Ho! Ho! Ho! — A (Baker's) Dozen of Santa's Favorite Physical Comedy Acts

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Your 3 Santas: Hovey Burgess (left), Mr. Clown (center), and yours truly

Here's a Winter Solstice-Chanukah-Christmas-Kwanza-New Year's present for you, a compilation of Santa's favorite physical comedy acts. This year you're being gifted self-contained acts, not physical comedy that's part of a narrative, which is why there are no movie clips from Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd, and the rest of the gang in your stocking. Sure, some of these 13 acts are from movies, but they were just snuck in there like whiskey in the eggnog to punch things up.

So off we go, in no particular order. Happier holidays!


Larraine & Rognan
Her name is often listed as "Lorraine" but her actual name was Jean Larraine. Either way, she's fabulous. If you've never heard of them, that's because their career ended tragically in an airplane crash that killed him and left her with injuries too severe to continue dancing. You can read more about them in this previous blog post.




Walter Dare Wahl & Emmet Oldfield
I love the movement imagination of these guys. So inventive!



Donald O'Connor:  Make 'em Laugh
You could make a case for this being the best physical comedy act ever. It's got everything but the kitchen sink. I wrote a lot more about it here.




The Mathurins
HIgh-speed, high-caliber comedy acrobatics (even if the host says "it looks easy"). Not big on character, but boy do you get your money's worth!




George Carl
There are many versions of this amazing act available online, and I'm sure you've all seen at least one. Still, Santa would be remiss to leave him off the list.



Charlie Rivel:  Comedy Trapeze
The legendary Catalonian clown could do it all. This is from the movie, Acrobat-Oh!




Red Skelton:  Guzzler's Gin ("Smooth!")
Perhaps the classic drunk act. For more on Red Skelton, see my previous post.




Dick Van Dyke & Rose Marie: Mary's Drunk Uncle
I came across this piece since I wrote this post and this post about Van Dyke. As with Jean Lorraine, what I absolutely love here is Van Dyke's back-and-forth between two states of being.




Beijing Opera: The Fight in the Dark
This one goes back centuries, but it's a masterpiece of physical dexterity. This is the tradition Jackie Chan came from, and it's easy to see the connections. Fifteen minutes long, and it's not all comedy, but it's great.




The Wiere Brothers
A recent discovery, which you can read all about here, and see lots more videos.




Lupino Lane with Lillian Roth (The Love Parade, 1929)
Lupino Lane was one of the great silent film comedians, although his characters never registered as strongly as those of Keaton or Chaplin. He was, however, every bit their match as a physical comedian. A member of the legendary Lupino family, with theatre lineage dating back to the pantomime days of Joseph Grimaldi, he was a superb dancer and acrobat. As it turned out, he could also sing and act well enough to survive the transition to sound. Lubitsch's Love Parade, starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette McDonald, was one of the first good movie musicals, and it signaled Lane's new career direction. Shortly thereafter he left Hollywood and returned to London, where he remained a star on stage and screen for decades. Lots more on Lane here and here.




The Jovers (1980)
Here's proof that you don't have to be skinny and you don't have to have 15 tricks in a row to do good physical comedy. (Not that there's anything wrong with that!)



Alrighty then, that's twelve, one for each day of Christmas, but let's make this a baker's dozen in honor of all the people who never bake the rest of the year but are churning out cookies for Santa while we lazily sit around watching these videos.

Wilson & Keppel
Long before Steve Martin's King Tut, there was this sublimely silly sand dance performed by Jack Wilson, born in Liverpool in 1894, and Joe Keppel, born in Ireland a year later. Wilson and Keppel first performed together in New York in March 1919 as a comedy acrobatic and tap dancing act in vaudeville, and continued working together until 1963. Yep, that's 44 years together.



Ho! Ho! Ho! indeed.

Dick Van Dyke at 89

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If you're looking for someone to make your music video a hit, Dick Van Dyke's your man. Eighty-nine years young. Inspiring!

Dick Van Dyke: My Lucky Life

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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:


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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!

Dick Van Dyke on Slapstick

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Had lunch today in Paris with Caroline Simonds, who is doing wonderful things with clown care in the city's hospitals (and as far away as Brazil) through her work with Le Rire Médecin. Caroline turned me on to this Dick Van Dyke clip about slapstick comedy, which I somehow never saw before. Not sure of the original context, but I think you'll like.....

Update (12-17-09): Thanks to Laura Fernandez for alerting me to the fact that the original YouTube clip is no longer there. I tracked down the episode (finale of season 1) and here's the clip, but with the scene before it as well, so now we do in fact have the original context. Come to think of it, the context of physical comedy is what this blog is all about, so this blip turns out to be a good thing! One step back, two steps forward...



You can watch the entire episode (with new commercials) on Hulu by clicking here or without commercials on Netflix Instant Play (if you're a member).

Update:
See a new post on Dick Van Dyke here.