I read something about Skelton a long time ago. This might have come from Paul Harvey's Rest of the Story.
Early in his career, he was on a flight when something went wrong with the plane. They were in a real danger of going down and everyone on the plane was freaking out. There were quite a few kids aboard so to keep them from crying, Skelton got up and went into a improvised comedy routine. He kept the attention of everyone aboard for 2 hours until the pilot was able to safely land the plane.
