Frank Britton

Frank Britton was an American vaudeville musician and slapstick comic entertainer whose birth name was Frank Louis Wenzel. He was born in New York on July 8, 1892, and adopted the surname Britton as his stage name. His Broadway credits include the Ziegfeld Follies of 1931.

Britton's performing career began when Milt Britton, born Milton Levy in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, started playing in vaudeville bands in 1914 and formed a duo with Frank in 1917. The two performed on trombone and cornet respectively. Over time, additional musicians joined the ensemble, among them accordion player Tito Guidotti, trombonist Walter Powell, drummer Tiny Kahn, and trumpeter Norman Faye, and the act came to be known under various names, including The Britton Band. During the 1920s and 1930s, the group was billed as both "America's Craziest Orchestra" and "The Mad Musical Maniacs."

Their performances typically opened with the musicians playing a tune in a straightforward, serious manner before a staged mishap — such as one performer stumbling into another — would trigger a cascade of comic chaos, with band members hitting one another with prop instruments and spraying water. Critic Kevin Whitehead characterized them as precursors to Spike Jones and described them as "musical Dadaists of the first order." The band toured in Europe and South America and appeared in the films Moonlight and Pretzels in 1933 and Sweet Music in 1935, as well as in short films.

Their Broadway appearance came in 1931 with the Ziegfeld Follies. Frank Britton retired from performing in 1938, while Milt Britton continued leading the band, appearing in the 1943 film Riding High. Milt Britton died on April 29, 1948, at the age of 54, from a heart attack following a performance at a social function for radio executives in New York.

After leaving show business, Frank Britton Wenzel settled in Malverne, a village on Long Island, where he opened a restaurant frequented by vaudeville performers and musicians. He was elected mayor of Malverne in 1951 and served a four-year term. He died in Malverne in 1992 at the age of 99.