Complete Book: The Mimes of Herodas

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Histories of ancient theatre tend to leave the impression that comedy began with Aristophanes, but Greece already had a rich tradition of commedia-style performance — the Dorian mimes (image, above). As I wrote in chapter two of Clowns...

These Dorian clowns— as well as the short plays they performed —came to be known as 

mimes (mimos). Today mime is usually equated with pantomime, the art of silent acting, but originally the word meant “to imitate” and referred to the performer’s talent for caricature; the ancient mimes were in fact quite talkative. Much of the dialogue apparently was improvised, and since the actors saw little need to preserve in writing what was said on stage, these comic dramas never became dramatic literature.

There is, however, one manuscript unearthed in 1890 that gives us some sense of these ancient skits: the mimes of Herodas. Obviously this text is not improvised, but rather the work of a poet adapting a popular form. This is what the Encyclopædia Britannica says:

Herodas, also called Herondas  (flourished 3rd century bc), Greek poet, probably of the Aegean island of Cos, author of mimes—short dramatic scenes in verse of a world of low life similar to that portrayed in the New Comedy. His work was discovered in a papyrus in 1890 and is the largest collection of the genre. It is written in rough iambic metre and in the vigorous, rather earthy language of the common people. His characters use vehement exclamations, emphatic turns of speech, and proverbs. In pieces of about 100 lines Herodas portrays vivid and entertaining scenes with the characters clearly drawn. The themes cover a range of city life: a procuress attempts to arrange a tryst for a respectable matron while her husband is away; a jealous woman accuses her favourite slave of infidelity and has him bound and sent to receive 2,000 lashes; a desperate mother drags a truant urchin to the schoolmaster. It is thought that these mimes were recited with considerable improvisation by an actor who took the various roles.

Wikipedia offers the following summary of the pieces:

Mime I
In Mime I the old nurse, now the professional go-between or bawd, calls on Metriche, whose husband has been long away in Egypt, and endeavours to excite her interest in a most desirable young man, fallen deeply in love with her at first sight. After hearing all the arguments Metriche declines with dignity, but consoles the old woman with an ample glass of wine, this kind being always represented with the taste of Mrs Gamp.
Mime II
This is a monologue by the "whoremonger" prosecuting a merchant-trader for breaking into his establishment at night and attempting to carry off one of the inmates, who is produced in court. The vulgar blackguard, who is a stranger to any sort of shame, remarking that he has no evidence to call, proceeds to a peroration in the regular oratorical style, appealing to the Coan judges not to be unworthy of their traditional glories. In fact, the whole oration is also a burlesque in every detail of an Attic speech at law; and in this case we have the material from which to estimate the excellence of the parody.
Mime III
Metrotimé, a desperate mother, brings to the schoolmaster Lampriscos her truant son, Cottalos, with whom neither she nor his incapable old father can do anything. In a voluble stream of interminable sentences she narrates his misdeeds and implores the schoolmaster to flog him. The boy accordingly is hoisted on another's back and flogged; but his spirit does not appear to be subdued, and the mother resorts to the old man after all.
Mime IV
This is a visit of two poor women with an offering to the temple of Asclepius at Cos. While the humble cock is being sacrificed, they turn, like the women in the Ion of Euripides, to admire the works of art; among them a small boy strangling a vulpanser – doubtless the work of Boethus that we knowand a sacrificial procession by Apelles, "the Ephesian," of whom we have an interesting piece of contemporary eulogy. The oily sacristan is admirably painted in a few slight strokes.
Mime V
This brings us very close to some unpleasant facts of ancient life. The jealous woman accuses one of her slaves, whom she has made her favourite, of infidelity; has him bound and sent degraded through the town to receive 2000 lashes; no sooner is he out of sight than she recalls him to be branded "at one job." The only pleasing person in the piece is the little maidservant permitted liberties as a verna brought up in the house whose ready tact suggests to her mistress an excuse for postponing execution of a threat made in ungovernable fury.
Mime VI
A friendly chat or a private conversation. The subject is an ugly one, Metro has arrived at Koritto's house to ask her where she acquired a dildo, but the dialogue is as clever and amusing as the rest, with some delightful touches. Our interest is engaged here in a certain Kerdon, the maker of the dildo and who hides this trade by the front of being a cobbler. On acquiring the information she desired, Metro leaves to seek him out.
Mime VII
The same Kerdon and Metro whom we see in VI appear, Metro bringing some friends to Kerdon's shoe shop, (his name, which means "profiteer", had already become generic for the shoemaker as the typical representative of retail trade) he is a little bald man with a fluent tongue, complaining of hard times, who bluffs and wheedles by turns. The sexual undertones which we have come to expect from his involvement in VI are only realized at the end when Metro's friends have left the shop.
Mime VIII
Opens with the poet waking up his servants to listen to his dream; but we have only the beginning, and the other fragments are very short. Within the limits of 100 lines or less Herodas presents us with a highly entertaining scene and with characters definitely drawn.

Spoiler Alert: This is not necessarily a laugh riot, but if you bring some theatrical imagination to it, the anthropologist in you will get some idea of this early form of comedy.

You're actually getting two translations for the price of one.  The first is a 1906 verse translation by Hugo Sharpley, the second a 1921 prose version by M. S. Buck.

A Realist of the Aegean


Herodas Prose

"Clowns": Chapter Two — Supplementary Material

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Chapter two (previous post) covered a lot of ground — about twenty centuries and at least four continents — so there's a ton of potential supplementary material. I'll just throw a few at you here, and then follow up in my next posts with some free books.

The first comes from the 18th-century tradition of French fairground theatre, which thrived outside the censorship laws imposed on the royally-sanctioned "serious" theatres in Paris. The most popular form of fairground comedy was a short farcical sketch known as a parade.  Popular, that is, until they were closed down by the police in 1777.

Below is a quite humorous example by Thomas-Simon Gueullette (1683–1766), a lawyer and scholar who wrote over sixty pieces for the commedia actors of the Théâtre-Italien. Rather than inventing much that was new, I suspect that Gueullette, like Goldoni and Gozzi, took much of the comic business made popular by the improvisatory commedia actors and repackaged it in a more tightly structured, written form. The good news is that he did a nice job of it.

One Armed, Blind Deaf Mute


Here's what that dumb comic servant Gille may have looked like:

And click here for a recent Ph.D. dissertation on the work of Gueullette.

If you've seen my favorite movie ever, Children of Paradise (1945), you already have some sense of the fairground theatre atmosphere, but transported half a century later from Gueullette's time to the heyday of the Boulevard du Crime in Paris. If you haven't seen Children of Paradise, you are hereby ordered to do so. Soon! It's on DVD and it's available on Netflix, though if you can actually see it in a movie theatre, it's worth the money to take it all in on a big screen. Much of the action takes place at the Théâtre des Funambules (theatre of the wirewalkers) and centers around the legendary mime, Jean-Gaspard Deburau (1796–1846), immortalized in the performance of Jean-Louis Barrault.

Here's a scene that did a lot to popularize pantomime. This is Barrault as a not-yet-famous Deburau, dismissed as the family idiot, forced to work the platform in front of the Funambules to help draw in paying customers.

There are no subtitles, but you won't need them. When the master criminal Lacenaire picks the pocket of a bourgeois gentleman, his accomplice Garance gets the blame. The police ask if there are any witnesses, and the silent mime suddenly speaks, saying he saw it all. Once he acts it out, Garance goes free, and her show of gratitude triggers a romance that is one of the movie's central plot lines.

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"Act! Act! You have the wrong place. We are not allowed to act here. We walk on our hands! And you know why? They bully us. If we put on plays, they'd have to close their great, noble theaters! Their public is bored to death by museum pieces, dusty tragedies and declaiming mummies who never move! But the Funambules is full of life, movement! Extravaganzas! Appearances, disappearances, like in real life! And then, BOOM, the kick in the pants!"   
— the director of the Funambules

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A mime piece performed by Barrault as Deburau at the Funambules:



Stay tuned: I will be posting a complete book (in French) of Deburau's mime pieces in a week or two.

Now here's a real curiosity: Etienne Decroux, the father of French mime, teacher of Marceau and Barrault, and later the creator of the more abstract corporeal mime style carried on by his students Tom Leabhart, Daniel Stein, and Steve Wasson, amongst others. Yes, that Etienne Decroux. Here he is, eye lashes fluttering, jabbering away, hamming it up like crazy as Deburau's very verbose father!

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"A kick in the ass, if well delivered, is a sure laugh. It's true. There's an entire order, a science, a style of kicks in the ass."
— Anselme Debureau (played by Etienne Decroux)

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Did I mention this is a great movie? Not only that, but once you've seen it, you'll want to know more about this whole theatrical era. Well, you've come to the right place, and I'm referring to our final supplemental item, "The Golden Age of the Boulevard" by Marvin Carlson.

When I was in graduate school at NYU and working as an assistant editor for TDR (The Drama Review), I commissioned this article from the distinguished theatre scholar Dr. Marvin Carlson for an issue on popular entertainments I was putting together. It gives me great satisfaction, almost forty years later, to have been back in touch with Professor Carlson, who kindly consented to have his article reprinted on this blog so it could reach a new and wider audience. It's an excellent article, and I once again thank Mr. Carlson for this and his many other contributions to theatre scholarship, which you can check out here.

Golden Age

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And, last but not least, an important correction. The following photo, from a Columbia Records lp of gamelan music, appeared in the color plate section of my book with the caption "Clown character from the wajang wong, the Balinese dance-drama."

Well, it turns out that was wayway wrong. After the book was published, I received a note from Leonard Pitt — mime, maskmaker, student of the above-mentioned Etienne Decroux, and expert on Balinese theatre — advising me that this photo was mislabeled. My bad for not having double-checked this. But I did save the note, and when I visited Leonard last year at his Flying Actor Studio in San Francisco, I was able to show it to him (35 years later!) and promise to finally make amends. I wanted to scan the note for this post, but it is lost somewhere here in my office. If instead I showed you a picture of my office, you'd see why it might take me a while to retrieve the note! Anyway, correction made, photo removed, and thank you again Leonard!

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Coming next, the following complete books, all related to Chapter Two material:
• The Mimes of Herodas
• The Commedia dell'Arte by Winifred Smith
• Masques et Bouffons by Maurice Sand
• Mimes et Pierrots by Paul Hugounet
• Memoirs of Carlo Goldoni
• Goldoni: A Biography by H.C. Chatfield-Taylor
• The Memoirs of Count Carlo Gozzi
• The Life of Moliere by Henry M. Trollope
• Le Théâtre des Funambules by Louis Péricaud
• Pantomimes de Gaspard et Charles Deburau

"Clowns": Chapter Two — The Clown to the Stage

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When I started this blog more than two years ago, I thought one thing I would definitely do would be to get my book Clowns, long since out of print, up on the blog so all of you could access it for free. The problem is that doing so involves a lot of tedious work (scanning; optical character recognition; proofreading; layout; etc.), plus I wanted to provide supplementary material for each chapter. Ideally I would rewrite it to improve it (hey, I was 26 at the time!) and bring it up to date, but that possibility will have to wait until I retire, at which point I'll probably prefer to do something that's more fun.

Still, even I am amazed that it's been two years and I've only posted chapter five (the one most related to physical comedy) and chapter one. So here goes chapter two.  At this rate, I'll have the whole book up there by 2020! If you're impatient, you can usually find a used copy on Amazon, with prices ranging from $15 to $200. If I were you, I'd hold out for a cheaper copy.

So here's chapter two, a long one, which covers the clown character in various dramatic traditions, including of course commedia dell'arte. It could have been broken up into more than one chapter, but I had deadlines to meet and had to limit it somehow.

I'll follow up with some related material, including some complete books, more than you will ever have time to read. Or me either, for that matter...

Clicking on the bottom-left button shows it full screen, and you can of course download it, print it, etc.

ch02

Chapter 1 — Supplementary Material

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Hmm... Fools, Natural and Artificial... what a topic!

This was my opening chapter, though actually written towards the end. In it I tried to bring together manifestations of the clown spirit in a wide range of contexts, though with an emphasis on cultures variously labeled as primitive, indigenous, non-literate or non-technological. The argument is that if the Clown Spirit emerges spontaneously amongst these isolated peoples, separated as they are by time and geography, then this spirit must speak to something deep in human nature. Its appearance in more than a few creation myths perhaps offers the strongest proof.

It's great stuff, though the problem is that to do it justice you need to be a seasoned anthropologist, which I'm not, despite several visits to the American Museum of Natural History before the age of twelve. It's one thing to put together a reasonable narrative about the evolution of the tramp clown figure, and quite another to chart a vaguely defined clown impulse through all of recorded time, especially since it forces you to have to define exactly what it is you mean by "clown" in the first place. So I feel like I'm on shaky ground here, academically speaking, but nevertheless on the right track. Help and suggestions are certainly in order!

Since I started the book by writing about the dances of the Hopi people, and go on to also discuss the Navajo, the Zuni, the Yaqui, the Crow, the Cheyenne, and even Sri Lankan demon plays, I have of course been curious and hopeful that, living in the YouTube generation where everything is supposedly online, some choice ethnographic film might surface showing clown figures in performance, more or less in their native authenticity, uncorrupted by the white man pointing a camera at them. I'm just beginning a serious search, but in the meantime, here's some stuff...

Creation Myths
Clown figures do figure prominently in many creation myths, though it's usually more the clown as trickster than it is the clown as bumbler. The standard text on this when I was writing my book seemed to be Paul Radin's The Trickster (1956), but since then at least three other books of note have come along, all of which I'm trying to find time for.

First up is Barbara Sproul's 1979 collection, Primal Myths, an anthology of well over one hundred creation myths from throughout the world. Yes, Genesis is included. Only some of the texts touch on trickster figures, but the scope is impressive, and Sproul's intelligent and very readable 30-page introduction to the subject is a great way for the layman to understand how these stories function within a society.



Apparently along similar lines is Kimberley Christen's and Sam Gill's Clowns and Tricksters, though I haven't gotten my hands on it yet. Subtitled "An Encyclopedia of Tradition and Culture," it would seem to be a valuable resource in this area. According to the review in Library Journal, the authors have "created a reference to tricksters and clowns, figures found in cultures and myths worldwide but whose characteristics differ according to the culture in which they originate. The work lists 185 cultures by geographical area, followed by a main section consisting of 194 alphabetically arranged entries related to tricksters and clowns; the entries, which are heavily cross-referenced, cite the name of the character with its culture or country of origin followed by stories or other information. The entries conclude with bibliographic citations, and there is a comprehensive bibliography as well. The scope of this work is vast, covering clowns and tricksters from the ancient world to the present and including some references to cultures that no longer exist as well as material from current popular culture. As the introduction states: 'This volume is meant as a general introduction to both the characters and the people who see the world through their eyes.' It succeeds admirably."

For an even broader perspective on the trickster spirit, there's Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World (1998), which I am currently reading. Hyde is also the author of The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, and has been praised to the skies by David Foster Wallace as "one of our true superstars of non-fiction." Hyde's real subject is "trickster consciousness,'' which he traces across a broad spectrum, from dozens of folklore myths through the work of such modern artists as Marcel Duchamp, Allen Ginsberg, and Maxine Hong Kingston.


The Feast of Fools
The title of the chapter, "Fools, Natural & Artificial," hearkens back to the middle ages and points to the distinction (or confusion) between those performers who acted the role of the fool for fun and profit, and those who were kept on by the rich and powerful, who found their very real physical and mental deformities amusing.


While this practice seems to have somewhat died out, I would take this opportunity to draw your attention to a NYC-based theatre company I'm fond of that has done a lot of exploration based on the Feast of Fools and the Fool's Mass. They are Dzieci Theatre, whose roots are in the teachings of Jerzy Grotowski, but whose explorations have included not only the fool's mass, but burlesque and circus as well. I want to cover more of their work at a later date, but meanwhile here's a pdf of a full-length article about their work from Ecumenica:

dzieciecumenica

If you're in the New York area, be sure to check out one of the December 2009 performances of their Fool's Mass, which are listed here.





Jesters
The medieval jester who, like Lear's fool, could speak truth to power has no doubt been romanticized. I suspect it was not all that common, and that many a "jester" had to shut up or at least tone down their criticism to keep their head attached to their neck. Even in our day and age, freedom of speech is not all it's made out to be, given the control of the media usually exercised by the rich and powerful inisde or outside the government. That being said, here are two modern examples of comics taking on the powers that be...

Will Rogers
The political humor of Will Rogers (1879–1935) seems pretty tame today, yet in his heyday as a star of film and the vaudeville stage, he was unique in his folksy ability to say some pretty nasty things about politicians without having everyone hate him; kind of a lovable Bill Maher. Here's a clip of Lance Brown as Will Rogers:




Stephen Colbert
For me, the most significant moment in modern comedy was Stephen Colbert tearing apart George W. Bush to his face at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. The character he plays on The Colbert Show is very much a jester, as he pretends to espouse a set of views while ripping them to shreds through exaggeration and the recital of inconvenient facts. When I saw the show being taped live, Colbert chatted with the audience beforehand and wanted to make sure they really understood that he was playing a character. (Hey, you never know who's going to wander in off of West 54th Street.) At the correspondents' dinner he destroys Bush by praising him, kind of like Mark Antony praising Caesar, only a lot funnier. It's in three parts...

Chapter 1— Fools, Natural & Artificial

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Chapter 1 from my book, Clowns: A Panoramic History
It's been my intention to get my entire Clowns book up on the blog, but since this is only the second chapter in six months, it looks like I'm going to have to accelerate the pace. [Click here for chapter five.]

There are two problems. One is that scanning a book (yes, it was written in the pre-digital Dark Ages), then correcting all the scanning errors (OCR is still not perfect), scanning the photos, redoing the layout, etc. is a tedious and time-consuming job. Not much fun either. The other obstacle is my silly desire to take a few small steps towards improving the book, both by correcting any errors and by adding supplementary material.



Okay, enough excuses. Here's a pdf of chapter one, to be followed by a post of supplementary material. And to be followed by chapter two in a lot less than six months!

Clowns—Chapter 1

Chapter 5 — Supplemental Material

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As I said in my previous post, I have a bunch of additional material relevant to each of the twelve chapters of Clowns. This is especially true of Chapter 5, because it focuses on physical comedy. In fact, you could view this entire blog as Chapter 5 supplemental material! In addition, I'm still a huge fan of the Hanlon-Lees and I could overwhelm you with stuff on them, but I'm going to wait for the publication this fall of Mark Codson's book (see below) to dive back into their work.

That being said, a few miscellaneous goodies...

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On pages 5-6, I talk about nineteenth-century performers such as Mazurier and Klischnigg, who did remarkable imitations of monkeys, starring in vehicles such as Jocko, or the Monkey of Brazil. You can get some sense of what that might have been like from this comic turn by Buster Keaton in his brilliant short, The Playhouse (1921).




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Baudelaire on clowns: the Vertigo of Hyperbole

When Tom Mathews' English pantomime troupe visited Paris in 1853, one of the spectators was the French poet, Charles Baudelaire. Despite his well-known interest in the macabre and the grotesque, Baudelaire was somewhat taken aback by the British clown, the "English Pierrot."


I shall long remember the first English pantomime that I saw. . . It seemed to me that the distinguishing characteristic of this genre of comedy was violence. . . . The English Pierrot was by no means this character pale as the moon, mysterious as silence, supple and mute as the serpent, lean and long as a pole, to which we were accustomed by Deburau. The English Pierrot comes in like a whirlwind, falls like a bale, and when he laughs he makes the room shake; his laughter sounds like joyful thunder. He is a short, thick fellow, who has increased his bulk by a costume filled with ribbons. On his whitened face he has crudely plastered — without gradation or transition — two enormous slabs of pure red. His mouth is made longer by a simulated prolongation of the lips in the form of two carmine strokes, so that when he laughs his mouth seems to open from ear to ear. . . . His moral nature is basically the same as that of the Pierrot we know: insouciance and neutrality, leading to the realization of all the rapacious and gluttonous desires, to the detriment sometimes of Harlequin, and sometimes of Cassandre or Léandre. But where Deburau thrust in the point of his finger so that he might afterwards lick it, the clown thrusts in both hands and both feet, and this may express all that he does: his is the vertigo of hyperbole. This English Pierrot passes by a woman who is washing her doorstep: after emptying her pockets, he seeks to cram into his own the sponge, the broom, the soap, and even the water.... Because of the peculiar talent of the English actors for hyperbole, all these monstrous farces take on a strangely gripping reality.

— De L'Essence du Rire
(my translation)

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In the book, I described The Duel Between Two Clowns, a clown act between Boswell and one of the Price Brothers (apparently William) involving an attempted two-high, a ringmaster, a duel, and some quick change. Amazingly there is an actual transcript of this routine from the 1840s in Entrées Clownesques, a collection of clown texts compiled by the great French circus historian, Tristan Rémy. I have no idea what the original source for this document is. Rémy's book was translated into English by Bernard Sahlins as Clown Scenes (Chicago: Dee, 1997). Unfortunately, for some reason he only includes 48 out of the 60 entrées contained in the original, and Le Duel Entre Deux Clowns ain't one of them. Thanks, Bernie, for forcing me back into the highly lucrative clown entrée translation business!

Here it is, hot off the press. Please use your imagination to see beyond the dialogue and picture the act performed by two very strong clowns.

[Forthcoming!]

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Another link between 19th-century pantomime and early film: First here's a poster of the train wreck from Le Voyage en Suisse (1879):




And now here's a shot from the 1904 Georges Méliès film, The Impossible Voyage, courtesy of the Library of Congress.



Coincidence? I think not.

Méliès was, as many of you probably already know, a stage magician who became a pioneer of special effects in early film. And while we're on the subject, the connections between film effects and circus-style performance is the subject of an intriguing blog that you might want to check out: Circo Méliès.





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And in my first On the Shoulders of Giants installment, I reinforce the obvious connection between the Byrne Brothers' Eight Bells and Buster Keaton's Neighbors by showing the Keaton clip that brings the poster to life (and then some).

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Mistakes? What mistakes?

Probably plenty; here's one.... Mark Codson, whose excellent dissertation on the Hanlons will be published this fall, pointed out that I persisted in translating the title of Le Voyage en Suisse into English, when in fact the show toured to England and the United States with the original French title. I was probably thrown off by a few bi-lingual posters and by a previous commentator or two who also referred to it as A Trip to Switzerland. The correction has been made, so thank you Mark. If anyone has additional corrections, just let me know.
UPDATE (11-17-09): Mark's book is now slated for publication on February 2, 2010. You can order it here.

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UPDATE (11-17-09): You can see a version of Auriol's bottle-walking act in Cirkus Cirkör's production, Inside Out. Read all about in in this post.

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So what's missing?

It's the second longest chapter in the book, and one of my favorites, but it has at least one glaring omission, the work of American pantomime clown George L. Fox. Yes, I do mention him, but that's about it. He was wildly popular and a colorful character (he went insane), but I think at the time it was hard to find all that much about his actual performing. Or perhaps I just ran out of time.

A few years later, when Bill Irwin was first considering doing a show based on Fox's life, I helped him out with some additional research, including uncovering some original pantomime scripts. It was not until 1999 that Laurence Senelick's excellent study appeared: The Age & Stage of George L. Fox, 1825-1877. Armed with this thorough research, Bill finally did his show, Mr. Fox: A Rumination in 2004 as part of his season of work for the Signature Theatre.

A note on Clowns: A Panoramic History

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Finally I get to answer all those questions I've been getting for over 30 years!

If Clowns was published back in 1976, aren't you like 100 years old by now??
I was young then, now I'm 60 (but I still do triathlons).

Why isn't it still in print?
Because my publisher, Hawthorn Books, got bought by Dutton who got swallowed up by Elsevier and, back in those pre-Amazon days, a global conglomerate like Elsevier had no reason to keep a niche book in print if bookstores were no longer stocking it. Counting the hardcover and the paperback, it sold nearly 20,000 copies (no, I didn't get rich), but at a certain point the Law of Diminishing Returns kicks in.

Can you sell me a copy?
Nope. I only have three hardcovers and one paperback to my name, and they're all falling apart, which is kind of strange since it's not my favorite reading material. When I prepared chapter five for this blog (see previous post), it was the first time I'd read it since I wrote it.

Couldn't you have gotten it reprinted by some university press or small publishing house?
Maybe, but no one ever made me an offer I couldn't refuse, and I never had the time to pursue it. Life gets busy, life gets complicated, you develop other interests, you have other matters you have to deal with. Furthermore, I would have wanted to improve it rather than just do a straight reprint, and that meant work I didn't have time for.

What kind of improvements?
First, correcting mistakes. Yes, I wrote the book under a deadline in little more than a year's time, so there's stuff to fix. Furthermore, there are sections I would expand upon, and of course plenty has happened in the clown world since 1975.

So why are you suddenly doing this blog?
Because I'm entering a full-year sabbatical from my teaching job at Bloomfield College. Because I did a lot of work toward a physical comedy book that I never had time to finish. Because I'm still a big fan.

Will we see more chapters from the Clowns book?
Well... no promises, but the plan is to put them all online as pdfs, suitable for printing. It is a lot of work: proofreading the OCR text, scanning pictures, redoing the layout, fixing mistakes. I also want to offer supplemental material on each chapter; I have a ton. For example, there was a 100-page appendix to the book — all sorts of scripts and related documents — that got as far as galley proof stage but then never got printed because Hawthorn realized it would just cost them $ without boosting sales.

And then will you reprint the book?
Ideally, yes, but again no promises. It's more likely to happen if the blog process helps me improve the product, which is why I welcome your corrections, comments, and suggestions.

And since this is a blog and I'm supposed to provide a lot of visual elements so you don't get bored by too much reading (God forbid!), here's a pic of what the original Clowns wraparound cover looked like before they opted for the Otto Griebling cover you see above.

Chapter 5 — Knockabouts & Cascadeurs

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Chapter 5 from my book, Clowns: A Panoramic History
One more background piece. This chapter from my 1976 history of clowns dealt in detail with the development of physical comedy in the nineteenth century and, ultimately, its influence on American silent film comedy. Good stuff!

[The usual Scribd note: click on icon in upper-right corner to view document full-screen; click again on same icon to return to blog.]

Chapter 5