Ann Butler and Jay Brennan --- Say Who?

You Don't Know The Half Of It (1929) Captures a Vaudeville Moment

I'll not try too hard getting this straight: Jay Brennan began with a male partner who impersonated a woman for their stage act, the latter killed by a bolt of lightning which necessitated replacement by another man as woman, then came Ann Butler to enact, closely as possible, a woman being a man being a woman. Vaudeville history needs scorekeep better than mine for minutia like this. We wouldn't notice or care but for unearthing (by Warner Archive) of curiosities like You Don't Know The Half Of It, which is mostly Butler telling Brennan of odd men she's known (they're odd?). Songs and patter are fun, one's called Can You Imagine A Guy Like That?, and no, we can't. It was important for performers, and their audience, to be hep to slang, more so then than today, I suspect. Easy too for us to get lost amidst torrents of catch-phrasing here, but that's joy of a jazz age as conveyed by entertainers who'd thrive mostly on stage, and leave but a glimpse of themselves on film. I found no more than smatter of credits for Brennan and Butler other than You Don't Know The Half Of It. Like so many others, they laid down the act and faded to obscurity. Luckily today there are family members of vaudeville/Vitaphone folk to pursue film and disc that survive, some even bearing costs of mating the media so ancestor's work can be enjoyed again.