It seems that our heroes or those that we admire often have feet of clay, maybe more so the great comedians. Oddly, or maybe not, the Wikipedia page for Red Skelton has a different genesis for some of his characters like Clem which the wiki page attributes to Red basing it on an old hard of hearing neighbor. I would think that people would write in corrections, but hen maybe those writers who actually developed characters for him, or their families, took the higher road and left the image of Red that we all learned to love in his performances.
They may well have taken that higher road.
Skelton had a harsh life from his early youth. From everything I've read of him, he seems to have taken it out severely on those whom he professed to love at home, and those with whom he worked, and knew only how to love the strangers who comprised his audiences in studio, on screen, listening on radio, or watching on television. He once said there was noting nobler than making people laugh. Who knew it meant strangers as opposed to his own loved ones and friends?
It's as though he knew and believed to his soul two things above all: 1) Those strangers couldn't hurt him. b) Playing his characters took him out of his own self but he knew too well he couldn't stay there. The show has to end sooner or later. That wouldn't make Skelton too different from numerous other performers of his or any generation, of course. (Jackie Gleason comes to mind almost immediately.)
For a study in a complete opposite, consider Fred Allen. He, too, had a harsh childhood; he, too, came from vaudeville; but he left the vaudeville style behind when he moved to radio in 1932 and rarely if ever looked back, and he succeeded in not letting his childhood embitter him. He not only developed his own comedy style (including pioneering the news satires that soon became common enough among comedians), he was known to be generous to a fault with both his wife (Portland Hoffa, also his on-air partner), his cast, his staffers, and complete strangers. Allen was far more prone to battling imperious network officials and censors than battling his wife, cast, staffers, and complete strangers, often inserting zaps against network executives in general but biting terms into his shows.
And he was funny as hell, even and especially when ad-libbing. (When Allen and Jack Benny kicked off their once-famous running gag of a feud, Benny's side of it made plenty of wisecracks about Allen's ad-libbing. The feud was so successful many didn't realise the two men were not only good friends in real life but often had each
other's writers come up with zaps. In actuality, Allen considered Benny the first radio comedian to work with radio as its own medium of mind and imagination and not just struggle to make vaudeville work invisibly as many of the earliest radio comedians did.
Jack Benny has been my friend for thirty-nine years, Allen wrote once,
and I hope to be his friend for thirty-nine more.)
He was known to drop $100 bills on friends he hadn't seen in ages and downtrodden strangers alike, he would talk to fans whenever they recognised him on the street, and the only apparent interruption to his life and his style was the lifelong hypertension he suffered that finally forced him off the full-time air as a host/head writer in 1949 (Allen worked almost all week long putting his scripts together from the best of what his staff writers and himself came up with for each week's exercise) and delivered his fatal heart attack in 1956, before he could finish his memoir
Much Ado About Me.