On the Shoulders of Giants: The Oblivious Gag (or, Channeling Harold Lloyd)

[post 260]


Installment #2

Picasso once said, "good artists borrow, great artists steal."

No he didn't. Or if he did, he probably stole it from T.S. Elliot, who supposedly said the same thing about poets.


Supposedly, because what he really wrote was: "One of the surest tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion."

Ditto physical comedians. Depending on how you look at it, they either avail themselves of a time-honored tradition of gags and techniques — or they "steal" like crazy. As Joe Killian and I used to joke about a bit we liked: "Consider it stolen!"

But as the two Toms (Stearns and Leabhart) said, it tain't what ya do, it's da way dat ya do it. Wit dat in mind, we get to have a little fun standing on the shoulders of that physical comedy giant, Harold Lloyd.... and in this case those shoulders are high off the ground.

While many of the gags seen in silent film comedy can be traced to the variety stage, taking a movie camera outdoors and letting it follow the action opened up new possibilities, the car chase being an obvious example. But the camera could also track vertically, taking advantage of that era's skyscraper boom to create thrills formerly reserved to displays of high-wire walking in the town square.

[ASIDE #1: Native Americans, specifically Mohawks, were used in large numbers in the building of the early skyscrapers. They gained a reputation for "walking iron" and were credited with superior balance and no fear of heights. Likewise, my friend Pat Judd, who like me has a bit of Cherokee blood, comments "let's hear it for my Cherokee / Choctaw ancestors who stood on top of the Mackinac Bridge arches when no one else wanted to go up there to finish that expansion project!" In more modern times, Mohawks were heavily involved in the construction of the World Trade Center. Go here and here and here for more on this cultural phenomenon and listen to this NPR All Things Considered report.]

[ASIDE #2:  Georges Mélies did a 74-second rooftop action film more than two decades earlier in 1897, Sur les Toits (On the Roof), but it's shot on a stage set and is pretty lame. Likewise Alice Guy's rooftop chase, Les Cambrioleurs (The Burglars) from 1898.]

Camera angles and other tricks ensured that enough of these stunts were less dangerous than they seemed. Note, for example, the absence of high-angle shots that would reveal any safety precautions. All this made possible a whole new genre of thrill comedy, with Harold Lloyd climbing to and dangling from that clock in Safety Last being the most iconic example. But this piece is not about Safety Last, but rather another Lloyd skyscraper sequence — and above all his refinement of what I am hereby dubbing the "oblivious gag."

Left: Lloyd in Safety Last;
Right: Safety mattress for Lloyd's Feet First 

First, however, a few popular photographs showing the public's fascination with this dangerous new world being created in the skies above them.

The Waldorf (1930)

You've probably seen this well-known Lunch Atop A Skyscraper by Charles Ebbets, taken in 1932:

But this Smithsonian exhibit on the Mohawk says the year is 1928 and that the photo was taken by Lewis Hine. Hmm... anyway, the caption does identify several Mohawk ironworkers.

And a current photo from the One World Trade Center construction:

Back in the day, they didn't just pose for pictures up there, they did entire acrobatic acts. Here's a video of the same guys from the photo above:



Even more spectacular is this clip of the vaudeville acrobat Joseph Späh, who performed his daredevil drunk act under the name of "Ben Dova" (get it?). This is from 1933, a bit after Lloyd's heyday, but I suspect Späh was not the first to be doing stunts like this.

Lloyd didn't invent aerial movie thrills, but he had the foresight to see the comic potential and the talent to take advantage of it. As one Lloyd title card reads, "In a Certain City, each crowded skyscraper holds a budding romance." An early example of this is in High and Dizzy, his 1920 short. [Note that this is a decade before the above photos.] Harold, a new doctor in love with a new sleepwalking patient, somehow manages to find himself on the same hotel ledge as her. At this point in the story, she has already taken one oblivious stroll on the ledge.

Notice that the sleepwalking mindset even carries over to Harold, who is so concerned with the girl that he is out the window and walking along the ledge before he realizes where he is and can even register fear. He continues this theme a year later in Never Weaken, his last short film and favorite 3-reeler. In this one, Harold has of course gotten his facts wrong, mistakenly assuming he's lost the love of his life to a tall, handsome stranger. Suicide is the only option. Blindfolded, he soon finds himself skywalking without realizing it, and again gets his facts wrong, thinking he's in heaven.

Lloyd sure knew how to get the most out of a gag. I love that the oblivious theme is reprised at the end of the sequence, with him on the ground, frightened out of his mind.

If this skywalking sequence looks familiar to you, that's because it's been replicated many times, with and without the "oblivious" aspect. An early case in point is from Liberty (1929), a late silent film by Laurel & Hardy. This is not bad, but they don't do anything new with it, so please don't feel obligated to watch all 11 minutes. I just include it to make my point!

Not surprisingly, this comic business shows up in numerous cartoons — much easier to draw than to stage! — but of course the thrill is not quite the same. First up is A Dream Walking, a Popeye cartoon from 1934.



And then there's this sequence from Bugs Bunny's Homeless Hare (1950).

A character who was totally unmindful became the trademark of Mr. Magoo (voiced by Jim Backus), star of animated movies and a long-running tv show. Near-sighted in the extreme, Magoo stumbles through a hostile environment unaware of the perils he is skirting. The opening titles to his Saturday morning tv series capture this m.o. pretty well, and include the kind of high-elevation gags popularized by Lloyd:



Babies are also liable to be unaware of grave dangers, thus Tot Watchers, a Tom & Jerry cartoon in which our heroes save a baby from — you guessed it — yet another construction site.



And we come full circle, from cartoon back to live action, with the otherwise forgettable Baby's Day Out (1994), in which the incompetent bad guys learn that kidnapping is not as easy as it's cracked up to be. Again with the construction site!

The Oblivious Gag
So we actually have two things going on here. One is simply the thrill comedy of the skyscraper, interesting enough in its own right. But more significant because it's more useful to your average feet-on-the-ground comedy creator is this particular genre of gag that could take place anywhere and only depends on our comic hero being spectacularly unaware and even more spectacularly lucky. And for my money, it's usually funnier if the unawareness is more of a (comic) character flaw than being simply caused by sleepwalking or blindness.

While your classic gag structure relies on some initial unawareness on the character's part, he or she usually pays the price and we get to see their reaction to the outcome. We see the banana peel, they don't. They slip, they fall, they react, we laugh. Conventional wisdom has it that this is funnier if the character is wearing a top hat, or at least acting haughty, because the greater the assumed dignity, the more satisfying the fall.

With the oblivious gag, there is no price to pay and the joke is that such characters have no idea how close they have come to harm. With no payoff required, structurally it's more likely to be a running gag rather than a three-parter.

Sometimes they eventually learn — cue the double-take — but sometimes they are never the wiser. Peter Handke wrote a play called The Ride Across Lake Constance and, if memory serves, the title references a folk expression meaning "you just escaped great danger without even knowing it." A man walks across frozen Lake Constance. When he successfully reaches the other side he is informed that the ice is too thin to support human weight. He immediately dies of a heart attack. Thus the saying, "you took a ride across Lake Constance."

Another expression tells us it's better to be lucky than good, and that's certainly true of our old friend Harold Lloyd in the aptly titled Why Worry? (1923). A hypochondriac millionaire, he is seeking peace and quiet in what he thinks is a quaint island paradise, only to find himself in the middle of a revolution — not that he notices:

Buster Keaton's The General (1926) features an army reject who becomes a war hero through a combination of courage, resourcefulness, and plain luck. The intertwining of several oblivious gags over the course of the movie makes the sum greater than the parts and shows why Keaton's storytelling so often rose to the level of art. Here's a short example in which Keaton, infiltrating behind enemy lines, is so busy with firewood that he fails to notice two entire armies passing by. If you're going to be oblivious, might as well go big with it!

And here his inability to get control over his pesky sword pays off big time:



In some of these scenarios, we do eventually get to see the character's reaction to a rather perplexing reality. In another short sequence from The General, Keaton is trying to derail a box car that is impeding his progress. His first reaction comes when he discovers that it has somehow gotten back on the track; his second, when it magically disappears. Both are to be savored!

In more recent times, the Peter Sellers character of Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther movies solves every crime thanks to incredible luck and despite being oblivious to pretty much everything going on around him. In this selection from A Shot in the Dark (1964), our inspector's charmed life is not even mildly ruffled by multiple assassination attempts. [Spoiler Alert: the would-be assassin turns out to be his boss, Chief Inspector Dreyfus, seen berating him at the end.]

And of course we love Clouseau and root for him no matter what!



Thanks to Ben Model, Drew Richardson, Riley Kellogg, and Jeff Seal for their suggestions for this article.

Not Exactly Physical Comedy: Kinetic Typography

[post 022]

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."

On the Shoulders of Giants — From the 2-High to the 1200-High

[post 008]

Installment #1

19th-Century Pantomime meets
21st-Century CGI

I thought it would be cute to begin a series entitled "On the Shoulders of Giants" by talking literally about standing on shoulders, what is commonly referred to as the "2-high." Pile on more bodies, perhaps flying off a teeterboard, and you get a 3-high, a 4-high, etc., but I sure am the wrong person to ask about this. I was pretty good at your basic 2-high, but that was it. I can still see Fred Garbo, somersaulting at me off a teeterboard some thirty years ago in a Gregory Fedin – Nina Krasavina circus class in Hoboken, NJ. Garbo was wearing a mechanic, maybe even coming in at reduced speed, probably weighed all of 135 pounds, but all I wanted to do was duck. I think he landed on my shoulders once or twice, and I managed to grab him, sortakinda, but I doubt I actually saw much of this.

Update: See post 013 for some fantabuloso partner acrobatics from 1902-03 by the Julians Acrobats, with a lot of two-high variations.

The proper technique for the 2-high has been laid out quite thoroughly in Circus Techniques (pp. 68-72) by Hovey Burgess. [Full disclosure: I was an editor on this book, and Hovey was my first understander back in my NYU days, back when the Delaware Indians still ruled Manhattan.]

And yes, the 2-high is indeed executed by performers known as the understander and the topmounter. Karen Gersch, a skilled understander herself who once bravely had me on her shoulders as the middleman in a 3-high, remarked that understander was one of her favorite words in the English language because of its double meaning. Likewise, Corky Plunkett, father and understander in a family acrobatic troupe that was featured in a couple of circuses I was in, liked to say that "in acrobatics, you put the brains on the bottom of the pile." This may not be what Shakespeare had in mind when he penned this bit of repartee for Two Gentlemen of Verona, but I've always liked to pretend it was:

SPEED: Why, then, how stands the matter with them?

LAUNCE: Marry, thus: when it stands well with him, it
stands well with her.

SPEED: What an ass art thou! I understand thee not.

LAUNCE: What a block art thou, that thou canst not! My
staff understands me.

SPEED: What thou sayest?

LAUNCE: Ay, and what I do too: look thee, I'll but lean,
and my staff understands me.

SPEED: It stands under thee, indeed.

LAUNCE: Why, stand-under and under-stand is all one.

___________________

So let's see where the laughs might come from with a 2- or 3-high — or for that matter a 31-high. I see two kinds of possibilities, because it seems to me that it might be useful to divide physical comedy into two categories. Now don’t you go frettin’ that I’m getting all intellectual on you here. Hey, I made it through grad school without understanding semiotics (though I did teach it once). But there are two types, and yes, this will be on the exam. (TOTAL DIGRESSION: one of my favorite quotes is “The world is divided into two kinds of people: those who believe the world is divided into two kinds of people, and those who don’t.”)

Did I mention there are two types of physical comedy? One is presentational, and in this case would take the form of comedy acrobatics, though of course there's also comedy juggling, comedy magic, etc.. The performers present (attempt) an act of skill in the here and now, but get laughs along the way, usually through a series of mishaps that are eventually overcome. The other approach uses physical comedy within a storytelling structure, featuring characters in a real-life situation. The characters and the situation are often exaggerated, but there is a narrative that does not take place in the here and now. Just think of your typical silent film comedy. As you will find, I am a big fan of both (you want me in your audience) but my deepest interest lies in the use of physical comedy within a narrative framework. What can I say? I like stories, I like content and context, and I like what physical comedy can say about the life we live. You don't have to share this bias... just letting you know.

Comedy Acrobatics & the 2-High
Most of the comedy acrobatics I've seen centering around the 2-high involves the topmounter's clumsiness in getting up there, slipping and falling on the way, and causing the understander to grimace pretty much non-stop. If the topmounter is female and wearing a dress, she might even falter and end up with the understander's head under her dress. It's been known to happen. In public.

I don't have the perfect comedy acrobatic clip for you, but here are a few brief seconds of such clumsiness from a routine by two unnamed acrobats on the old Colgate Comedy Hour. [Anyone know who they are?] Notice the foot on the face.






In The Playhouse, Buster Keaton's spoof of Vaudeville, a Zouave acrobatic act has to be replaced at the last moment by some ditch diggers from down the block, with the inevitable clumsiness.





The "broken column" dismount from the 2- or 3-high, as seen in this drawing from Georges Strehly's 1903 classic, L'Acrobatie et les Acrobates, also usually gets a laugh. I'm guessing the laughter comes from the relief of tension, but you might have to ask Freud to be sure. The whole column tilts forward, staying in a straight line until the last split-second, when they all bail out into some variation of a forward roll. This can be done with two people but is much more visually arresting with three. I even saw three Taiwanese women acrobats go directly from a 3-high into a 3-person peanut roll and then roll backwards right back up into a 3-high.
Wow! indeed.
[Note: a peanut roll is what the "Colgate" acrobats do at the end of that video above.]

Just to prove I can still translate French, this is what Strehly wrote about it:
One of the most original and unexpected moves is the broken column. The performers, balanced in a 3-high, let themselves fall forward and, at the moment when they are about to hit the ground, detach themselves from one another and complete the fall with a saut de nuque.

And what exactly is a saut de nuque? Translated literally it's a neck dive, and is explained by Strehly as follows:

The saut de nuque, uniquely reserved for clowns, at first resembles the saut de lion, but instead of having the arms in front of the body, they are left glued to the body and, at the moment when it seems that the head is about to smash into the ground, the chin is brought to the chest so that it is the neck or, to be more precise, the muscles in the cervical region that break the fall.

Here's a video clip of the acrobatic team Quatour Stomp doing a broken column from a 2-high, atop a table no less, though with a fairly early break and with a conventional forward roll.




And Strehly adds a variation I'd never heard of:

One increases the difficulty, but not the effect, of this cascade by falling backwards. At the moment when it seems that the three performers are about to land flat on their backs, they disengage from one another, execute a half-pirouette, place their hands en parade, and complete the movement with a saut de nuque.

I don't know, I've never seen this done, but I'm betting it would increase the effect for me big time. [And no, I'm not positive what en parade means, though I could guess. Neither Harrap's nor the internet are any help, but I'd be happy to hear from any of the 90 million francophones out there, most of whom I assume read this blog.]

Update:
a poster of the Trevally Acrobats (1907-8):



Storytelling
If you're telling a story and one character is standing on another's shoulders, there's got to be a reason. You can't just stand there and shout "Ta-Da!" Maybe you're trying to reach somewhere you shouldn't be. If so, you might need to make a quick escape. The classic example of this is from Buster Keaton's 1920 silent short, Neighbors. Keaton is in love with the girl next door but can't marry her because the families are arch enemies, so elopement is the only answer. Unlike Romeo and Juliet, this one has a happy ending thanks to some, er, understanding friends.



Even given that the bride-to-be topmounter is replaced by a dummy in most of the shots, the dexterity with which the three-high disassembles and reunites to make its way through the neighborhood obstacle course is amazing and transforms what is usually a static stunt into a refreshingly original chase scene. Skill, story, and comedy merge perfectly.

Keaton was an incredibly creative comedian and filmmaker, so it would not be surprising for him to have concocted all this on his own, but he was also a Vaudeville veteran who had not only performed with his family's knockabout troupe since the age of three, but had no doubt worked on the same bill with hundreds of other physical performers along the way. So I was not all that surprised to come across this poster of the Byrne Brothers' Eight Bells while doing research for my Clowns book.






Notice the sneaky three-high off to the left, carrying off a trunk, not to mention the ladder pivoting on the fence, which also is a major physical gag in Neighbors. Eight Bells was performed by the Byrne Brothers from 1890 to 1914, when it was replaced by a similar piece, An Aerial Honeymoon. Keaton had begun performing in Vaudeville before the turn of the century, so I'd say the similarities are hardly coincidental.


Human Pyramids in a CGI World
Fast forward to the 21st century (aka, now), where big budgets and CGI (computer-generated imagery) have resulted in some amazing television commercials that mine the physical comedy tradition to hawk such essentials as $100 sneakers and watered-down beer. But give credit where credit is due: some of these spots are highly creative and quite funny, though little or no physical skill may be involved. Here's Kevin Garnett, in real life an immensely talented basketball player, in the Adidas "Carry" ad, backed up by Etta James singing "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands." The visual effects are by Method Studios (Santa Monica, Ca.).





And you thought I was joking about a 31-high! [Okay, 31 is an approximation, but you get the idea.]

Viewed as physical comedy, this commercial raises two obvious questions: is it physical and is it comedy?

You are of course right in assuming that Kevin Garnett did not walk around town with all those people on his back. Instead, he wore a rig that was used to collect position data for motion tracking so that performers hanging from a rig in a green screen studio could be composited into the shot. You can get a more thorough explanation from artist Andrew Bell, but meanwhile here are some pics showing how Street Shot w/ Rig + Greenscreen Shot = Final Composite:















There's some physical work here — the guy diving off the building is probably a stunt man — but otherwise it's pretty much an illusion. If this gets your dander up about truth and live vs. digital performance, I'm glad because I have every intention of fomenting controversy on this issue in later posts! Still, because this pyramid is such an obvious exaggeration, it doesn't bother me as much as other faked physicality. It's all done with a wink. And the joke itself isn't bad, the gag of repetition leading to the "impossible" pyramid, nicely contrasting with the nonchalance of Garnett. I admit to liking it.


Here's another video snippet of a wild human pyramid (this one dances!). I don't even know what this is from, but you'll find it on the Method Studios demo reel.






Okay, a 31-high is fine and all, but the Miller Lite "Break from the Crowd" commercial creates a 1200-body human pyramid that is a rampaging monster of conformity. (And you thought I was kidding about a 1200-high!) So what if 99.9% of the bodies aren't real?



Yep, that was also done by Method Studios under the direction of Alex Frisch; they seem to have a thing about pyramids. Effects like these are accomplished with specialized crowd-creation AI software such as Massive.

Here are some pics showing how they put together the shot at the end that combines these CGI bodies with a few real humans.


































































For those of you out there with a serious interest in visual effects, you can learn more about how this was done from an interview with Frisch at fxguideTV: there's a high-bandwidth version and a low-bandwidth version. The discussion of this commercial starts at the 3–minute mark.

It looks like even less actual physicality went into the making of this one, but the visual idea of the monster pyramid representing the conformity of the crowd is a striking one, and our hero's escape from it funny enough. Too bad it wasn't for a better brand of beer.



Human Pyramids: Sacred Cultural Tradition?
Widen the base of your three-high and you can add a lot more bodies, creating what's called a human pyramid because of its inverted-V shape. We all did these in high school — you can probably still feel those knees in your shoulder blades — and YouTube is full of such stunts. They are supposed to teach teamwork, and with all those understanders there should be one huge heap of understanding.

In Catalonia (Spain), this is carried several steps further — oops, I mean higher — by the castell folk tradition dating back several centuries. "Castle-building" competitions pit large teams (650 members, all living, breathing sentient beings) against one another. One pyramid goes ten stories high and, according to this video, has a base of 400. Talk about community building!






And Now It's Silly Time:
A Three-High in Outer Space
Eat your heart out, earthbound Catalans! This brief segment from Howard Smith's odd documentary film Gizmo shows astronauts on the Skylab space station taking advantage of weightlessness to do a three high at the very beginning of the clip and, later on, a triple-decker, no-hands push-up.




__________________________________

As Sir Isaac Newton once said, "Th, th, that's all folks." Comments and additions welcome!

On the Shoulder of Giants — Introduction to a Series

[post 007]

" If I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
— Sir Isaac Newton (1676)

It's ironic that Newton's famously modest observation was itself plagiarized from his predecessors. Our good friend Wikipedia traces it back to at least the 12th century. But that's the whole point: there's nothing new under the sun, and if a towering scientific genius like Newton could give credit where credit's due, so should we mere mortals. And besides, the historian in me enjoys making all kinds of connections between our vintage sepia past and our cutting-edge RGB present.

The result is this series, which will be a regular feature of the blog, an exploration of the multiple reincarnations of various physical comedy skills, gags, and concepts. There will be no attempt to chart every manifestation of an idea — I'm not that obsessive and I don't have that kind of time — but I hope there will be enough examples to keep you and Sir Isaac happy. If you have more, just send them in.

Before I get into my first installment, take a look at "Great Artists Steal," an interesting montage of Buster Keaton and Jackie Chan clips that was posted to YouTube a few months back. The picture quality ain't great but it does a good job of showing one of the traditions Chan draws upon. Since many of Chan's fans have probably never even heard of Buster Keaton (most of my college students haven't), this in itself is a service. It doesn't take anything away from Jackie Chan, who is brilliant in his own right, but shows that he is also smart enough to take inspiration from past artists.





So that's the general idea. Just go to the next post for my first installment...