Hugh Herbert was a stage and vaudeville performer and playwright before coming to Hollywood as a dialogue director in the early talkie era. Signed as an actor at RKO Radio, Herbert played a variety of comic and noncomic roles in films like Hook Line and Sinker (1930), Danger Lights (1931) and Friends and Lovers (1931). His forte turned out to be comedy, as witness his sidesplitting performances as an arm-wrestling prime minister in Million Dollar Legs (1932) and an aphorism-spouting Chinaman in Diplomaniacs (1933).
During his long association with Warner Bros. in the mid-1930s, Herbert developed his familiar half-in-the-bag screen persona, complete with fluttering, hand-clapping gestures and his trademarked cries of "woo woo!" and "oh, wunnerful, wunnerful." In the opinion of several film buffs, the quintessential Hugh Herbert performance can be found in the 1936 Warners musical Colleen (1936). At Universal in the 1940s, Herbert starred in a string of "B" comedies, one of which, There's One Born Every Minute (1942), represented the screen debut of Elizabeth Taylor; he was also a stitch as the resourceful detective in Olsen and Johnson's Hellzapoppin' (1941).
From 1943 through 1952, Herbert starred in 23 two-reelers at Columbia Pictures, which were popular at the time but in retrospect represent a low point for the actor. Columbia director Edward Bernds has observed that Herbert considered these shorts beneath his talents, which may account for his listless performance in most of them.
Throughout his Columbia stay, Herbert made scattered feature-film appearances, the best of which was in Preston Sturges' The Beautiful Blonde of Bashful Bend (1949). Hugh Herbert died a of heart attack shortly after completing his final Columbia short, A Gink at the Sink (1952); he was preceded in death by his brother, movie bit player Tom Herbert.