Victor Borge (1909-2000)

Victor Borge was a highly accomplished pianist and musical comedian who was born in Denmark. Early on in his career he had to leave Europe because of the Nazis and WWII. Victor wanted to become a professional concert pianist, but decided that he would be more successful doing a comedy act using classical music. He came to the US and developed his own unique style of comedy. Victor Borge had his own TV show called “Comedy in Music” which was one of the longest running and most successful shows in television history. He told many different types of jokes. A few of those jokes involved music and classical music composers.

He rarely played a piece of piano music all the way through without stopping or cracking a joke. Here is a rare performance of Victor Borge playing Claude Debussy’s Clair de Lune from start to finish. You can hear that he played very musically. Enjoy.