Edgar Livingston Kennedy (b. April 26, 1890 in Monterey County, California; d. November 9, 1948) was an American comedic film actor, known as "the king of the slow burn". A slow burn is an exasperated facial expression, performed very deliberately; Kennedy embellished this by rubbing his hand over his bald head and across his face, in an attempt to hold his temper. Kennedy is possibly best known today for a small but memorable role as a lemonade vendor in the Marx Brothers film Duck Soup.

A former singer and boxer, Kennedy worked in hundreds of films beginning as a Keystone Kop in 1914. He would go on to work with the biggest film comedians in the United States, including Fatty Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Charley Chase, and Our Gang. Kennedy's burly frame originally suited him for villainous or threatening roles in silent pictures. By the 1920s Kennedy was working for producer Hal Roach, who kept the actor busy playing supporting roles in short comedies. Kennedy starred in one short, A Pair of Tights (1928), in which he plays a tightwad determined to spend as little as possible on a date. His antics with comedian Stuart Erwin are reminiscent of Roach's Laurel and Hardy comedies, produced concurrently. Roach also allowed Kennedy to direct, which resulted in about a dozen comedies.

In 1930 Edgar Kennedy was featured by RKO-Pathe in a pair of short-subject comedies, Next Door Neighbors and Help Wanted, Female. Kennedy's characterization of a short-tempered householder was so effective that RKO built a series around it. The "Average Man" comedies starred Kennedy as a blustery, stubborn guy determined to accomplish a household project or get ahead professionally, despite the meddling of his featherbrained wife (usually Florence Lake, her freeloading brother (originally William Eugene, then Jack Rice) and his dubious mother-in-law (Dot Farley). Kennedy pioneered the kind of domestic situation comedy that later became familiar on television. Each installment would end with Edgar. embarrassed or humbled or defeated, looking at the camera and doing his patented slow burn. The Edgar Kennedy series, with its theme song "Chopsticks," became a standard part of the moviegoing experience: Kennedy made six "Average Man" shorts a year for 17 years.

Edgar Kennedy became so identified with frustration that practically every studio, large and small, hired him to play hotheads. He often played dumb cops, detectives, and even a prison warden; sometimes he was a grouchy moving man, truck driver, or blue-collar workman. His character usually lost his temper at least once. In Diplomaniacs (1933), Kennedy presides over an international tribunal, where Wheeler & Woolsey want to do something about world peace. "Well, ya can't do anything about it here," yells Kennedy, "this is a peace conference!" Kennedy, now established as the poster boy for frustration, even starred in an instructional film titled The Other Fellow, in which loudmouthed roadhog Edgar always vents his anger on other drivers, little realizing that, to them, he is "the other fellow."

Perhaps his most unusual roles were as a puppeteer in the detective mystery The Falcon Strikes Back (1943) and as a philosophical bartender inspired to create exotic cocktails in Harold Lloyd's last film, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947).

Kennedy died of throat cancer in 1948 and was interred at the Holy Cross Cemetery, Culver City, Los Angeles County, California.

In 2005, a book biography by Bill Cassara was published about Kennedy's life and career.

Edgar Kennedy, who was born on April 26, 1890, near Monterey, California, hit the road as a young man and moved across the country, working in a succession of jobs. He became a professional boxer, claiming to have gone 14 rounds against The Manassas Mauler, Jack Dempsey, In addition to his knowledge of the sweet science, Kennedy possessed a good musical voice, and he wound up singing in musical shows in the Mid West, his first taste of show business. During his cross-country peregrinations, he eventually wound up in Los Angeles, and was hired as an actor by Max Sennett. At the Mack Sennett Studios, he was allegedly one of the original Keystone Kops, but soon graduated from bit parts to supporting roles in Keystone Comedies, including "Tillie's Punctured Romance" with Charlie Chaplin. Kennedy had good roles in other Chaplin movies, but when his contract expired in 1921, he went freelance, though he did occasionally return to Sennett to make a movie. The former Keystone Kop made a career out of playing harassed policemen after leaving Sennett. By the late 1920s, Kennedy's craft was most prominently featured in comedies for Hal Roach, Sennett's archrival, where he flourished in support of Laurel and Hardy. It was with Roach that he developed his mastery of the "slow burn" that he became famous for. In support of Laurel and Hardy, he often played a policeman unable to cope with their absurdities. He also directed two Laurel and Hardy films, "From Soup To Nuts" and "You're Darn Tootin'." RKO hired Kennedy to appear in a series of situation comedies called "The Average Man," in which he played the head of a family. The short comedies had very short shooting schedules, some as little as three days, but Kennedy was always a pro and delighted the audience by giving them his all. He eventually made over 200 short subjects and appeared in over 100 feature films, still in demand right up to the day he died of cancer on November 9, 1948.