Inside the Red Skelton Museum in Vincennes: seventy years of American comedy in one Indiana town
Vincennes, an old trading town of about 18,000 on the west bank of the Wabash River in southern Indiana, is not the obvious place for a major museum of American comedy. But Skelton family history puts it on the map: this was where one of America's first big vaudeville families began.
Richard Bernard Skelton was born in Vincennes in 1913. His father had died six months before his birth. At fifteen he left town with a medicine show — the nineteenth-century travelling caravans that mixed patent medicines with entertainment. Stripped of the more discreditable circus elements, the format gave Skelton his first lessons in stagecraft.
After a decade of vaudeville apprenticeship, Skelton signed with RKO Radio Pictures in 1936. Between 1942 and 1953 he was one of the contracted comedians at MGM. His broadest fame came on CBS television: "The Red Skelton Show" ran in prime time from 1951 to 1971, twenty years on the air.
The museum's collection includes costumes for the seven principal characters Skelton created: the hobo Freddie the Freeloader, country boy Clem Kadiddlehopper, the bashful Sheriff Deadeye, conman San Fernando Red and others. These characters drew on Skelton's own background and on the social class of his hometown.
The museum, on the Vincennes University campus, opened in 2013 through a partnership between the university and the Skelton Foundation. The design re-used the town's old Greyhound bus terminal — the building Skelton once said was "the doorstep I couldn't cross in 1928" as he left for the road.
A notable item is one of Skelton's early oil paintings, "The Clown of Vincennes." From the 1960s onwards Skelton was an active painter. In contemporary American folk-art collections, his clown portraits change hands at material prices.
Museum director Anne McKee told local press: "Red Skelton's work was essentially built on characters that turned class into something amusing rather than humiliating. His comedy was his peace with the social hierarchy he had grown up under." McKee added that visitor numbers had risen 31% in 18 months, in part thanks to a recent independent documentary on Vincennes.
Skelton died in 1997 and was buried at Yorba Linda's Forest Lawn cemetery in California. The Vincennes museum is supported by a $9 million endowment, much of it from Skelton's daughter Valentina Marie. "I wanted my father's hometown not to be forgotten," she told the Indianapolis Star.
Culturally, the comedians who bridged vaudeville and television were a small group. Skelton's particular brand of stand-up vaudeville shaped the stage technique of later American comedians, including Lenny Bruce and Bob Hope. The collection includes Bob Hope's 1962 letter to Skelton, ending: "You entertained America, but you never mocked it."
The museum is open six days a week from May to September; adult admission is $12. Entry is free for student groups and Vincennes University students. The site runs weekly comedy workshops under the "Skelton Academy" name throughout the year — a small cultural programme aimed at building Indiana's local comedy scene.