[post 270]
Here’s a simple but effective comedy idea. How do you make a highly skilled but somewhat standard hoop spinning act more engaging — not to mention funny? Simply perform it while trying to fetch and drink a glass of red wine! Here’s Annabel Carberry in A Glass of Red.
By the way, I did indeed try this at home and was actually able to do about half the act. I’ll let you guess which half.
Thanks to Karen Gersch for the link!
Click here for another comedy hoop spinning act.
Post #200. Wow! I thought I was getting out of this business, but I guess the money’s just too good. (Yes, that was sarcasm.)
So…. here we are again.
Let’s celebrate #200 with one of my favorite pieces, The Fight in the Dark from the Beijing Opera (where Jackie Chan trained). If you think about it, being “in the dark” is a good metaphor for comedy, especially the physical kind. In this classic piece, two mortal enemies — only it turns out they aren’t — find themselves in a room together with the lights out. Naturally they try to kill each other.
This is one part comedy to five parts friggin’ incredible physical dexterity, but there are some real nice comedic moments where they slow down the mayhem long enough to savor the predicament. Enjoy!
Some links:
• Click here for previous post of Monkey King act from Beijing Opera.
• Jackie Chan was a student of Beijing Opera from the age of seven to seventeen, which you can read about in detail in his autobiography, I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action.
Here’s a riddle for you: what do the sticky floors of New York City subway cars and dusty, musty books on Elizabethan drama have in common? For the answer, just read on….
First clue: flash back to last spring. I’m on a crowded E train from JFK airport when a quartet of performers bound onto the train, loudly announcing their act with no little modesty. More hip-hop popping I’m guessing, ho-hum, which is why I don’t bother to whip out my Flip camera. Suddenly these guys burst across the length of the car in a flurry of handsprings and somersaults and some nifty partner moves, all dangerously close to their (truly) captive audience — “if I touch you, I’ll give you a dollar.” I especially like the peanut rolls (double forward roll holding each other’s ankles) because they have to make precise, last-second detours to avoid impaling themselves on the car’s vertical poles.
I really didn’t think you could do any of that on a standing-room-only subway train bolting along at 40 mph. I was wrong. Unfortunately, at under two minutes, by the time I got my camera out, they were gone. A YouTube search turned up nothing, but inspired by the next act in this post, I searched again yesterday, this time successfully. I still don’t know who they are, but this is definitely them.
Because camera angles are a challenge in a subway car, here are two views of the same act:
And then yesterday I noticed a NY Times article on two performers, Paul Marino and Fred Jones, who call themselves Popeye & Cloudy and who are no strangers to subway floors. They have been earning a reputation and a fair amount of loot by doing another form of action drama underground, casting the passengers as groundlings as they perform quick renditions of scenes from Shakespeare, favorites being Romeo’s suicide and Macbeth’s decapitation. Not only that, but they also throw in some Abbott & Costello as well; yes, Who’s on First?
Read the whole article here.
“Not all subway lines are well suited to Shakespeare,” writes a reporter for the Wall St. Journal in an earlier article. “The long cars of the N and R trains allow for a bigger audience per scene. And the J,M,Z trains, which cross the Williamsburg Bridge, give riders time to relax for a lengthy performance. Riders who frequent the 4,5 and 6 trains in Manhattan are out of luck: those lines are too crowded for a proper death scene or sword fight, the actors say.”
Here’s the Popeye & Cloudy website.
Here’s that article from the Wall Street Journal and a short WSJ video.
If you want to see more, here’s a 12-minute Vimeo video montage that includes some of the Who’s on First.
Popeye & Cloudy from Paul Marino on Vimeo.
So speaking of Shakespeare, and hopefully bringing this post full circle, here’s some more chapter two material, this time two complete public domain books on the fool characters in Shakespeare’s plays.
Studies in the Development of the Fool in the Elizabethan Drama by Olive Mary Busby
Our first dusty, musty book answers that eternal question, “whence came this insistent demand of the English public for the buffooneries of the fool?” Okay, so I exaggerated; it was never published as a book, it’s just a 1923 master’s thesis. Hard to believe, but it cost money to publish books back in what is now known as the Pre-PDF Era. I’m guessing Olive Mary Busby went to her grave not knowing that this blogopedia would make her famous.
The Fools of Shakespeare by Frederick Warde
This 1913 work starts with a chapter on “the fool in life and literature,” followed by individual chapters devoted to each of Shakespeare’s principal fool characters, including: Yorick, Touchstone, Trinculo, Feste, Launcelot Gobbo, the grave-digger in Hamlet, and the fool in King Lear.
Fools of Shakespeare
That’s all I got!
“Washington Square Park is the entertainment capital of the world.”
— Tic and/or Tac
(Hey, they’re twins, they speak in unison; how am I supposed to know which one said it?)
A mere hour ago I was walking home from viewing Werner Herzog’s amazing 3D documentary about the Chauvet caves of southern France, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, when I saw Tic & Tac performing in Washington Square Park. I’d seen them many times before, but I stopped “just for a moment” and ended up staying for the whole show.
What Tic & Tac do isn’t exactly what a purist like me would label physical comedy, but rather a mixture of straight acrobatics and stand-up comedy and audience participation. They are street acrobats who intersperse a few impressive stunts with a lot of verbal comedy, most of it centering around racial stereotyping. Lots of build-up, not that many tricks, but they make it work.
They are smart enough to make more fun of themselves than they do of the spectators, so the audience is comfortable enough to join in the fun. And it is effective — as in they haul in a ton of cash. Or as they say, “thank you for making it possible for us to work two days a week while you work five.”
So I was thinking, these guys are pretty much an institution here in New York, but maybe not to most of my gazillion and one blog readers. You know what I should do? I should go home, grab my handy-dandy Flip camera, come back to their next show (all of 15 minutes later), shoot it, and post it. Luckily, I checked YouTube first and, happily, many people had already beat me to the punch. Which is why I’m sitting here sipping my second glass of chilled white wine, writing this intro, and embedding some html code, instead of kneeling on the hard concrete shooting a show I admire but, alas, also know by heart.
So here’s a two-part clip from 2009, not the show I just saw, but you get the spirit and the m.o. They’ve continued to evolve the act since then and you can see other versions on YouTube. Or, better yet, come visit us in New York for the very latest update!
It’s street theater. People don’t know how difficult it really is to stop people from doing whatever they’re doing and just look at you. Especially New Yorkers. New Yorkers are prone to, even if you go to a comedy club, they’re in there demanding “Make me laugh.” What kind of attitude is that? In street theater, sometimes we get up there and we haven’t even done anything yet and you still have people looking at you like, “You better do something good.” It’s fun to be able to win them over.
This YouTube video announces an upcoming Tic & Tac DVD documentary coming soon, but no specifics. If anyone knows more, drop me a line.
And, finally, a short but good interview with Tic & Tac here.
This is an odd bit from the old Ed Sullivan Show, back in the days of early television one of the best places to see variety acts. If you think all partner balancing acts are the same, you might appreciate how the Maxwells underplay this one to comic effect. Not big belly laughs, but some nice subtle humor. I especially love the ending!
A few posts back we looked at Lou Costello taking a dance lesson. This time we see Martin & Lewis going at it. Yes, I know the world is divided into those who like Jerry Lewis and those who don’t, but whichever side you’re on I think you’ll enjoy the physical comedy moves in this piece from the old television show, the Colgate Comedy Hour. Dean Martin is the instructor, Lewis the oafish and slow-witted student. The first half is full of solo gyrations by Lewis, while the second half has some real nice partner work.
Update (4-1-12): The blog New Slapstick has a post analyzing a segment of this routine: Creating Simple Double Act Material
This video has a gazillion partner acrobatic tricks. I should know, I counted them. As is probably inevitable in such a fast-paced club act, the character comedy is a bit of a throw-in, sorta hit and miss, but on the other hand you get tons of terrific stuff. (One gazillion = several tons.) But who are they? This was put on YouTube by Show Pals International, but the performers are not identified, which is pretty odd if you’re trying to sell an act. Their web site is a dead-end, so maybe they’re out of business. If anyone knows, drop me a line!
So a big thank you to Ira Seldenstein, whose Acting Clown Actor blog appears in my blog roll in the right panel. (Check it out!) And now here’s another video of…. wait! wait! their name’s coming to me….
Price & McCoy
And here’s the Bal Caron Trio mentioned by Ira:
In my previous post, The Fine Art of Impaling Oneself on Heavy Metal Objects, we saw knockabout artists from the past six decades knock into poles, pedestals, platforms, ladders, wire cable and, of course, the ground. This time we take a gentler approach, with a sampling of “quick-change” comedians who have found ingenious ways to get dressed in public and, in the case of a chap named Keaton, an actual reason to do so.
Let’s start with the basic move…
On that very same last post, we looked at Walter Galetti’s bounding rope numéro. The whole act is 11½ minutes long, but he frames it with the classic clown-rolling-into-his-coat bit. Here he is, nonchalantly setting his coat down before he tackles the rope walking:
And here he is, almost 10 minutes later, donning the coat for his exit.
I’d seen this bit done by the great Tommy Hanneford in the Hanneford Circus back in the 70s, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it done with a coat (or vest), a hat and a newspaper — though I’m not sure if that was by Hanneford.
Speaking of hats, here’s Bill Irwin in Regard of Flight putting on his chapeau the old-fashioned way:
And here’s a unique sequence by the legendary Russian-Armenian clown Leonid Yengibarov, who says why dive into clothes when you can bring the clothes to you?
Of course I still like Buster Keaton’s costume change from Sherlock, Jr. best. He dives through what I’m going to call a “quick-change” hoop, emerging dressed as a woman, and follows it up with an equally outrageous clothing trick. The hoop move was a standard of circus equestrians, but Keaton’s carries more weight because he uses it to escape from the bad guys.
Yes, one might ask why the hoop didn’t just fall off the window sill when he dove through, seeing as how it was just leaning there — but let’s not quibble!
Finally, it’s fascinating how esoteric techniques from the performing arts can get adapted by our popular culture and go viral — witness parkour — as this cool YouTube video of jumping into trousers so aptly demonstrates.
So here’s the idea: (non-comedic) acrobatic performers usually execute a series of graceful tricks in order of apparent difficulty. Comedy acrobats use many of the same skills, and may perhaps finish with a flourish of standard tricks, but their m.o. is to emphasize clumsiness or eccentric movement over grace, and indeed to transform whatever (heavy metal) apparatus they’re on into one big obstacle. That pedestal, that ladder becomes an excuse for missteps, pratfalls, and (hopefully mock) pain. Getting there is more than half the fun.
Here are five stellar examples:
Our first heavy metal impaler is the great Catalan clown, Charlie Rivel, doing his comedy trapeze act. This is from 1943, when he would have already been 46 or 47. For more on Rivel, see my post from last spring. Apologies for the poor video quality, but it’s the best I’ve got right now.
Next is Larry Griswold, the “Diving Fool,” a Vaudevillian and a gymnastics instructor who with George Nissen (you’ve probably rolled on Nissen mats) developed and popularized the trampoline. Griswold was an international star during the 50s and 60s. Here he is on the Frank Sinatra Show in 1951, like Rivel about 46 years old. A thank you to New York clown and impressario Audrey Crabtree for alerting me to this clip.
One year later (1952), and we have the acrobatic duo Tom & Jerry (not to be confused with the cartoon cat and mouse) on the high bars on an episode of the Colgate Comedy Hour hosted by Abbott & Costello. The comedic partnering could be better, but some terrific moves. Not sure who Tom & Jerry were, though one writer on YouTube suggests that “the Aussie brothers, the Shipways, were around about this time; there is a chance this video clip was them.”
In 1962, the comedian Jimmy Durante — who in the early sound film era had been forced upon Buster Keaton as a co-star in a series of MGM movie shorts — starred as a circus owner and sad tramp clown in the Hollywood extravaganza, Jumbo, directed by Billy Rose. Here we see his character perform a comedy wire act, complete with Impaling Oneself on Heavy Metal.
I know what you’re thinking: there’s no way Jimmy Durante pulled off all those tricks. And you would be correct. He was doubled by the wirewalker Linon (right), whose name does not appear in the movie’s credits. This was in the days before unions negotiated the full credits we now see at the end of every film. Still, hardly fair to Linon.
But fast forward half a decade to December 26, 1967, and Jimmy Durante is hosting the television show Hollywood Palace on an episode featuring a variety of circus performers, including none other than “The Great Linon.” To his credit, in the intro to the act, Durante goes out of his way to award Linon a retroactive Jumbo credit, in sheepish-comedic fashion. Here’s the intro and Linon’s act.
And as for Linon himself, although he appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show six times and Hollywood Palace twice, I haven’t been able to find any biographical information on him, not even a first name. Nothing in Thétard, Adrian, Jando, Speaight, Rémy, etc. Anyone?
Finally, in a similar vein but of more recent vintage, here’s the clown Walter Galetti doing a nice bounding rope act full of mishaps that by now should be looking familiar. Notice that though he has some serious ropewalking chops, he actually doesn’t start walking on it until well after the 6-minute mark.
I’m a semi-serious runner, so I’ve put in my hours on the treadmill, but I never had this much fun. This is OK Go performing Here It Goes Again (The Treadmill Video).
Some nifty moves but, like I said, not exactly physical comedy. For some actual treadmill humor, see this previous post of Sacha Baron Cohen (aka Borat) fighting for his life aboard the moving belt.
Visual and verbal humor for the cognitively and artistically curious!
“A book to treasure!”
—Bill Irwin
