Book Report: Scapa's Clowns

[post 347]

Clowns make great subjects for paintings, but what I like about the clown cartoons of Scapa is that you get the clown in action — perfect for a physical comedy blog. I discovered these over thirty years ago, at the time in the form of a coffee-table book, which has long since gone missing. I hadn't been able to find a copy since then, but was thrilled when my sweetheart Riley surprised me with a new (smaller format) edition of it for Christmas.

Here are a few of my favorites...

This last one Fred Yockers and I used in one of our publicity brochures.

There are 12 days to Christmas, so it's not too late to get this for a gift! You can find this on the various Amazon national sites and elsewhere, so shop around for the best price. 

Book Report: Steve Kaplan's "The Hidden Tools of Comedy"

[post 340]

There are a lot of books on comedy out there that try to explain how and why things are funny. Everything from how-to manuals to Freud and Bergson. I've shied away from them, especially the latter, which tend to be dry, over-intellectual and, well, not funny. (I dare you to read "Theories of Humor" on Wikipedia!) But I was eager to read Steve Kaplan's book because I knew Steve back in the 80s when he ran the Manhattan Punchline Theatre. I took a workshop he led at our NYC rehearsal loft and he directed one short piece that had come out of one of my physical comedy classes.

Not only did I like Steve's work then, but some of his ideas passed the test of time, actually sticking with me for three decades. Shortly after that period, Steve moved to L.A., where he has made quite a name for himself as a comedy teacher and script consultant. His former students/clients comprise a who's-who list of the best television and film comedy. His web site of course does not neglect to list these impressive credentials.

I am happy to report that Steve's book, The Hidden Tools of Comedy, is quite an entertaining read, but above all a very useful tool indeed. If I had to summarize Steve's approach in a paragraph, I'd highlight the crucial distinction he makes between being funny and creating comedy. While any joke or physical bit can be "funny" in and of itself, schtick for no reason can prove anti-productive. What he is going after is telling the story of a character stuck in a situation. In his comedy formula, "comedy is about an ordinary guy or gal struggling against insurmountable odds without many of the required skills and tools to win yet never giving up hope." Anything that distracts from that, including jokes for the sake of jokes or slapstick for the sake of slapstick, works against the comedy.

Just as he did in his workshop almost 30 years ago, Steve starts the book by asking which of these is the funniest:

A)  Man slipping on a banana peel.
B)  Man wearing a top hat slipping on a banana peel.
C)  Man slipping on a banana peel after kicking a dog.
D)  Man slipping on a banana peel after losing his job.
E)  Blind man slipping on a banana peel.
F)  Blind man's dog slipping on a banana peel.
G)  Man slipping on a banana peel and dying.

You'll have to buy the book for the (6-page) answer, but it's worth it!

__________________________________

Unlike other art forms, comedy is the only one that requires a specific physiological reaction (e.g., laughter) from a large number of strangers — not once or twice, but eighty, ninety, one hundred times over the course of a couple of hours or it's thought to be a failure. No other art form requires that kind of uniform response. Drama? You wouldn't expect to see a thousand people sitting watching "A Streetcar Named Desire" to all reach into their pocket and pull out a hankie and cry simultaneously at the end of the play. That would be weird. It would be comic, in fact. You wouldn't expect a hundred people walking into the Louvre to se "La Pietà" to all say "Ah!" and have the same astonished look of awe all at the same time. Yet if a hundred, or five hundred, or a thousand people don't share the same physiological response sixty or seventy or eighty times in an evening, then that comedy is said to be a failure. And that requires an immense amount of focus. — SK

__________________________________

While the book's examples are mostly drawn from television and film and deal more with verbal humor, pretty much everything he says relates directly to the physical performer and certainly the clown. Steve's analysis of what he calls the "straight and wavy line" is a more sophisticated version of what is more often described as straightman and comic. His emphasis on finding the true comic moments and focusing in on the character's natural reaction to what's going on, often at the expense of would-be funny business, are absolutely relevant to clown work. His examples of physical business that adds to the comedy and instances where it's extraneous are right on target. Above all he insists that "it takes a pretty a pretty smart cookie to play dumb."

__________________________________

Some actors have a hard time allowing themselves to appear "less than." Even the stupidest actor in the world will say "I don't want to play that, the character's not stupid." Nobody in the world wants to appear an idiot. But actors in comedy have to. In comedy, you've got to love the pie. You want the pie to land on your face; you want to be the clown. You want your characters to accept their own flawed humanity. — SK

__________________________________

The book is a breezy, conversational read — he even throws in four-letter words! — but it's also the career summation of a man who has thought an awful lot about the subject and, like a fine mechanic, is at home under the hood. I don't know if this is the definitive work on comedy, or if such a thing is even possible, but this is one for your bookshelf. The unanimous 5-star rating on Amazon is no accident.

You can buy the book here.
You can learn about Steve's seminars here.

Book Report: Foolish Wisdom

Stories, Activities, and Reflections from Ken Feit

[post 289]

This is the second of four posts in remembrance of the life and work of Ken Feit, "itinerant fool."

Ken Feit was an experience, one that no book could hope to recreate. That being said, Joseph Martin's posthumous 1990 collection of some of Ken's philosophy, stories, and workshop activities is a welcome piece of research, and will be especially valuable to all us aging fools who played with him over three decades ago and for one reason or another cannot quite remember every detail. (You know who you are!)

After a sweet preface by Margie Brown and a good 14-page overview of Ken's life by the author, the book breaks down into six sections. Much of the content consists of short reflections by Ken, which Martin chooses to arrange like poems, each one almost its own haiku, each one on its own page. Nothing wrong with this, but just know that the 150 pages of Ken's foolish wisdom could easily fit into 50 pages — but it's certainly a rich 50 pages!

I. The Fool

Ruminations on the role of the fool and clown in modern soceity.  (I used several in yesterday's post). Very thought-provoking, though there is some repetition.

2. The Priest

Ken recognized priesthood as part of his persona, but in this section he searches for the similarities between the role of the priest and that of the fool. For example:
The term "priestly fool" is used to describe that person, male or female, who is a discerner of wonder, mystery, and paradox; who celebrates life and death; who is a storyteller and listener; who is a focuser of community (though frequently living on the periphery of the community); who is a proclaimer of the truth (verbally and non-verbally); who is a servant and healer of the poor (powerless); and who re-symbolizes, re-ritualizes, and re-mythologizes for the tribe.

3. The Storyteller

Ken would sometimes insist that he was a story maker, not teller. This section has reflections on stories, but also contains many of the stories that he performed. Some were totally from his fertile imagination, others adapted from the world's cultures. Here's a short excerpt from one of his original pieces, Cleo the Pregnant Woman, with Ken confronting the audience as the mother-to-be.

Don't know what to do. Don't know. What would y'all do if'n you had America in your belly? Would you have it, or would you stop it? I needs help. I don't know. How about you, mister? Would you have the baby, or would you stop it? Keep it, then. You, mister? You'd have the baby too! How about you? Don't know. How about you? Y'all mighty brave with Cleo's baby. Yeah.

You'll be able to see Ken performing this in a film two posts from now!

4. The Prophet

This category very much overlaps with the Fool section, so again some repetition, but also some nice passages, including this one on his sound poetry:

In a flash I saw two visions of language like the cities of Augustine. One was intuitive, process, personal, marginal, and the other was conceptual, static, conventional, mainstream. In the first city lived children, primitives, dreamers, artists, cripples, seniles, the poor and powerless, mystics, madmen and fools. The other world was peopled by the rest of society — adults, rationalists, professionals, skeptics, the economically secure and powerful, healthy, civilized, and buffoons. Between the two cities there were constant exchanges as children became "educated" or adults became senile, as fortunes were won or lost, as sickness, madness, faith, or folly were cured or caused. That night I went home and stayed up all night creating my own language — sound poetry.

5. The Mystic

Meditations on the mysteries of life. This one, sadly, came true way too early:
Several years ago I began formal preparations for my death journey — collecting maps, visas, consulate addresses, vaccinations, traveler's cheques, other supplies. There are still a few items missing, but I feel basically ready. There's no departure date, and I haven't decided on my mode of transport, but that will take care of itself I trust.

6. Activities

A Ken Feit workshop was better than kindergarten. I especially remember the Cornstarch activity, which he said he'd done with the Milwaukee police as an illustration of how the greatest force did not always produce the best results.

Fill a bowl with a box of powdered cornstarch and add water, mixing the cornstarch in until all the powder is first absorbed in the water; add no more water. Then strike the mixture smartly with your fist and observe that you cannot penetrate the solution. Place your finger in the mixture and it easily penetrates...

_______________________________

All in all, an essential book for anyone interested in Ken's work, but where to find it? The bad news is that it is indeed out of print; the good news is that (as of this writing) you can still find a few used copies at amazon.com for under $10. And in this day of digital publishing, why not roll Ken over in his Chicago grave by turning it into an e-book?


Coming up: 
• Ken's long letters about his incredible global adventures.
• Excerpts from Fools for Christ, a documentary partly about Ken's work

Book Report: "Fool," a Comic Novel by Christopher Moore

[post 214]

The only chance you or I will have to see Bill Irwin play the fool in King Lear (see previous post, below) would be a visit to the NY Public Library for the Performing arts, whose Theatre on Film & Tape Archive offers a second chance to see most of the major shows mounted in New York, as well as a few regional offerings. (Not guaranteeing they'll have it, though.) Meanwhile you can have a lot of LOL fun by diving into the wacky antics of Christopher Moore’s 2009 novel, Fool, a loose and raunchy retelling of King Lear from the fool’s point of view.

Moore is a top-selling comic novelist who very much enjoys being outrageous. His novel Lamb, for example, recounts the missing early years of the life of Jesus (aka Joshua), as told by "Biff, the Messiah's best bud." Not surprising, then, that his bold imagination does not cower before the monumental status of what many consider to be Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy. It’s not that he doesn’t respect Shakespeare, because he does:

If you work with the English language... you are going to run  across Will’s work at nearly every turn. No matter what you have to say, it turns out that Will said it more elegantly, more succinctly, and more lyrically — and he probably did it in iambic pentameter — four hundred years ago. You can’t really do what Will did, but you can recognize the genius that he had to do it. But I didn’t begin Fool as a tribute to Shakespeare; I wrote it because of my great admiration for British comedy.

Christopher Moore

British comedy cited in his afterword includes Monty Python, the Goons, Evelyn Waugh, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Tom Stoppard, Douglas Adams, Nick Hornby, and Eddie Izzard.

Moore does not buy into the traditional view of history, where great men, usually with noble motives, lead us poor commoners forward for the greater good and, if they err, the flaw is tragic, not endemic. Au contraire. This is the underbelly of history, where the mighty are totally corrupt, totally in it for wealth and sex, and anyone who can manage it beds everyone they fancy, with varying degrees of mutual consent.

Into this mess of greed and carnality steps one Pocket, Moore’s version of Lear’s fool: "The castle’s awash in intrigue, subterfuge, and villainy — they’ll be wanting comic relief between the flattery and the murders.”

_____________________________

“The fool’s number is zero, but that is because he represents the infinite possibilities of all things. He may become anything. See, he carries all of his possessions in a bundle on his back. He is ready for anything, to go anywhere, to become whatever he needs to be."

_____________________________

You don't need to have seen or read King Lear to follow and enjoy Fool. Like Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, the story contains the major events and some of the language from the source, but with plot twists more radical than anything in Stoppard's more faithful take on Hamlet. Not only does Fool borrow elements from other Shakespeare plays, such as the three witches, but the fool's clandestine machinations are what drives the altered plot forward, starting with him conceiving and writing Edmund's treacherous letter. And (spoiler alert) it is eventually revealed that the fool and his apprentice Drool turn out to share an ancient bond to Lear’s own family saga.

Moore's writing is continually witty, and he delights in juxtaposing famous passages from the original with his own more down-to-earth language. Lear famously rages against the storm — "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!" — and then turns to Pocket to say "It’s really fucking cold out here.” Or when in the opening scene Lear tells Cordelia "you’ll get nothing for nothing; speak again," the fool is quick to interject "Well, you can’t really blame her, can you? I mean you’ve given all the good bits to Goneril and Regan, haven’t you? What’s left, a bit of Scotland rocky enough to starve a sheep and this pox river near Newcastle?"

I'm not so sure Moore sustains the momentum for all of his 357 pages — some of the riffs do get repetitive, sometimes he tries too hard to show how clever he can be. The end result is not necessarily great literature, but it is a funny and breezy read, a thought-provoking, weird-sister concoction that is equal parts Shakespeare, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Kurt Vonnegut, and Lenny Bruce.

Dick Van Dyke: My Lucky Life

[post 137] 

Old joke:
Two professors chatting.
First Professor:  I say, Rodney, have you read Derrida's treatise on grammatology?
Second Professor:  Read it?  I haven't even taught it!

Dick Van Dyke, physical comedian and star of stage and screen, has written a new book, Dick Van Dyke: My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business. I haven't read it, but I sure am writing this blog post about it.

Well, in my defense, I did listen to a 7-minute promo interview with him two days ago on NPR, and now you can too by clicking here.






I never saw Mary Poppins or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (I have sons, not daughters), and the only time I saw Van Dyke live was as Harold Hill in a NYC revival of The Music Man; let's just say he was not right for the part. But I did grow up watching the Dick Van Dyke Show (created by Carl Reiner), one of the best sitcoms ever if you're trolling for physical comedy gems.

Every show started with these 18 seconds:


enter01 by towsen

Unless of course he wanted to surprise us by starting with these 18 seconds:


enter02 by towsen

Not every episode was full of physical comedy, but there were indeed some gems. Here's a highlight reel that conveniently proves my point.



Hats off to YouTube member Paul Hansen for the excellent edit!  And speaking of edits, here's a YouTube remix of a Van Dyke pantomime routine.



I did an earlier post of Van Dyke doing a "fake" physical comedy lecture, the kind where his speech gets undercut by physical mishaps. You can read the whole post here, but because I don't want to tax you with the arduous task of actually having to click on a link, here's that video clip again:




Which I include because it was not his only physical comedy lecture. In another episode he visits his son's school and quickly discovers it's better to show than to tell.


atSchool--class by towsen

Finally, if you're new to the Dick Van Dyke Show, you can watch nearly all of the  episodes (with new commercials) on Hulu by clicking here or without commercials on Netflix Instant Play (if you're a member).

And if you like what you see, check out his book!

Book Report: Let the Great World Spin

[post 057]

Let the Great World Spin
a novel by Colum McCann
NY: Random House, 2009
349 pages

Take a careful look at the top of the book cover above and you'll see a wire walker, balancing pole in hand, pencil-thin atop a spreading megalopolis. It is 1974, and the wire walker is Philippe Petit, poised between the twin towers of New York City's World Trade Center.

Let the Great World Spin is not really a novel about Philippe Petit, but it uses his "artistic crime of the 20th century" and August 7, 1974 as the centerpiece for a soaring tale that dissects not just New York City, but the divide between human aspiration and the muck and mire of everyday existence, between all that pulls us up to the heavens and all that yanks us down, down, down. Or as Oscar Wilde once famously put it, "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."

Although Petit is just one of many characters in the book, all the action is refracted through the lens of his walk and arrest. Mc Cann conjures a tapestry of interlocking stories, shifting from 3rd-person to 1st-person narrative, getting into the heads of a broad swath of New Yorkers. The NY Times book review said it much better than I can: "Like a great pitcher in his prime, ­McCann is constantly changing speeds, adopting different voices, tones and narrative styles as he shifts between story lines... McCann just keeps rolling out new people, deftly linking each to the next, as his story moves toward its surprising and deeply affecting conclusion."

All in all, a deeply felt tale, a feat of superior storytelling, and certainly one of the best novels I've read in recent years. I am not at all surprised that it won the National Book Award and was named Amazon's Book of the Year, amongst other honors. A damn good read, and if you're not in the habit of devouring serious contemporary fiction (hey, what's up with that?), this would be a great place to start. And you can get the paperback on Amazon for a mere $7.50 — the price of a beer in many a New York bar.


Update (Sept. 7, 2011):
The NY Times has started a new online book discussion group, Big City Book Club, and their first selection is none other than Let the Great World Spin. The host (Gina Bellafante) poses some questions and readers share their views but, unlike your typical comments section, the host joins in the dialogue on a regular basis. Check it out here.

Book Report: Why We Make Mistakes

[post 33]

Why We Make Mistakes
by Joseph T. Hallinan
(NY: Broadway Books, 2009); hardcover, 283 pp.


Mistakes of judgment and mistakes of execution are the stuff of comedy, especially physical comedy. YouTube offers a rapidly expanding video archive of human stupidity in action, from the world's most incompetent criminals to every conceivable mishap awaiting those so foolhardy as to get out of bed in the morning. Likewise Chuck Shepherd's News of the Weird.

When Joel Schechter, editor of Yale's Theater magazine, asked me to do an article on physical comedy way back in 1986, I used it as an excuse to probe the connection between human error and physical comedy. [Read the whole article here.] Admittedly this was my subversive attempt to forge some new connections that would counter the notion that physical comedy was an inferior form of comedy, mindless entertainment that was good for a belly laugh but little else. Instead, I wanted the reader to see physical comedy as embodying a deeper truth about the human condition, and I had no better ally in this than Henry Miller in his clown novella, The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder:

"The beloved clown! It was his special privilege to reenact the errors, the follies, the stupidities, all the misunderstandings which plague human kind. To be ineptitude itself, that was something even the dullest oaf could grasp. Not to understand, when all is clear as daylight; not to catch on, though the trick be repeated a thousand times for you; to grope about like a blind man, when all signs point the right direction; to insist on opening the wrong door, though it is marked Danger!; to walk head on into the mirror, instead of going around it; to look through the wrong end of a rifle, a loaded rifle! -- people never tired of these absurdities because for millennia humans have traversed all the wrong roads, because for millennia all their seeking and questioning have landed them in a cul-de-sac. The master of ineptitude has all time as his domain. He surrenders only in the face of eternity."

Of course I'm not the only one to notice the disastrous results of human error, be it the sinking of the Titanic or our nation's certitude as to the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In many fields, especially those that involve human life, the study of risk assessment and human error is serious business — and often the findings are quite frightening.

Now there comes along a new book on the subject, and one I highly recommend for its research and readability, Joseph T. Hallinan's Why We Make Mistakes. (The image you see above is a joke wraparound cover and flaps, not a result of my crooked scanning.)

Subtitled How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average, the book offers both clear analysis and great entertainment. And in most cases, the connections to comedy pretty much jump out at you. A few choice tidbits:

• In an experiment designed to test our ability to recognize change, two researches from Cornell University concocted a scene that could have been right out of a Marx Brothers movie. One of their actors would stop a stranger on the street to ask directions, but in the middle of the conversation two other actors would abruptly walk right between them carrying a door. But the catch was that while passing through, the actor asking directions would use the cover of the door to quickly change places with another actor, who seamlessly continued the conversation with the stranger. In the majority of cases, the stranger did not even notice the change! However, when the experiment was described to a college class and the students were asked to predict whether or not they would have noticed such a switcheroo, 100% were quite sure they would have.

• Overconfidence is indeed one of Hallinan's main themes and, as they teach you in clown school, pride goeth before the fall. Overconfidence makes us buy gym memberships or time shares we'll never fully use, and think we can accomplish complex tasks without following instructions (what he dubs the "bushwhack" approach). It seems to be part of human nature to want to feel on top of things, what Hallinan calls the "illusion of control." In one experiment, subjects guessed the outcome of a series of coin tosses. Students who were told that their first guesses were all correct (they didn't actually see the coin close-up) became convinced that they would be able to continue to predict the outcome well above half the time, and that they would even get better with practice. And who were these overconfident and, dare I say, foolish subjects? Students from a certain ivy league college in New Haven. The same researcher did an experiment in which the subjects bet on the outcome of a simple card game in which whoever drew the high card won. Though the chances on any draw were obviously 50-50, what happened was that when playing against "a guy dressed as a schlub," the subjects bet more than they did when betting against a nattily dressed opponent. Yes, these were Yale University students.

You probably won't be surprised to read that all kinds of tests have shown that men on average are far more overconfident than women and that they (conveniently) forget their mistakes a lot quicker. In the chapter "Men Shoot First," Hallinan gives example after example of this tendency, from men being more likely to kill their fellow soldier ("friendly fire") while in combat, to men overestimating their own IQ scores. Tragically, when it comes to driving a car, men wear seat belts with less frequency than women but are three times more likely to be involved in a fatal accident.

It's not much of a leap to connect this arrogant overconfidence to today's talking heads who assure us that climate change is nothing to get so worried about, that they've got everything under control. Obviously a lot of this drivel comes from those getting rich from oil production, but there are millions of others with nothing to gain — and, like all of us, everything to lose — who are blinded by overconfidence into assuming that somehow it will all work out, but with no evidence to back that up. Somewhere Henry Miller is chuckling.

I haven't seen it yet, but you might want to check out the new movie, The Age of Stupid, in which a man living alone in 2055 in a world devastated by climate change examines old footage from 2008 and tries to figure out how we could have been so stupid. Here's the trailer:




I guess the good news is that clowns know what they're talking about. The bad news is that what we're talking about is pretty scary.

In Remembrance: Brooks McNamara

[post 006]

All those popular entertainments that we associate with physical comedy — circus, pantomime, street performance, to name just a few — have always been the poor cousins of the so-called legitimate theatre. A few centuries back, when ruling royalty wanted to clamp down on public expression, they only granted theatrical licenses to a couple of theatres, relegating everything else to the streets and the fairground.

Conventional theatre history is often just the narrative of what was approved for performance at respectable houses such as Drury Lane and the Comédie Française, everything else a mere footnote. Great dramatic literature was indeed showcased at these theatres, but on the other side of the proverbial tracks an alternative tradition flourished, given the name commercial theatre, popular theatre, or even people’s theatre... all depending on who was doing the giving.

When I was at NYU, I was lucky enough to study with Brooks Mc Namara, a young professor who thought this alternative performance tradition worthy of consideration alongside the greats of drama and the trendy experiments of the post-modernists. His efforts were occasionally derided by colleagues who thought such pursuits trivial, but pursue Brooks did, teaching what I'm pretty damn sure was the first graduate-level course in Popular Entertainment and, over the course of several decades, inspiring countless students to take the field seriously.

Through his teaching, mentoring, scholarship, stewardship of the Schubert Archives, and a dozen or so excellent books, Brooks was the prime mover in bringing popular performance traditions into the mainstream of theatre scholarship. Readers of this blog would probably find a lot to like in his books, especially Step Right Up! An Illustrated History of the American Medicine Show and American Popular Entertainments: Jokes, Monologues, Bits, and Sketches.

We lost Brooks McNamara earlier this month after a long illness. He was my mentor at NYU, the man who turned me on to all kinds of possibilities, the man who taught me more about writing than anyone else. He was my editor for Clowns and I had looked forward to sharing this blog with him; in fact, this blog's banner is made from a vintage circus poster Brooks gave me as a wedding present. I know he would have been excited by the blog, but sometimes fate's timing is downright rotten.

One more word about Brooks, which has nothing to do with physical comedy and everything to do with basic human decency. During my years as a graduate student at NYU, I paid off my tuition by working as an assistant editor on TDR (The Drama Review), an NYU publication where Brooks was an associate editor. It was the early 70s, and everything was political. Vietnam and Watergate dominated the news, but power issues permeated grad school programs and theatre magazines as well. Disputes were common and I was involved in more than my fair share of them (okay, maybe I was a bit of a hothead back then). Brooks usually ended up as the arbitrator, and unfailingly he did what was right while at the same time showing political smarts well beyond my youthful abilities. In other words, when push came to shove, a good man. He will be missed.
___________________

Update: My friend Arnie Aronson has written a very nice tribute to Brooks, with more biographical information, which you can find here.