Brother Theodore

Blessed are those who do not know and cannot think. I envy you folks, I honestly do. I would rather be a contented pinworm, than a tormented Brother Theodore.

- Brother Theodore

Lately Brother Theodore has become a bit of a fascination for me. I think it has something to do with this moment we are living through.

I first came to know Brother Theodore from his guest appearances on the David Letterman Show in the mid-1980s. He was an oddity, a darkly mad comic, maybe the darkest ever. An absurdist tragedian.

An energetic older man, seemingly in his mid-80s, who spoke in scholastic English with a heavy accent. I had the impression that he might have been Greek. He had a compact body with an oblong head full of grey hair combed at odd angles. His head sat on a thick, square body—you had the impression that he was constructed out of blocks. He had beady eyes, a wide mouth and pointy nose, and was dressed in black. He looked like a cartoon villain or a ghoul.

In those days Brother Theodore called himself “a philosopher, metaphysician and podiatrist.” People would go to hear his rambling stream-of-consciousness monologues at his weekly appearances at the 13th Street Repertory Theatre in Greenwich Village.

What I hadn't realized in the 1980s was that Theodore had been performing since the late 1940s and had made television appearances for decades on many of the major talk shows—Jack Paar, Dick Cavett and Merv Griffin, to name a few. He'd actually reluctantly come out of retirement when he appeared on Letterman, which revived his performing career and brought him to the attention of a new, young hipster audience.

Brother Theodore was not “God's gift,” as his name suggests, but rather quite the opposite. He called himself the devil's spawn. His famous refrain was, “As long as there is death, there is hope.” And he was not Greek.

He was Jewish. Born Theodore Gottlieb in 1906, he was the scion of a wealthy Austrian-Jewish textile and fashion-publishing family. He said he was born with “a golden spoon” in his mouth. He was also a chess prodigy and played with Albert Einstein, a family friend and frequent house guest after the family moved to Düsseldorf. He lived the high life in Weimar Germany, a dandy and a playboy.

And then it all came crashing down with the rise of Hitler. At the age of 32, Theodore found himself at Dachau concentration camp. Few of his family members survived, and he was forced to sign away his family's fortune to the Nazis for one Reichsmark. Having personally witnessed horrors, some of which he later recounted, his quick wit and abilities as a performer played an important part in his survival. Eventually, family friend Einstein helped him emigrate to America to restart his life after the war.

What made Theodore so compelling as a performer was his unpredictability. When asked a question, he would respond ambiguously—as though even he didn't know what would come out of his mouth next—and soon branch off into some wordy oration, pseudo-intellectual tangential nonsense, which would in turn send him into a fit of rage, on the cusp of violence.

Given his experience in life, it's not a mystery why unpredictability was his modus operandi, the essence of his performance art. Once you started watching him, you couldn't look away. It was like watching a natural phenomenon: the tranquil sea suddenly frothing and rising into storm-tossed waves crashing against the rocks.

A reflection of his lived experience. And he turned it into art. Tragic comedy. Few knew what was behind it.

“We are puppets in the hands of an insane puppeteer,” Brother Theodore said. 

He wanted his audience, sitting on the edge of their seats in the vice grip of his mad performance, to experience the same helplessness that he had decades earlier.