Here's a little physical comedy gem for you from the 1954 Bing Crosby – Danny Kaye classic film, White Christmas. This is Danny and crew in "Choreography," a parody of modern dance, and especially of Martha Graham. Enjoy!
BTW, Riley Kellogg found this photo of the real Martha Graham and also informs me that the structure the Kaye dancers climb on towards the end is a reference to the more than twenty sets the famous sculptor Isamu Noguchi built for Graham dances.
On the Second Day of Christmas Update: And this just in from my old friend Jim Moore, whose excellent VAUDEVISUALS blog yesterday featured a slapstick version of White Christmas performed by Lou Costello. Click here to watch. The mayhem starts around the minute and a half mark.
On the Third Day of Christmas Update: And this just in from Ira Seidenstein, who knows a thing or two about a thing or two. Choreography by Martha Graham and featuring Merce Cunningham.
From the Performing Arts Encyclopedia,: Performed by the Martha Graham Dance Group to music by Paul Nordoff, Every Soul Is a Circus premiered on December 27, 1939, at New York's St. James Theatre. Costumes were designed by Edythe Gilfond and the set was created by Philip Stapp. This work marked the first appearance of Merce Cunningham, who became the second male dancer (after Erick Hawkins) to join Graham's ensemble. Composer/critic David Diamond, writing in Modern Music (December 1939) said, "The circus she creates is one of silly behavior and ridiculous situations, its theme, the desire of woman to be the apex of a triangle, the beloved of a duet, who, as the spectator of her own actions, becomes the destroyer of experiences necessary to her essential dignity and integrity. It represents the fullest consummation of Miss Graham's conceptions. She has unified her entire dance vocabulary into a simple and direct theatrical means of projection and communication. The perfection of her technique, the warmth of personality, make this performance a piece of the most poignant clowning seen in the dance."
You've probably never heard of him because, even in his heyday, he was never actually famous. He was for many years a gag writer for Buster Keaton who also directed for Harold Lloyd, Laurel & Hardy, and W.C. Fields, and wrote for Abbot & Costello and the Three Stooges. In the silent film era and beyond, when the gags often came first in the creative process and the story second, "gag writer" was a recognizable job description.
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One joke of the time was that Keaton's employment application consisted of two questions: “Are you a good actor?” and “Are you a good baseball player?” and a passing grade was 50 percent. Brand ran into Bruckman, realized he was a natural fit for Keaton’s studio, arranged a lunch, and Bruckman started the next Monday, in a dual role as “outfielder and writer.” — Matthew Dessem
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Being a gag writer also got him into trouble, because when a decade later he recycled Harold Lloyd gags for Three Stooges movies — certainly a common practice at the time — Lloyd sued Columbia Pictures for $1.7 million and "won." Well, won, but only won $40,000, perhaps enough to pay his lawyers. As somewhat of a physical comedy historian, I'd have to take Bruckman's side on this one. So many of the gags of that era were lifted from earlier movies, films that it was assumed would never be seen again. And in any case, you can find references to many of these same gags being performed on the variety stage long before the advent of film. Nothing new under the sun. T'ain't what ya do, it's the way hows ya do it.
I mention Bruckman today not only because it's his birthday but as an excuse to encourage you to check out an excellent article on him which sheds some light on how gag writers worked in the 20s and 30s. And all you have to do is click here to read TheGag Man by Matthew Dessem.
I've already written about Abbott & Costello's "Who's on First" in this post, which is chock full of interesting stuff, but now I have three more takes on it to share with you.
TAKE 1 is "a little Patter and Dance by Norman & Arnold — Australia's Gentlemen Wags." It's from the Pathé vaults by way of Eccentric Dance expert Betsy Baytos. No explanations, just watch!
For the record, that was from 1931 and Abbott & Costello first performed together in 1935, but then again similar routines date back to at least 1905.
TAKE 2. All of the variations on "Who's on First?" that I've ever seen had two characters, until Jimmy Fallon came along and tried it with five, including Billy Crystal and Jerry Seinfeld. And it works, even if Fallon as Abbott and whoever that is as Costello are no more than serviceable imitations of the originals.
TAKE 3 is not a variation, but rather a fresh way of looking at the routine. While it is a highly verbal piece and can be enjoyed in an audio-only format, what really sells it for me are Costello's increasingly physical displays of his own frustration.
Which brings me to Steve Kaplan's book The Hidden Tools of Comedy (which I reviewed here) and his workshop, which I take every three decades, most recently this December. In the workshop, one thing we did was to each write down one question about comedy. Mine, not surprisingly, was "what is the role of physicality in comedy?" Steve was very clear in his response, saying that it's absolutely essential because the comic character has to find an external expression of their internal feeling. Steve is not fond of comedy where each line tries to top the previous one, as in many mediocre tv sitcoms, preferring instead to see characters lost in situations where the comedy comes from their reaction to their predicament. Sounds a lot like clowning, no?
But it goes further than that. Instead of analyzing status or straightman-comic dichotomies, Steve looks at comic partnerships in terms of what he calls Straight Line / Wavy Line:
The dynamic of Straight Line / Wavy Line is the idea that comedy isn't us watching somebody doing something funny, but rather us watching someone watching someone do something funny. Straight Line / Wavy Line is: • The one who does not see and the one who does • The one blind to or creating the problem, and the one struggling with the problem • The essential dynamic of comic focus, not character
And guess what his first example is. Yep, "Who's on First?" And in this case, Bud Abbott has the information, he "sees" the names of the players, but he does not see that he is confusing Costello. Costello struggles mightily, but it is because he actually sees there's a problem, and he eventually solves it: "Third base!"
As Costello gets more and more frustrated, he also becomes more and more animated, emitting odd noises, flailing about, at one point seemingly screwing himself into the ground while steam practically vents from the top of his head.... The Wavy Line, the human being in the scene, has the obligation to express his internal reality. All those comic noises are the external expression of an internal truth. If you could put a sound and a movement to frustration, that's what it would look like.
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?
"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.
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
Think Abbott & Costello and you think Who's on First? and other classic verbal routines from the heyday of burlesque. Lots of intricate wordplay, the comic effect multiplied by Lou Costello's expressive reactions. While Bud Abbott stands there, calm and "reasonable," his feet firmly planted, Costello's takes and double-takes convulse his body, a quivering bowl of jello on the verge of spilling over. More robust movement — I'm talking dance, acrobatics, slapstick — is seen less often in their work, which is why I enjoyed the following piece so much.
The show is The Colgate Comedy Hour, for which Abbott & Costello shared hosting duties with Martin & Lewis, Eddie Cantor, and others. The year was 1952, and the theme for that episode the inauguration of President Dwight Eisenhower. Costello's going to the inaugural ball and so he gets Grace Hartman to teach him to dance. The piece starts slow but gets a lot more physical starting around the 3 ½-minute mark, and includes a brief but nice use of the broken mirror gag and an apparently unintentional pants malfunction. This was live television, after all.
Later in the same show we see them at the ball, where one mishap leads to another, cascading into knockabout mayhem aided greatly by breakaway props and furniture. Some of the technique is fine, but more than one punch misses the mark (see Abbott's at 1:51), and curiously some blows produce noise while others don't. Kind of sloppy, even for live television.
Yes, that's supposed to be outgoing President Harry Truman salvaging part of the piano, tickling the ivories having been one of his hobbies.
Finally, for more than you'd ever want to know about the Who's on First? routine, see this previous post.
So here I go again, launching yet another blog feature that I think will repeat on a regular basis. This is reserved for stuff that's technically not what I would call physical comedy (and I have a pretty broad definition), but that I think would be of interest to the readers of this blog for one reason or another.
Let's launch it with an unusual version of (most of) Abbott & Costello's Who's on First, named the best comedy routine of the 20th-century by those well known comedy experts, the editors of Time magazine. There are no performers in this one, so you can't say it's physical, but the text sure do bust some nice moves.
If you like this style of typographic animation (and I do), try a YouTube search under kinetic typography.
If somehow you've never seen the original, there are several versions available on YouTube. What may be the best version, from their movie The Naughty Nineties, can be seen here.
Small world (two degrees of separation) department: Abbott & Costello first did Who's on First? for a national audience on the Kate Smith radio show in 1938. I performed on at least one TV show with Kate Smith about twenty years later. All I remember was she was quite big and was always singing "God Bless America."
Oh, now who's being naive? You know how I hate to disillusion you (heh heh), but if you've always marveled at the originality of Abbott & Costello, then you've missed the lesson of On the Shoulders of Giants. "Who's on First?" is stolen from "Who Dyed?" a burlesque comedy routine which, as Ralph Allen points out in Best Burlesque Sketches, goes back to at least 1905; Abbott and Costello first performed together in 1935 at the Eltinge Burlesque Theater on 42nd Street in New York.
Here's the evidence:
2ND COMIC You've got a job? That's a surprise. Where are you working? 1ST COMIC At the Market Street Cleaners and Dyers. 2ND COMIC What do you do there? 1ST COMIC I dye. 2ND COMIC You what? 1ST COMIC I dye for a living. If I don't dye, I can't live. 2ND COMIC Are you sick? 1ST COMIC No. You don't have to be sick to dye. 2ND COMIC You don't? 1ST COMIC In fact, if you're sick, you can't dye. 2ND COMIC How long have you been dying? 1ST COMIC About two years. My father dyed ten years before I was born. 2ND COMIC Well, if you're dying, what are you doing here? 1ST COMIC I took a day off. You can't dye every day, you know. It wears you out. 2ND COMIC So, you didn't feel like dying today? 1ST COMIC No. You see, I'm not dyeing for myself. 2ND COMIC You're dying for another fellow? 1ST COMIC Uh huh. 2ND COMIC Why doesn't the other fellow die himself? 1ST COMIC He doesn't have to. He's the boss. Others dye for him. 2ND COMIC What's the name of the man you work for? 1ST COMIC Who. 2ND COMIC The man you work for? 1ST COMIC Who. 2ND COMIC The man you work for? 1ST COMIC Who. 2ND COMIC Your boss. Look, you get paid, don't you? 1ST COMIC Of course. Don't you think I'm worth it? 2ND COMIC Who gives you the money? 1ST COMIC Naturally. 2ND COMIC Naturally? 1ST COMIC Naturally. 2ND COMIC So you get the money from Naturally? 1ST COMIC No. 2ND COMIC Then who gives it to you? 1ST COMIC Naturally. 2ND COMIC Naturally. That's what I said. 1ST COMIC No, you didn't! No, you didn't! 2ND COMIC You get the money from Naturally. 1ST COMIC But I don't! 2ND COMIC Then, you get the money from who? 1ST COMIC Naturally. 2ND COMIC What is the name of the man you get the money from? 1ST COMIC No. What's the bookkeeper. 2ND COMIC I don't know. 1ST COMIC She's the secretary.
Not surprisingly, there have been a lot of amusing adaptations of the routine in recent years —based for example on ballplayers and political leaders named Hu or on the rock bands The Who, The Band, and Yes. Here's an SCTV version from their "Midnight Express" episode:
Incidentally, one of the writing credits on this is Bernard Sahlins, one of the founders of Second City and translator of Tristan Rémy's Entrées Clownesques into English, published here as Clown Scenes.
And here are the Animaniacs at Woodstock, playing with the same rock band premise.
And to close, my favorite Abbott & Costello story: As Lou Costello got more popular, he wanted more money. One time, he threatened not to show up on set unless his demands were met. When advised in no uncertain terms that staying home would put him in violation of his contract and cost him a pretty penny, he replied, "Okay, I'll be there, but I can't guarantee you how funny I'll be."
...that you can click on any blog image to see it full size?
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An Introduction...
[So this is what I wrote six years ago; more or less true!]
Ring around a rosie, a pocket full of posies Ashes, Ashes, we all fall down
Welcome to the All Fall Down blog, an exploration of all aspects of physical comedy, from the historical to the latest work in the field, from the one-man show to the digital composite, from the conceptual to the nuts & bolts how-to. Be prepared for a broad definition of physical comedy (mine!) and a wide variety of approaches. Physical comedy is a visual art form, so there’ll be tons of pictures and videos, but also some substantial writing and research, including scripts and probably even some books.
This blog is a result of me wanting to follow through on lots of unfinished research from the past 25 years. It’s made possible by a full-year sabbatical leave from Bloomfield College that will take me through August 2010. It’s also made more practical by the ease of Web 2.0 tools for managing and distributing content. I had envisioned a web site similar to this blog more than a decade ago, but never got too far with it because it was simply a lot more work. Now, no more excuses!
Just as this blog will be sharing lots of goodies with you free of charge, I hope you will share your knowledge and ideas with me. Feel free to comment on any of it, or to write me directly with your suggestions. Admittedly I don’t see this as a free-for-all forum on the subject of physical comedy. It’s my blog, I’m the filter, and it won’t be all things to all people. That being said, I hope it will bring together insights, information, and people, and encourage others to make their own singular contributions to the field.
I hope to be adding substantial and varied material to the blog on a regular basis, so check back often and be sure to check out previous posts. And finally, a thanks to all of you, past present, and future whose work contributes to our knowledge — and our fun. We are truly standing on the shoulders of giants.
— John Towsen New York CIty May, 2009
My Physical Comedy Qualifications
So if you don’t blink, you can see me doing a pratfall on the original 1957 CBS production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella(starring Julie Andrews, directed by Ralph Nelson, stage managed by Joseph Papp).
If that doesn't say it all, then click here for the full bio.
My Favorite Posts Okay, there are literally thousands of physical comedy blogs out there, but only one physical comedy blogopedia. Why list my favorite posts? Because I want to draw attention to my best research and writing, to posts that make the strongest connections between old and new, between theory and practice, between ha-ha funny and broader global issues. If I die tomorrow, which is impossible because it's already the day after tomorrow in Australia, these are the ones I would like read aloud at my funeral, with high-rez projection of all videos. (Is it bad luck to write that?) Also, please mention that I never voted for a Republican. —jt
Here are some useful and fun blogs and web sites that touch on the whole field of physical comedy, rather than just sites by performers about themselves (not that there's anything wrong with that). Click away!
For the latest posts from these blogs, see below. (Blogs only; not web sites.) These are automatically sequenced by Google in order of most current posts. The blog at the top of the list is the blog with the most recent post. Since the whole idea is to keep you (and me) up to date on current posts in the field, blogs that have not been posting regularly have been dropped from the list; if you've been dropped but are now posting regularly, just let me know.
Los otros hombres que ríen
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En nuestro camino para conocer a Gwynplaine hemos encontrado algunas otras
versiones de la célebre novela de Víctor Hugo. La primera película
inspirada p...
Caroline Loyo
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R.I.P Dougie Ashton
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ICHOF inductee Dougie Ashton passed away on August 25th at the age of 96.
Please enjoy this rare audio interview with him from 1973 when he was
touring wit...
The Apache Dance
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I had heard of the “Apache dance”, but didn’t know much about it, until I
ran across this youtube video: It’s a humorous setting for a dance that
isn’t mea...
Canal Payasas
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Con todas las grandes payasas que conozco y admiro, había tardado mucho en
realizar esta lista. Seguramente porque a muchas las tengo incluidas en
otros....
Here's a list of complete books available for free as pdf documents right here on this here blogopedia, arranged in chronological order; dates are publication in the original language. Clickhere for a Tech Note on these books. Click on the book title to go to that post. More books coming!
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