Physical Comedy is Everywhere! Exhibit A: Stephen Colbert

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As a physical comedy aficionado, the question I get asked the most is:  “What is physical comedy exactly?” Usually I stammer and say something like, "well, you know, comedy that’s, uh,  physical."

Blank stares. 

So I try to come up with recognizable examples. Buster Keaton? Charlie Chaplin? You might be surprised how many people are not familiar with their work, even young clowns. But if they represent the heyday of physical comedy, does that mean it’s a relic of the past? After all, that was a full century ago! 

There must be some more recent examples... 

Jim Carrey? Yeah, that kinda works, though the work he’s best known for was 20–30 years ago.

Rowan Atkinson? Who? You know, Mr. Bean… That gets some recognition, but doesn't exactly close the deal.

How about today’s clowns, the ones we people in the field think of as being famous? Bill Irwin, Avner Eisenberg, James Thiérrée? Only Bill has penetrated into mass culture, but again probably less than you would think. Plenty of people have seen him acting in movies without making the connection.

All of this leads me to a new recurring blog feature: Physical Comedy is Everywhere!, in which on a semi-regular basis I will draw attention to physical comedy work being seen by millions even if they don’t recognize it as such. While many of the clown greats were Mr. or Ms. Non-Stop Physical Comedy, my examples use it as just one weapon in their arsenal. This will make sense as these posts slowly accumulate, but today let’s start with Stephen Colbert…

Even if you didn’t know Stephen Colbert, you probably do now, thanks to Trump conniving to get his show terminated as of this coming June. Colbert is a sharp and very political stand-up comedian, who since 2015 has hosted The Late Show on CBS, a talk show featuring his opening monolog, celebrity guests, music, and occasional sketches. But especially his opening monolog. Colbert is playing himself, but from 2005-2014 he hosted The Colbert Report (both t’s silent, as if he were French), in which he played a fictitious character —a right-wing talk-show pundit who, in Colbert’s words, was "a well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot."

Most talk-show hosts sit at their desk, but Colbert rarely leaves his feet. His background is in theatre games, improv, and sketch comedy, and Del Close and Second City (Chicago) gave him his formative training. He was never a serious student of mime, but managed to develop some basic mime chops and a mime imagination doing all those theatre games and improv exercises, where props get invented literally out of thin air to fit the situation at hand.

Our first example of Colbert adding physical comedy to his stand-up is Stephen Colbert, Mime Extraordinaire, a collection of clips put together  by Third Beat Productions, a website inactive since 2015, which lists Sharilyn Johnson as its editor. Thank you Sharilyn, or whoever did this! It's the kind of painstaking archival research you can expect to find on this blog, so long as I'm not the one who has to do it.

That was put together eight years ago. The next clip, The Invisible Props Department, is from seven years ago. Funny enough but longer than it needs to be, it shows to what degree mime has been considered to be an integral component of Colbert comedy.

 One more mime clip, this one sparked by Trump's hatred of windmills:

In the next clip, the well-known actor Henry Winkler gives Stephen a lesson in physical acting.

Okay, enough mime and object manipulation, real or imaginary. Time for some (silly) song and dance.

Colbert also makes imaginative use of space to create some unexpected visual comedy. One of his gags is to have people under his desk while he is ostensibly conducting a normal talk show from above.

Another frequent device is to freeze the camera frame, Colbert moving in and out of it, leaving it oddly depopulated in his absence. There is always some comic reason for doing this, and I've seen a couple of dozen examples, but I never made actual notes on them because nobody told me I would be doing this post. And since I do want to get this post out, I will stop here. If I find any in the future, I will add them, or if any kind reader can point me in that direction I would be happy to share them and grateful for your help. And there's a free subscription to the blog in it for you. Yeah, I am aware that the blog is free, but it's the thought that counts.

That should be enough Colbert physicality for you to make my point. Just because physical comedy is not a performer's entire m.o. does not mean that it's not a key part of their act. And you will see in future posts that I have dozens of examples of physical comedy being everywhere.

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• If you're keeping score as to what percentage of comedians had sad childhoods, add Colbert to the list. When he was ten, his father and two of his brothers died in an airplane crash.
• The Wikipedia bio of Colbert is quite thorough.
• One of Colbert's greatest and most controversial moments was as keynote speaker at the 2006 Washington, D.C. Correspondents' Dinner, where he brutally satirized not only the entire press corps, but also President Bush, who was sitting at the speakers table, all of two seats away. You can see it here.

Gene Nelson: (Almost) The Next Gene Kelly

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Most Hollywood musical comedies are too schmaltzy for my tastes, so until recently I didn't even know who Gene Nelson was. But many of these movie musical comedy performers from the 40s and 50s were wonderfully skilled and talented, and a great example is Gene Nelson, a highly athletic dancer and, later on, a highly successful TV and film director. Nelson was an engaging and charismatic performer, but what I especially like when I think of him in terms of physical comedy is the way he incorporated our physical world into so much of his choreography—furniture, props, pianos, walls, stairs —pretty much everything that surrounds him, whether nailed down or not. It was all an excuse for improbable dancing, leaping, bouncing, and swinging.

Originally, this post was supposed to feature a single video and take me less than an hour to put together, but instead I had a hard time narrowing it down to only these six clips. And that's just to get you started! He did A LOT, and between 1950 and 1953 was in ten movies! So yeah, there's more on YouTube, including one with Ronald Reagan (before he was president).

The first clip is his brilliant stair dance from Tea for Two (1950), starring Doris Day and Gordon MacRae. (No, I haven't seen the movie.)

Most song & dance performers had a few hat moves and cane manipulations in their repertoire; it went with the territory. But once again, Nelson excelled. This clip is from The West Point Story, also from 1950.

Also from 1950 from the movie The Daughter of Rosie O'Grady we get this eccentric dance with June Haver, choreographed to George Botsford's 1910 Chatterbox Rag. Years earlier, when Haver was already a known quantity and Nelson a minor player, she had helped him gain more recognition in Hollywood, introducing him to her agent, who was also the agent for none other than Gene Kelly.

Mention should also be made of his great leaping ability. He loved to jump onto grand pianos, as in this clip from a 1954 appearance on Colgate Comedy Hour.

Our fifth clip is an amazingly singing acrobatic dance sequence from She's Working Her Way Through College. (1952) This is said to have been in rehearsal for three months and taken four days to shoot. 

I thought I had never seen Nelson before, but that was only because I didn't realize he was Will Parker in the 1955 movie version of the classic musical, Oklahoma! The choreography for the show was by Agnes DeMille, and was considered to be groundbreaking because of her ability to tie in the dance with characters, emotion, and plot. Here's Nelson singing the quite funny song, Everything's Up to Date in Kansas City. Singing AND dancing AND rope spinning.

Although touted by many as the next Kelly (or the next Astaire), Nelson never rose to that level of stardom. Serious injuries in the mid-50s curtailed his dance career, but it was also a period when musical comedy became less a staple in Hollywood. Times were changing. And despite his amazing talent and finely honed skill, he was not as funny as Gene Kelly (who was not as funny as Donald O'Connor). He was perfect for light comedy —adjectives such as charming and delightful spring to mind— but maybe too much so. Did he lack gravitas, or was it just because that was how he was cast? Ultimately he was more leading man material than comedian... but then nobody's perfect.

Here are some quick bio factoids gleaned from Miller Daurey's excellent Hey, Dancer! podcast. (see notes below)
👉🏻 Nelson's father was a ballroom dancer, a roller skater, and an acrobat.
👉🏻 When he was twelve and living in Santa Monica, Nelson saw Fred Astaire in Flying Down to Rio and got hooked on dance.
👉🏻 During high school, he enrolled in the Marco School of Dance in Hollywood, where Judy Garland, Anne Miller, and Rita Hayworth had studied.
👉🏻 He also got hooked on skating and got so good that he was hired for the Sonia Henie Hollywood Ice Revue. He was the first person to ever do 13 Arabian cartwheels on ice.
👉🏻 In World War II he joined the army and was in an all-soldier revue show when Irving Berlin was in the audience. (You can't make this stuff up.) This led to Berlin casting him in his show This is the Army, touring for over two years and appearing in the film as well.
👉🏻 Movie acting gigs led to him almost being cast for the lead in Easter Parade, but Fred Astaire came out of retirement and the rest is history.
👉🏻 But the movie roles gradually got bigger and bigger, leading up to Tea for Two.

👉🏻 Before shooting Oklahoma!, he took a bad fall and suffered a herniated disc. He taped up his back and kept going on. A few years later, he fell from a horse and crushed his pelvis, which curtailed his dance career, though he did make a successful comeback at the age of 51 in Follies on Broadway.

👉🏻 Meanwhile he carved out a long and highly successful career as a television director, including directing 21 episodes of The Donna Reed Show, 18 episodes of The Mod Squad, and eight episodes of The Rifleman.

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• You can view Miller Daurey's bio video of Nelson here. Very well done and entertaining. And I highly recommend his Hey, Dancer podcast, which you can find here.  As of this writing, there are 71 episodes, including documentaries on such significant dancers as Ben Vereen, Gregory Hines, Ann Reinking, the Nicholas Brothers, and Irene & Vernon Castle. 

S.Z. "Cuddles" Sakall

• The actor S.Z. ("Cuddles") Sakall, who you see in the Tea for Two clip, may be familiar to you as the waiter in Casablanca (1942); see a clip of that here. Sakall and Nelson were part of Warner Bros. "repertory" company and also appeared together in Lullaby of Broadway and The Daughter of Rosie O’Grady. The Hungarian actor was well-known in Europe and in his younger days had written a lot of comedy, including music hall sketches. He fled Hitler and made a career in Hollywood, often playing befuddled or eccentric types. IMDB has a good bio of him.

• Though hardly a great movie, This is the Army is free if you have Amazon Prime.
• Nelson got the full bio treatment just a couple of years ago from Scott O'Brien in his book Gene Nelson— Lights! Camera! Dance! (No, I haven't read it.) Coincidentally, O'Brien was a student at San Francisco State University in the 60s, I turned down a full-time teaching job there in 1987, and a year or two later Gene Nelson joined their faculty.
• Since I posted this, my friend Hank Smith added a comment which I am copying here so more people see it:
I got to meet Miriam Nelson, Gene Nelson’s wife, a number of years ago when she was honored by a tap organization. I often did presentations for whoever they honored, and did one on her, using clips of her that she provided because she was a dancer, actress and choreographer. She was very nice. This is an example of her dancing. 

The Evolution of the Tablecloth Pull from ?? to WES-P to Pope Francis

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First a little history:

You all know Ye Olde Tablecloth Pull, yanking a tablecloth off a table without disturbing the dishes on top of it. It's a neat effect that became what the Victorians labeled a parlor trick, because this was what passed for convivial amusement in their gentlemanly hangout caves, a fine prelude to the next game of cribbage, a glass of sherry in one hand and a cigar in the other. (The spectators, not the gentleman showing off.)

As with most tricks, it's impossible to know for sure who originated this one, but we do know that restaurant physical comedy acts, a heady mixture of acrobatics and juggling, date back to at least Grimaldi's Harlequin and Mother Goose (1806) and served as a climax to the Hanlon-Lees Voyage en Suisse (1870). This sort of thing became the basis for several 19th-century comedy juggling acts, most prominently Les 7 Perezoff.   

Did any of these acts include a tablecloth pull? Maybe, but I haven't found any description or poster that would prove it. Other than our cat above, pictured at the banquet table of King Louis XIV, the first human use of it in an act that juggling historian David Cain could pinpoint was by the "gentleman juggler" Kara (1867–1939). Gentleman jugglers were so called because they dressed in formal attire and juggled objects that might be found in an (upscale) home; W.C. Fields did some of this in his early juggling days. My magician friend Ben Robinson informs me that a version of the trick was also in the act of the magician Chung Ling Soo (real name: William Robinson). He was born six years before Kara, so who knows which of these two came first. And I suppose it doesn't matter all that much since, no doubt, some lesser-known performer —or perhaps some flamboyant waiter— did it before them.

Kara

Juggler H. M. Lorette took notes on Kara's act, which included "Pulled
table cloth from under large amount of crockery and spun the cloth on the end of a billiard cue." Other props mentioned are: pool ball rack, chalk, bottle, and a cue, coin, shoe, monocle, candlestick, candle, glass of wine, three straws, tray, bottle, matchbox, cigar, knife, fork, orange, plate, napkin, bowl, ladle, hat rack, and three high hats. Oh yeah, and five juggling balls. But as far as I can tell, it's mostly been presented as a stand-alone trick, independent of any comedic situation.

And a bit of science:
It's relatively simple to do, and probably most of you have already mastered it. But just in case, let's start with the basics. There are several videos on YouTube that show how it works and explain the science of it. This one by Louis Bloomfield, whose How Things Work series is now on YouTube, is my favorite.

When Clowns (pretend to) Do It
Here are the Rastellis mining one of the oldest clown formulas in the book:

Note that there's more trickery here than a typical audience member might suspect. Yes, the plates are attached, though loosely enough so they move a couple of inches. But how then does the tablecloth pass underneath the wires? Very likely just some slits in the cloth that no one would notice during the setup.

Too Easy... so let's make it harder
Of course, humans are only human and performers are perfomative, so new wrinkles have been introduced into that cloth to make it more astounding to the audience. You won't get much mileage out of a trick anyone can do. Adding more objects is the usual route taken, but I think my favorite is the reverse pull by juggler and comedian Mat Ricardo:

Mat also does the classic pull while spinning a diablo, and does another version with a very long table, and has an excellent how-to video on the basic tablecloth pull that you can find here. Note that he advises pulling the cloth straight back, not down, as others advise. This makes sense to me because I would think that pulling downward would create more friction with the table edge.

But speaking of more objects, I am also fond of yanking the cloth when someone is sitting on a chair on the tabletop. I saw this done in the Big Apple Circus, I think sometime in the 80s, and have tried it successfully. Each leg of the chair is placed on a plate —and you probably don't want to choose the heaviest volunteer available to sit in that chair. Other than that, it's the same. The only video I currently have of it is me showing it in a physical comedy workshop in Toronto in I think 1991. (I see that I did have hair so it was a long time ago.) My yank was more up than back, so it didn't totally work, but you get the idea. I will try to remember to shoot a clean version of it sometime soon and then erase this incriminating evidence of my fallibility from these pages!

Somewhat related is this impressive magic trick by Doc Murdock that Ben Robinson sent me, in which Murdock makes the tablecloth and all the objects appear out of nowhere.

But who needs science, who needs skilled performers, when you have CGI?
More elaborate versions have shown up on television and in the movies, but we always have to ask if it's real or if it's CGI. (I was going to write "Is it real or is it Memorex?" but was afraid that would be lost on you youngins out there.) Let's go back to our old friend Mat Ricardo to expose some of the dastardly deception being practiced by our digital overlords:

And who needs CGI when you have AI?
Even Pope Francis got into the act!

Obviously, a fake video, but I was faking you out by calling it AI. It predates this particular AI capacity so it's just very good CGI. In other words, the creators had to spend hours and hours on it, not a minute or two.

But finally to our headliner, WES-P
I promised you evolution, and just like Darwin I have kept my word. All eyes please on the star of the moment, WES-P (Kazuhisa Uekusa) a Japanese comedian whose fame came via Twitter and TikTok and led to his appearance on several different "(Our Nation's) Got Talent" shows. And his signature trick, what first catapulted him to fame, was nothing other than the tablecloth pull. Or rather, multiple insane variations. WES-P is technically brilliant and makes wildly imaginative use of all kinds of everyday objects. He takes tricks that "normal people" do and shows how a pro does it.

But his main comedy angle centers around his baring 95% of his decidedly pudgy body and threatening to reveal the final 5% should his trick go haywire. Yes, I am talking about his naughty parts. We are light-years from that very proper Victorian parlor!

And in case you're thinking that these are somehow faked, or that he shot it a hundred times before getting it to work, here's one of his many live performances.

OK, it's funny and it's physical, so is it physical comedy? 

Yes and no. I'm guessing WES-P made you laugh. I at least chuckled, and I was amazed. ("I thought I'd seen it all.") But is it funny because it's weird cool? Funny because of his appearance? Funny because penises are funny? Maybe all of the above, but if so, it is still a different kind of funny. There's no gag, no story, no delicious "clown moments" where we see a character caught in a predicament of their own making. It's an amazing novelty act, I admire it, wish I could do it, but it's a specific kind of funny.

Let me contrast it, not with the Rastelli's formulaic clown gag, but with the Pope Francis sketch. The richest physical comedy grows out of a specific character and situation, and this one sure does. (Let's put aside the CGI for a moment.)  The dignity of the pope, which is amplified by the setting and the table setting, is a perfect setup for the inappropriate silliness. Who's doing the trick? The pope! We knew he was the coolest pope ever, but really?? But what truly sells it is the startled reaction of the bishop, a subtle 2-second take that makes all the difference.

Let's let Steve Kaplan explain why.

In his book The Hidden Tools of Comedy, Kaplan writes that"the real dynamic is of watcher and watched... Think of Kramer in Seinfeld. The comedy isn't just in watching Kramer behave in his typically outrageous fashion, the comedy requires Jerry or George or Elaine to watch it in bemused or bewildered amazement." Yep, and I would add that this was why George Burns was such a great straightman for Gracie Allen. Or if you're familiar with When Harry Met Sally, think of the famous "I'll have what she's having" scene.

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 "When I started, I used to think that comedy was watching someone do something silly. We later came to realize that comedy was watching someone watch someone doing something silly." –John Cleese

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This is how I tend to think too, that there is a difference between "funny" and "comedy," which I guess may be why I don't spend much time on Instagram, but that's for a longer discussion and another blog post...

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• Check out Mat Ricardo, quite an interesting guy. He and American writer Bill Barol have a podcast about creativity entitled Imagination & Junk, from the Thomas Edison quote, "To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk." Ricardo is also the author of The Magic in You. and he has a video lecture called "It's Not the What, It's the Who," which I imagine would fit in perfectly with this post. You can see Mat at the Irish National Circus Festival in Tralee, hosting and performing in the gala show on November 8th (2025)

• If you're hungry for a little more Asian tablecloth action, you'll probably enjoy a taste of this Ramen Tablecloth Pull.

Mr. Bean, Street Hustler

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Rowan Atkinson (aka Mr. Bean) is a very funny man and a talented physical comedian. This clip from Mr. Bean's Holiday (2007) has a lot to offer. His various comic bits would be funny enough even out of context, and you can find shorter clips of this on YouTube with just the singing and dancing, but notice how much the story setup deepens the comedy. And how much funnier the opera singing gets once he and the boy start acting out a story to it.

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• See Mr. Bean fight himself, way back in post 158, Beating Yourself Up for Fun and Profit.

Coyote vs. Acme: from Humor Piece to Completed Movie to Abandoned Movie to "Opening August 2026"

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Writing this post, I just learned that a "Wile E. Coyote moment" is a serious term used by serious economists. Here's no less an authority than Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman using it this week as a metaphor for the voodoo economics spouted by the Trump administration:

So if the conventional wisdom is that economic conditions will remain more or less normal despite highly abnormal policy, markets will remain calm until the illusion of normality becomes unsustainable. At that point market prices may “change violently.” The current technical term for this phenomenon is a “Wile E. Coyote moment” — the moment when the cartoon character, having run several steps off the edge of a cliff, looks down and realizes that there’s nothing supporting him. Only then, according to the laws of cartoon physics, does he fall.

Call him a metaphor or an archetype, whatever, Mr. Coyote’s futile struggles are as much a part of our cultural language as Charlie Brown repeatedly having the football snatched out from under him by Lucy Van Pelt. Equally iconic is the Acme Corporation, supplier of countless implements of destruction that Wile E. purchases in the hope of terminating Road Runner. As most of you know, Acme’s equipment has a 100% failure rate, prompting the joke: 

--Why on earth does Wile E. Coyote keep buying from Acme?? 

--Free delivery to the desert.

All of which is the basis for a very funny 1990 New Yorker piece by humorist Ian Frazier, Coyote v. Acme, in which Wile E. sues the Acme Corporation for damages. This in turn became the basis for a Warner Bros. live-action/animation movie in the style of 1988's Who Killed Rodger Rabbit. The filming of Coyote vs. Acme (produced by Superman director James Gunn) wrapped in May 2022, and none of you have seen it yet... but more on the stupid reasons why in a moment.

The entirety of Frazier’s 7-page piece consists of the opening statement by the lawyers for Mr. Coyote. It is wonderful in its mimicry of legalese and in its catalog of Coyote mishaps, all described in exacting detail. You can read the original Frazier piece for free here, as reprinted in the Texas Law Journal. (!!) But this is at best a jumping off point for a movie, hardly a film script with a developed story carried along by compelling characters and the mandatory plot twists.

So here’s what we think we know of the plot they came up with:
After years and years of failed attempts to catch the Road Runner using defective Acme products, Wile E. engages the services of a human, ambulance-chasing lawyer (Will Forte) to sue the corporation. The case has been described as a David-and-Goliath story, as our underdog heroes must face the intimidating and ruthless corporate attorney representing Acme (John Cena). As the trial proceeds, Wile E. and his lawyer uncover a dark secret: Acme has been deliberately producing faulty goods as part of a research program called "Project Sisyphus." The corporation has been studying how cartoon physics work, willfully causing harm to animated characters for its own benefit. (The mandatory plot twist.)

Huh? Well, we will have to wait until August 2026 to get the full story, and here’s why:

In 2023, the finished, ready-to-go movie was shelved by Warner Bros. so that, according to Variety, "the company could write off its $30 million budget. The movie was greenlit by the previous regime for the streaming service HBO Max, but the team led by WBD’s CEO David Zaslav decided to abandon that strategy and focus on theatrical releases instead. That decision led to the notorious cancellation of HBO Max films Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt in 2022."

You got that right. A movie about corporate greed was shelved because of corporate greed. The creative work of hundreds of people lost out to the advantages of a tax break.

Almost. There was quite an uproar on behalf of our cartoon physical comedians, and not just from the folks who had put a year or two or more of their lives into the project. Test audiences had given the movie rave reviews. Insiders who had been granted a sneak preview strongly concurred. Finally, Warner Bros. consented to at least try to find a distributor to take it over. This took quite a while, apparently because they insisted that any deal pay them substantially more than the tax break would. $100 million was said to be the asking price. In March of this year the movie rights were finally sold, but reportedly for "only" $50 million, purchased by Ketchup Entertainment. But why are we waiting another whole year for its release? No idea.

But we do have some sense of the movie thanks to a panel devoted to it at the 2025 San Diego Comic Con:

Less than a year to go!

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• Frazier's piece also appears in his collection of 22 humor pieces, Coyote v. Acme. Since he used this piece as the title of the collection, I would assume that it was his most popular.

• Paul Krugman: Why aren’t markets freaking out: of Trump, Keynes and Wile E coyote

• The Nine Unbreakable Rules of the Wile E. Coyote / Road Runner Universe

• Evolution of WILE E. COYOTE & THE ROAD RUNNER Over 71 Years

Judy Garland Goes Full Harpo

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Here's a gem from the movie Easter Parade (1948), starring Fred Astaire and Judy Garland. A short (80 seconds), very economical gag with a nice twist. Enjoy!

Welcome back to All Fall Down, my Physical Comedy Blog(opedia)!

[post 443]

Where the hell have you been?

Yeah, just kidding. I am indeed the one who’s been away. I started this blog(opedia) on May 4, 2009 and did my last post (until now) nine years later! But that last post was more than SEVEN YEARS AGO. Yikes.

What can I say? Rip van Winkle went 20 years without blogging, but then he was asleep the whole time. Me, I’ve been busy, man, and it turns out you can’t do everything. I know because I tried. What happens is that I usually end up feeling like a juggler who throws more objects up into the air than they can possibly catch. Okay, maybe I can flash five or six projects, but keeping them going is another matter. So, yes, a long break from blogging (blogopedia-ing?) but meanwhile: I’ve been teaching, I’ve been directing a few shows, I’ve been traveling, I’ve been writing an actual play, I've been grandfathering, but but but… most of my waking hours have gone into construction. Yes, construction. Some dedicated clown-carpenter friends and I have built Falling Coyote Studios, a clown/circus rehearsal space in Greenwood Lake, New York, less than an hour outside of New York City. It’s been quite an undertaking, and we did 90% of the work ourselves, which is why it's still not 100% done five years later. But a lot is already happening here, and I will devote a separate post to that, with the hope that you, and I do mean you, will someday visit. You will be very welcome. 

2018
Working with Angela Delfini in Italy

2025.

That's me on the left (not working) with my wife Riley Kellogg and our friend David Tabatsky at the final (?) Grateful Dead concert in San Francisco. Yes, it's true, I haven't aged a bit in those seven years.

Falling Coyote Studios

But it's September 2025 and I am back at my desk because I have too many ideas and too much stuff that I like to share. 

And I call it a blog(opedia), NOT just a blog, because it’s not just some sort of journal, but an ever-growing archive of material about physical comedy from a wide range of perspectives. NOT a podcast, because you don't want to hear me talk for an hour and you wouldn't be able to return and easily find pertinent information. And NOT a Substack newsletter because they only allow a limited amount of multimedia material.

Here’s what you can expect:

• Short video clips of cool physical comedy, most of which most of you won’t already be familiar with. I must admit I also like these because they are the least work for me!

• Technical articles on specific skills with video examples and sometimes how-to info. 

• Historical articles on past physical comedy heroes (many of them unsung) and on how our glorious tradition all came about and fits together, and what we owe to our predecessors. As Sir Isaac Newton said, we are all standing on the shoulders of giants. And of course he wasn’t the first to say it: the thought has been traced back to someone else's shoulders in the year 1123! 

• Analytical articles about the role of physical comedy (and by extension clown work) in an increasingly technological world where, seven years later, actual human accomplishment is increasingly eclipsed by AI slop and our too-taken-for-granted freedoms are severely threatened by the rise of authoritarian, neo-fascist governments who seem immune to ridicule. Spoiler alert: no easy solutions there.

So at least that’s the plan. There are 442 posts preceding this one, and hopefully a whole bunch more (new! improved!) yet to come. Think of it as The Old Testament and The New Testament. (On second thought, don’t.) Use them all as you see fit: for the love of history, as a source for creating new material, or just for the fun of it. Better yet, for all of these reasons and maybe more.

I welcome your comments and I also welcome guest posts that are thoughtful, original, and specifically on the subject of physical comedy —but are not mere self-promotion. I also hope that you will let others know about All Fall Down, because I don’t have the time or desire to hang out on social media and constantly be promoting the blog(opedia) or myself. I’m counting on word-of-mouth, and betting you all have mouths. For which I thank you.