Tom Howard

Tom Howard, born Thomas Black in Ireland in 1885, came with his parents to the United States when he was a kid. In 1905 he changed his name to Tom Howard and went into vaudeville working the Columbia and American burlesque circuits.  Howard began acting in one and two reel comedy shorts in 1929.  Three years later he teamed with George Sheton in a dozen shorts for Paramount and Educational Film Corp.  Howard‘s last film appearance was with Shelton in the 1936 two-reeler, Rail Birds.  Howard and Shelton made frequent Network Radio guest shots on Rudy Vallee‘s Fleischmann Yeast Hour in the 1930‘s but Tom was 57 in 1942 and his career was seemingly over.  

Howard welcomed his daughter’s idea, spiked up her scripts with a few gags from his burlesque days and suggested that a new name was needed.  The most immediate need, however, was finding the cast to accurately portray the degree of intellectual inferiority that the script required.  He picked up the phone and called three old friends.

In 1905, he embarked on his show business career, taking the stage name Tom Howard. After decades of working in medicine shows, burlesque, vaudeville and a few Broadway plays, he made his breakthrough in two Broadway musicals, Rain or Shine (1928) and Flo Ziegfeld's Smiles (1930), the latter at a salary of $1100 a week. He appeared in two feature films, Rain or Shine (1930, repeating his stage role) and Get That Venus (1933).

Howard became better known in movie short subjects, filmed in New York by Paramount and then Educational. Many of these featured Howard's longtime burlesque and vaudeville partner George Shelton (1885–1971).

Howard owned, co-wrote, and starred in the radio comedy show It Pays to Be Ignorant, which aired from 1942 to 1951, first on the Mutual Broadcasting System, then CBS, and finally NBC. 

Howard died of a heart ailment in Long Branch, New Jersey at the age of 69, in 1955.