He had withstood a breakdown and returned to the stage with his unique, "quiet" style of comedy. But a few years later, at the height of his fame, he was a gunshot victim. He didn't get a chance to record his most unique material (which is now associated with W.C. Fields) and many of his best jokes and routines are, to this day, lying in the obscurity of newspaper morgues, along with the articles that praised his stage act.

As reported by Ronald L. Smith in some book of his or other, from which I abridge this sad and sorry case, Case was billed as "The Man Who Talks with a String." His trademark was a piece of string that he would rend and ravel as he spoke. Like many comedians of his day, he wore blackface make-up. He wasn't black; his mother was the exact opposite, an albino. His father was Irish.

You think of old-time comics as corny and loud. But Charlie was quiet, with a Jack Benny-type delivery. He was even more unassuming off stage. The Indianapolis Star in 1906 wrote: "He is of a quiet and retiring dispostion when off the stage, and to see him on the street or at his hotel one would never take him for a comedian who makes thousands laugh every season." That year the Toledo Blade called him "one of the funniest monologue comedians in the business."

After suffering a nervous breakdown around 1907, Case persevered and returned to the stage. He toured England in 1910 and recieved raves for an odd poem he recited about a fellow drinking beer for the first time. He gets potted and

"Then, while crazed with the liquor
He met a Salvation Army girl
And cruelly he broke her tambourine.
All she said was "Heaven bless you"
Then placed a mark upon his brow
With a kick which she had learned
before she had been saved.
So kind friends take my advice
And shun the fatal glass of beer
And don't go round a-breaking tambourines."

The poem, of course, later became "A Fatal Glass of Beer" as sung by W.C. Fields in a short of the same name.

Our story ends six years later. Case is at the Palace Hotel on 45th Street in New York. He's trying to line up some bookings so he can send money to his family. Suddenly, there's a gunshot. A fellow vaudevillian reports that Case shot himself, his dying words:

"Pardon me."

The police are told that a bottle of oil and a cleaning cloth were on the floor, a sure sign that Case accidentally killed himself while cleaning his gun.

End of story...almost.