I started this blog in May, 2009 and nine years and 441 posts later I decided to take a little break. Not out of boredom or any feeling that enough was enough, but simply because I had too many other projects and I seemed incapable of writing quick posts. Every idea, no matter how simple it initially appeared, inevitably took me down some fascinating rabbit hole of research, where other examples and insights kept popping up. Which is great for a blogopedia, except posts that I fantasized would be knocked off in an hour or so ended up taking up the better part of a day or two. So I took a short break —for eight years!What happened? Well, those other projects took over and multiplied, and then covid hit, and I ended up in Greenwood Lake, NY, building a circus studio with a few clown-carpenter buddies. (But that’s another story.) But my mind and curiosity never shut down. I would constantly jot down ideas for new posts. Finally, almost a year ago (8-29-25) I relaunched the blog, having great fun putting together 22 new posts before going off to Europe this April to teach and to explore, leaving me with little time to actually finish a post. It was a great 6-week trip, during which many new ideas percolated. Unfortunately, toward the end, in a brief moment of inattention, my backpack was stolen at the railroad station in Cherbourg, and not only did I lose my laptop, I lost a lot of writing I had done, including material for future blog posts. I had been on a roll in terms of writing, but because I am, after all is said and done, An Idiot, most of it was not backed up. Lost, lost, lost. Since then I have been rebuilding six months of my digital life.
On a happier note, this spring I also finally moved ahead on a long-time dream of porting the blog from the free but archaic Google Blogger to the more powerful WordPress platform, which is enabling me to seriously upgrade the design. Not just in terms of visual attractiveness, but for ease of use and enhanced interactivity. I have also begun the tedious task of repairing broken links. It should come as no surprise that since the blog began17 years ago, many links have become dead ends. Web sites, blogs, YouTube videos, pdfs stored on Scribd —so many of them disappear for one reason or another. Wherever possible, links are being restored, and videos and pdfs will be hosted on my domain, where access and downloading will be easy and free.
I used to be a digital media nerd, teaching Quark, Final Cut, Director and several Adobe apps at the college level. At a certain point, however, I realized I couldn't keep up with all the new technology without sacrificing time for creative work, so I drifted away from all that when I retired from college teaching 15 years ago. Rather than attempt to re-educate myself, I was smart to work on the design and implementation of the new site with a professional: Nora Krstulović. Thank you, Nora!
I certainly hope you enjoy the new site! You can reach it by clicking here. [functioning link coming very shortly]
Some upcoming posts: • My Europe Trip (spoiler alert: clown & circus are thriving!) • Austria's amazing Circus & Cheese Farm • My five visits to the Zagreb Clown Festival • The wonders of the Vienna Circus & Clownmuseum • A dialogue with my son Nat Towsen about how the worlds of stand-up comedy and physical comedy differ and how they relate. • A survey of stand-up comedians using physical comedy • Numerous other fun clips proving physical comedy is indeed everywhere! • Politics & Physical comedy: how can we be relevant? • My new favorite dancers: Nils & Bianca • Many more guest posts by experts in the field offering their own unique experiences and insights • A six-part (at least) series on how gag structures work
•Analysis of specific skills and their use, including how-to pointers • My efforts to finally revise my 1976 book Clowns and make the new version widely available • And numerous short physical comedy video clips that come my way that you may not have seen yet.
This is how it works • If you navigate to the old version of this blog on Google's Blogger (physicalcomedy.blogspot.com,) you will soon be redirected to the new blog on Wordpress, but the old blog will continue to be there. However, even if you want to read a very old post, it will be better to read it on the new blog, because I will be doing my blog repair (missing links, etc.) directly there and not back on Blogger.
• All correspondence from me about the blog ,or any promoting of the blog, will from now on refer to the new version.
In other words, much is being gained, nothing lost!
What you can do
This blog has always been free, and always will be. I do not take advertising and I do not earn a cent, despite incurring some expenses along the way. It's a labor of love. But since I started it over 17 years ago, attention spans have shortened, reading in depth has become less common, and history has lost its relevance to many. These are not good things for our world, our culture, or for physical comedy performers. There needs to be a balance between new approaches and a knowledge of what came before and how it functions. I hope to contribute to that, and you can too by joining the discussion and letting your friends know about the blog. Personal recommendations go a long way, and I am asking for yours. Thank you!
"When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford." —Samuel Johnson, 1777
I've always loved London, having first visited there in 1968 and countless times since, and as recently as three months ago. I still fondly recall getting off the plane at Heathrow early one June morning in 1970, going straight to the National Theatre (then at the Old Vic), and getting £5 rush tickets to see Laurence Olivier play Shylock that evening in Merchant of Venice. (I have since learned that Shylock was his last Shakespearean role.) I've been going back to London ever since. I love the (affordable) theatre, the high level of acting and the British wit, I love the history, and of course I love the pubs, and in this century, the cultural diversity, which thankfully equates to better food. My favorite dog lives in London, as does my chess coach.
The Comedy School Visiting is one thing, but I am especially excited that my next visit will be to teach there for the very first time, this May at London's esteemed The Comedy School. The school, created by Keith Palmer MBE in 1998 and still under his directorship, specializes in stand-up comedy but has also run many courses in clowning and mime and all kinds of improvisation. Which is great because I am hoping that the participants will come from a variety of comedy approaches and we can all learn from one another. Instructors from our neck of the comedy woods have included Luke Sorba (improv), Mick Barnfather (clown), and Richard Knight (mime).
Since this is my first time teaching in London, it will only be a two-day (all-day) workshop, but if we get a crowd then next time we would aim for my usual 4-day intensive. The dates are Sunday, May 24th and Monday May 25th, that Monday being a bank holiday. You can read all the details here.
Classes will be next door in the home of BADA (the British- American Drama Academy). Yes, fancier than my usual digs!
Comedians Paradise Podcast A while after this workshop was arranged, I received an email from Marvin McCarthy asking me to appear on his London-based podcast, Comedians Paradise, to discuss physical comedy, which I was happy to accept. Marvin is a stand-up comedian but he is admirably eclectic in both his training, which includes several Philippe Gaulier workshops, and in his choice of guests, many of whom come from the broader clown world, including Mark Gindick, Jeff Raz, Chad Damiani, Iva Peter, Tim Eagle, Lee Delong, Jon Davison, Johnny Melville, Tiffany Riley & Dick Monday, Sue Morrison, Barnaby King, Mariko Iwasa, Rene Bazinet, and Aitor Basauri. And there are even more of them, so check it out!
I was introduced as "The Beast of Physical Comedy." Not quite sure what that means but I have to admit it sounds cool! We talked non-stop for almost two hours but thankfully Marvin edited it down to half that. I also have to admit I have not watched all of it because, frankly, I don't like listening to me talking about myself, but then that's my hang-up. But I do think it was a good discussion, Marvin is a knowledgeable and skilled interviewer, and I've already received excellent feedback on it. Therefore, check it out!
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•I have just learned that there was a 1973 television version of Olivier in Merchant that is streaming for as little as $2.
I'm betting this has happened to you: You find an affordable place to rehearse, perhaps in a neighborhood that you can also afford to live in. Other artists who work large gravitate there. Pretty soon it becomes a pretty interesting neighborhood. More restaurants open up, maybe a couple of art galleries, and before you know it, it's trendy. Everyone wants to live there… and many of them have a lot more money than you do. This of course is not lost on the real estate industry. Rents rise, not just a little, but by tenfold, and before you know it, you and your fellow artists can't afford to live or rent space there so you move to the next neighborhood you can afford, a bit farther off the beaten track, a bit farther from public transportation, a bit seedier, maybe a bit less safe at night. And the process repeats... from Soho to Tribeca to Williamsburg to Bushwick to Ridgewood to small towns along the Hudson River.... change the names for your city, and there you are.Until recently, I lived in Manhattan, not far from where I was born. Although I had been a childhood television actor, for that I did not need rehearsal space. That was provided by CBS or NBC. But when I got heavily into all things clown and circus in my twenties, instead of working for other people, my friends and I were creating and producing our own shows, and it takes space to do that. There is a limit to what you can do in your small NYC apartment! In the mid-70s, Fred Yockers and I had started our clown business, If Every Fool, Inc., soon to grow into an ambitious arts organization. In or around 1979, a few of us decided to get serious, with the idea of pooling our resources and getting our own place. A lot of light industry had moved out of the city, making large industrial spaces suddenly affordable.
143 Chambers Street (Manhattan) I started the search with puppeteer Eric Bass. I remember us looking at large lofts in Williamsburg (Brooklyn, not Virginia), just on the other side of the Williamsburg Bridge. If you are not familiar with New York City geography, that is about as close as you can get to Manhattan without actually being in it, but in those days Brooklyn might as well have been Timbuktu. The lofts were big and the price was right, but we never seriously considered it. Now it is the Gold Coast.
Then one day Eric was walking along Chambers Street in downtown Manhattan. Though not far from Wall Street and all that, the area was still undeveloped, still not on the yuppie radar. Soho ("south of Houston") was already going upscale but the Chambers Street area —about to be popularized by realtors as Tribeca (“triangle below Canal”)— not so much. Taped to the front door of a 19th-century building at 143 Chambers Street was a hand-lettered cardboard sign saying the space was for rent. A phone call was made and Eric and I met with the owner, an older gentleman who had closed up his decades-long business there, Universal Eggs, Butter & Cheese, and was looking to rent out the space. It was spacious indeed: 80% of the ground floor, all of the basement, and all of the sub-basement. The price? $300 a month. Okay, with inflation that's $1,350 a month today, but still..
We were there for seven years and probably never realized how lucky we were. The studio was the spawning ground for many new shows and home to countless workshops, classes, labs, and of course parties! And thanks to the essential work of dozens of volunteers, we launched two influential international clown-theatre festivals on a shoestring budget. Given the space and the affordability, a wonderful clown community grew out of the dust and mold of old egg crates and conveyor belts. Even with our improvements, including eradicating the rat population and bribing the Con Ed inspector to turn on the electricity, it was never a candidate for Architectural Digest, to put it mildly. But as that song from A Chorus Line goes, "it wasn't paradise... it wasn't paradise... but it was home."
Top: covers of programs for 1983 and 1985 festivals. Lower left:This publicity photo by Jim Moore of Fred Yockers and myself for our clown-theatre show, A Beautiful Friendship, was shot just a few blocks away! What is now snazzy Hudson River Park was then just landfill. Lower right:That’s a slightly younger me on the slack wire, rigged between two steel I-beams we had attached to the floor and the ceiling, which was at least 16' high.
Over the years, the original gang of four —Eric, Fred, Peter Hoff, and myself —morphed so that at the end, I was the only one left. My loft partners had become Joe Killian & Liz Reese (who lived there); Mike Seliger; and Catherine Turocy and her New York Baroque Dance Company —still active today! But a lease is a lease and it ended in 1987. And by then Tribeca was highly desirable, and our studio would soon be a restaurant. But by that time I was a father and had, not coincidentally, taken a job teaching full-time at Bloomfield College in New Jersey, as well as two days a week in the theatre program at Juilliard.
At Bloomfield I actually had my own theatre, but no theatre department, and also a large room where we had circus classes. Yes, I created/directed many shows, but with students who ranged from talented, enthusiastic and hardworking to (more likely) those lacking experience and enthusiasm. It's not enough to have the space. You also need the possibility of getting together there with the people you want to get together with!
And I had zero time outside of Bloomfield, Juilliard, and fatherhood. I naively thought I could still do it all, clown-theatre included, but inevitably I was pulled away from active participation in the clown scene. The birth of another son and my wife Susan's illness took me farther away.... for something like 15 years.
Soundance Studio (Williamsburg, Brooklyn) Yes, the same Willliamsburg. Fast forward a couple of decades and I have been lured back to the clown world bit by bit (so to speak) by some old friends who should have known better. In 2011 or so, I was invited by Audrey Crabtree to do a weekend workshop for the new version of the NY Clown-Theatre Festival in now hip but not totally gentrified Williamsburg, and that workshop led to many of the participants wanting to continue working together. Audrey knew of a space to rent by the hour right there in Williamsburg, SounDance Studio on N. 7th Street. The price was right, the space was large, and it was conveniently located two blocks from the L train.
This morphed into the NYC Physical Comedy Lab (fizcom lab), which started as a closed group of eight people. After a promising start, that petered out and led to me working with lab stalwarts Audrey Crabtree and Billy Schultz on No Reservations, again at SounDance. About a year after that, I had an idea for another lab for a larger crowd. In February 2015, if not earlier, Lab version 2.0 was launched, a twice-a-month, 3-hour open lab where anyone with $10 to throw in the hat was welcome. Yes, again at Soundance.
We took turns leading warmups, improvs, and exercises, and teaching a variety of skills that ranged from rope spinning to knife throwing to partner acrobatics to yo-yo to, well, just about anything. Anyone could bring new material to get group feedback, and many did.
Full article on the lab by Ben Robinson in VANISH magazine.
Yes, that's Bindlestiff's Keith Nelson, totally unaware of what I've hurled his way.
Every lab was different, but always a great cross-section of eccentrics.
It was a large space, especially by New York standards, and I was even allowed to store all my physical comedy gear there at no extra cost, which included three trick doors, half a dozen mats, all kinds of juggling equipment, weird props, and weirder costumes. A sizable corner of the room. At that price, I could afford to run the lab and rent the space for myself for three mornings a week, four hours each morning, always biking from my lower Manhattan apartment over the bridge and back, though on Fridays that included an essential detour to buy several pound of smoked salmon at Acme Smoked Fish Friday in Greenpoint, a habit I gratefully picked up from Stanley Allan Sherman.
The lab averaged around ten people per session, but had as many as 17 —though one week only Hilary Chaplain and I showed up. But all in all the lab was a great success, a gathering ground for the clown community, and a place out-of-town performers could come to and immediately make friends. I'll cover some stuff we did there in other posts, but meanwhile check out all the video on the Facebook page, NYC Physical Comedy Lab. The lab continued for more than five years, until covid hit and what we did became risky in a way we could never have imagined.
But how was all this possible? Because SounDance director Vanessa Paige was a true friend of performers, and rented the space for $15 an hour. I believe it was film director Otto Preminger who said, "As usual with artists, the only problem is money."
Falling Coyote Studios (Greenwood Lake, NY)
Clearly I loved having a studio for all the reasons above, but I especially loved having it available 24/7. So when Riley and I, both native Manhattanites, finally started that search for a country escape, building my own studio there was a fantasy that took wings. The more I thought about it, the more it became an essential part of the purchase, meaning the new property would have to have enough space for the studio, and that I'd be able to roll out of bed and be there in a New York minute. In the summer of 2018, Riley and I visited my old clown partner Fred Yockers at his family's home on the San Juan Islands off the NW Washington coast. Over the decades he had added several tools to his belt, one of them being construction. He was more than enthusiastic. He was about to retire from teaching video and volunteered to come east for lengthy stays to help build it. Which was essential, because I had enough money for the construction, but not enough money to pay a team of contractors. Oh yeah, not enough knowledge either, though that's rarely stopped me.
By then we had narrowed our search to Greenwood Lake, which we were familiar with from having visited our late-great clown friend, Jan Greenfield and his wife Gunnel and kids Hannah and Daniel. And it was indeed there that we found our log cabin in the woods, luckily closing on it a couple of weeks before covid hit. That June, Fred made his first of many lengthy work trips from somewhere in the Pacific to somewhere near Greenwood Lake. It took him longer to get to Seattle for the flight than it did to get from Seattle to here.
Jan's clown costume and clown spirit look down on us from up on high
Fred and I naively thought we could build the studio in under a year. Oh boy. But build it we did, though the work spanned closer to three years, seemed endless, and required a brigade of fellow clown/would-be carpenters, too numerous to list here. But at the top of the list is Fred Collins (New Jersey Fred), who joined Fred Yockers (west-coast Fred) and myself as our third partner in constructive folly. Other clowns made frequent contributions, particularly Michael Zerphy (all the way from Vermont) and Adam Auslander. And it was especially gratifying that Gunnel, Daniel, and Hannah Greenfield also pitched in, helping perpetuate a project that Jan had in many ways inspired.
I am very thankful that west-coast Fred made the movie below about building the studio and what's been going on there ever since, because it does a better job than I could possibly do writing about it. Enjoy!
I do like it when visitors see this movie because I think it's important for them to realize that the studio wasn't the result of some rich guy writing a check, but rather was the product of some ridiculously hard work over several years by many clowns —whose average age was well above 70!
The movie shows some of the creative work being done at the studio, but here's a quick summary: • Rehearsals for a variety of shows • Performances, which have included Deborah Kaufmann's Veni Vidi Vici and Michael Zerphy's Bedutzed. • Parties, especially our big June 2025 clown reunion, dubbed Clownmageddon by Judy Gailen. • Work-in-progress 3-day labs, which of course we had to call Labmageddon. These have been wonderful and will get a blog post down the road.
• And last but not least, as a personal workout space for my brain and body!
Clownmageddon (June 2025)
I prefer to think of a performing arts studio as more of a community center than a business, so I don't rent out Falling Coyote. It is available to friends and kindred spirits and you can't give me money. All we ask is some sort of "soft barter," which has ranged from helping out with the work (there's always work to do around here), to cooking meals, to (in one case) sharing some of your weed crop, which of course I would only use for medicinal purposes.
Y'all come visit...
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• If you ever frequented 143 Chambers Street back in the day, you might be interested in this short history of the building (dating back to the 1830s!) by Tom Miller in Tribeca Citizen. • You can read Ben's whole Movers & Shakers article on the NYC Physical Comedy Lab here. • It was Michael Zerphy who came up with the name Falling Coyote, which is especially apt because our address is 11 Cliff Road. There are other connections to the Road Runner / Wile E. Coyote cartoons, but that too is another post.
It would have been way too predictable for me to try to fool you on April Fool's Day, but this BBC video from 1957 was actually just such a joke, likely the first April Fool's prank by a major broadcaster. I remember seeing it on the tv show, Tonight Starring Jack Parr, and since I still remember it, obviously it made an impression, either because I thought it very funny or perhaps because I actually fell for it at the time. I was eight, after all. I was reminded of it again when my old clown partner Fred Yockers sent me a clip of it. This is the original BBC version:
I love the deadpan documentary style. As Eddie Cantor said about Laurel & Hardy, "It's their seriousness that strikes me. They play everything as if it might be Macbeth or Hamlet." Also, I suspect what Jack Parr showed was condensed for an American audience, as are some of the versions you will find on YouTube. Which is a shame, because what really sells this for me is all the detail, both in the narrative and in the visuals. After all, art is in the details, and comedy is an art.
Caroline Simonds sent me the video below, describing it not only as "the best moment in Switzerland" but also "the highlight of the conference." Caroline is an old friend (but younger than me) who moved to France in 1991 and brought hospital clowning with her, establishing Le Rire Médecin, which through her leadership became a large and highly respected organization for French hospital clowning. Her 2024 book, Le Rire Médecin: Journal du Docteur Girafe, was the inspiration for the wonderful French film, Sur un Fil (On the Edge).
The conference (in Lausanne) was HCIM 2026 — Healthcare Clowning International Meeting. Several of my clown friends from the New York area were there and had a great experience.
I wasn't at the conference, but I thought this presentation on Rejected Workshop Proposals was indeed very funny. Enjoy!
An article about Trump's attack on Iran from the Financial Page in the highbrow New Yorker —Trump’s Inexcusable Unpreparedness for the Iranian Oil Crisis— was the last place I expected to find a discussion of Laurel & Hardy. But I think the writer, John Cassidy, nailed this one:
Nothing is certain, except the fact that the President is floundering, making conflicting statements from one day to the next about how long the war will last. As it continues, rule at the whim of a strongman seems to be giving way to rule by slapstick. Growing up in England, I spent countless hours watching the comedies of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, which the BBC showed all the time. In each show, the two nitwits would set out on some caper, which would inevitably go horribly wrong, leaving them broke, or tied up, or in jail, or hanging over a cliff, or some other situation of great peril. At which point, Ollie would turn to Stan and say, “Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”
Trump is turning into Oliver Hardy.
Yep.
And I am admittedly proud to point out that I have for a very long time been making the case that physical comedy (and by extension clowning) is inherently political in that it showcases human error and undercuts the delusional arrogance and inflated self-esteem that the high and mighty rely on to justify and perpetuate their position of power. In my 1987 article for Yale Theater, Zen and the Heart of Physical Comedy: The Revenge of Murphy's Law, I made a similar argument to Cassidy's:
A closer look at last year's hit parade of catastrophes offers compelling evidence that clown behavior has infiltrated its way into the highest echelons of society. The meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor is surely an example of Laurel & Hardy at their most mischievous. In an attempt to complete an experiment on the power capability of the reactor's steam-driven turbines, the plant's resident clowns cleverly executed a series of maneuvers that in effect dismantled the reactor's safety features one by one.
This Russian two-reeler is full of laughs as our fiercely determined technicians, Laurelovitch and Hardyofsky, find perfectly good reasons to turn off the emergency cooling system, remove all but a few control rods while leaving the reactor operating, and disengage all safety systems designed to implement automatic shutdown. When Mrs. Hardyofsky — in this version played by a Soviet nuclear expert — returns home, she is shocked beyond belief to learn that the menfolk have deliberately disabled so many safety and warning systems, then run the reactor in a very unstable condition. But they did, and our little tragi-comedy ends with the prospect of millions of people, even the unborn (politely referred to as third- and fourth party victims), paying the price in sequels yet unfilmed.
Another fine mess was created by NASA engineers and administrators who allowed the Challenger space shuttle to be launched although several warnings of potential danger had been sounded. NASA's need to perpetuate a public image of having effectively vanquished the hazards of space flight — to have rendered it so routine that they could now rocket a schoolteacher into orbit — guaranteed that their infallibility would be shattered.
This American silent movie classic opens with engineer Laurel frantically gesticulating as he tries to get the attention of his boss, a very busy and self-important Mr. Hardy. The subtitles tell us that Laurel wants to warn Hardy about the weakness of the o-ring seals. But we can see that a vain Mr. Hardy is too busy impressing his big-shot friends to listen. The final image is unforgettable, as the camera dissolves on a whimpering engineer Laurel, stammering through his tears. The subtitle reads, "But Ollie, that's what I was trying to tell you all along."
Finally, I never tire of quoting Henry Miller from his The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder. He said it first (1959) and he said it better:
How little the public understood! To be a clown was to be fate's pawn.
The life in the arena was a dumb show consisting of falls, slaps, kicks —an
endless shuffling and booting about. And it was by means of this disgraceful rigolade
that one found favor with the public. 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..
• Hardy usually said "another nice mess," but they did make a film Another Fine Mess (1930), and this has been more frequently copied as a catch phrase ever since. Take your pick...
• When I say "...physical comedy (and by extension clowning)..." what I am thinking is that most clowning is physical, the clown character's vulnerability is revealed through the body. So clowns are nearly always physical comedians but physical comedy moments can happen to anyone, and can be depicted in dance, opera, serious drama and film, and can be described in literature and personal narratives. So (almost) all clowns are physical comedians but physical comedy can and often does exist without clowns.
• I first asked Claude, the AI program from Anthropic —the company that actually stood up to Trump— if it would alter the Laurel & Hardy image below to make it look like a worried Trump and Hegseth. It declined: "Placing real people's faces — including public figures like Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth — into existing images or scenes is something I have to decline, as it creates potentially misleading or manipulative depictions of real individuals." Fair enough.
Then before giving it any specifics, I asked ChatGPT if it would perform such an edit. It gave a qualified yes, but said that "I can’t create deceptive edits meant to impersonate real people in harmful ways." I said it wasn't deceptive and that it was obviously satirical and I sent the photo. And it did it! But I was worried people would not immediately recognize Hegseth from the first image ChatGPT generated so I had it re-do it with Vance instead, as you can see above. And since these AI programs are always offering to do more, it of course wrote: "If you decide to use it for a blog post or talk—especially given your interest in physical comedy history—you could also play with a few small variations: removing the “BIG BUSINESS” title so the image reads more like a still from the film, aging the typography to match the original intertitle style, or even adding a silent-film style caption beneath it. The Laurel & Hardy visual grammar is surprisingly flexible. If you ever want to push the gag further—say, turning it into a fake 1920s lobby card or a newspaper-style still from a “lost Laurel & Hardy short”—that can be done too." It's endless....
• I don't know if The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder is a novella or a long short story, but it is my favorite piece of clown fiction. Sigfrido Aguilar and I even co-directed a student dramatization of it at Ohio University back in the mid-80s. But I mention loving the book because I see it only gets 3.6 stars on Goodreads (2,263 ratings), but if you read this blog, I'm betting you will have a much keener appreciation of it.
[post 459] I recently came across two more Sid Caesar pieces that I liked so much that I had to share them here. And that's even though I've already written about Caesar several times over the years:
Sid Caesar Was My Father And Imogene Coca my mother. But only for a day or two, and not as publicly as I might have liked. The year was probably 1958.....
Gibberish (Say What? Perhaps the best gibberish comedian was "my father" Sid Caesar. His one-sided duel with Drew Carey on Whose Line Is It, Anyway? has been yanked from YouTube, but... But, nothing! I was inspired to track down a copy of this, and added it as a bonus here, as well as restoring it to that older post.
Sid Caesar (1922–2014) The king is dead. You can read the whole NY Times obituary here and...
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So... let's go straight to that Caesar appearance at the age of 79 on Whose Line Is It Anyway?, a funny-enough improv game show that ran for eight seasons a decade ago. Our hero talked circles around Drew Carey, no slouch himself, but what I really enjoyed was Caesar's use of gesture and facial expressions, as he acted out every nationality. And as I wrote in that earlier post, in real life Caesar spoke only two languages, English and Yiddish!
Beethoven's 5th I love this 1954 pantomime marital battle between Caesar and Nanette Fabray, choreographed to the opening music of Beethoven's Fifth, which I just learned is known as the fate motif. That seems quite fitting here! Fabray (1920–2018) grew up as a singing and dancing child vaudevillian who performed as Baby Nanette, and later studied opera at Juilliard.
A Streetcar Named ???? Elia Kazan's movie of Tennessee Willliams' play A Streetcar Named Desire was a big hit when it opened in September, 1951, with Marlon Brando sensational as the tough, blunt-spoken Stanley Kowalski fighting for his wife's allegiance against the intrusion of his demure, Southern belle sister-in-law, Blanche DuBois, played by Vivien Leigh.
In this parody from April, 1952, it's Caesar doing battle royale with Imogene Coca, with Betty Furness caught in between.
If you like Sid Caesar as much as I do, you'll be happy to know that this probably is not my last such post, because I just ordered what is purported to be the most complete collection of Caesar material. I doubt it's definitive, but I'm sure I'll find us some goodies. Note to researchers: not everything is on the internet. Sometimes you still have to buy DVDs
...that you can click on any blog image to see it full size?
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An Introduction...
So this is what I wrote 16 years ago; still more or less true!
Ring around a rosie, a pocket full of posies Ashes, Ashes, we all fall down
Welcome to the All Fall Down blog, an exploration of all aspects of physical comedy, from the historical to the latest work in the field, from the one-man show to the digital composite, from the conceptual to the nuts & bolts how-to. Be prepared for a broad definition of physical comedy (mine!) and a wide variety of approaches. Physical comedy is a visual art form, so there’ll be tons of pictures and videos, but also some substantial writing and research, including scripts and probably even some books.
This blog is a result of me wanting to follow through on lots of unfinished research from the past 25 years. It’s made possible by a full-year sabbatical leave from Bloomfield College that will take me through August 2010. It’s also made more practical by the ease of Web 2.0 tools for managing and distributing content. I had envisioned a web site similar to this blog more than a decade ago, but never got too far with it because it was simply a lot more work. Now, no more excuses!
Just as this blog will be sharing lots of goodies with you free of charge, I hope you will share your knowledge and ideas with me. Feel free to comment on any of it, or to write me directly with your suggestions. Admittedly I don’t see this as a free-for-all forum on the subject of physical comedy. It’s my blog, I’m the filter, and it won’t be all things to all people. That being said, I hope it will bring together insights, information, and people, and encourage others to make their own singular contributions to the field.
I hope to be adding substantial and varied material to the blog on a regular basis, so check back often and be sure to check out previous posts. And finally, a thanks to all of you, past present, and future whose work contributes to our knowledge — and our fun. We are truly standing on the shoulders of giants.
— John Towsen New York CIty May, 2009
My Physical Comedy Qualifications
So if you don’t blink, you can see me doing a pratfall on the original 1957 CBS production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella(starring Julie Andrews, directed by Ralph Nelson, stage managed by Joseph Papp).
If that doesn't say it all, then click here for the full bio.
My Favorite Posts Okay, there are literally thousands of physical comedy blogs out there, but only one physical comedy blogopedia. Why list my favorite posts? Because I want to draw attention to my best research and writing, to posts that make the strongest connections between old and new, between theory and practice, between ha-ha funny and broader global issues. If I die tomorrow, which is impossible because it's already the day after tomorrow in Australia, these are the ones I would like read aloud at my funeral, with high-rez projection of all videos. (Is it bad luck to write that?) Also, please mention that I never voted for a Republican. —jt
Here are some useful and fun blogs and web sites that touch on the whole field of physical comedy, rather than just sites by performers about themselves (not that there's anything wrong with that). Click away!
For the latest posts from these blogs, see below. (Blogs only; not web sites.) These are automatically sequenced by Google in order of most current posts. The blog at the top of the list is the blog with the most recent post. Since the whole idea is to keep you (and me) up to date on current posts in the field, blogs that have not been posting regularly have been dropped from the list; if you've been dropped but are now posting regularly, just let me know.
Your Travalanche Daily Digest for July 23, 2026
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Today’s new Travalanche post for July 23, 2026 are about Bert Convy and a
new 3D version of Animal Crackers Earlier Travalanche posts for July 23 (in
no pa...
Isaakyan Video (1984)
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← Older revision Revision as of 20:11, 22 July 2026
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Stepan Isaakyan, mixed animal act, at the [[Bolshoi Circus]] in Moscow
(1984)
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George Carl ~ A Talk about this Genius!
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The Lost Session: A Tribute to George Carl A visual celebration of George
Carl — one of the most brilliant physical comedians of the last century —
captu...
Diabolique, el tragafuegos del infierno
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*L’acqua… il fuoco (2003), Luciano Emmer*
La carrera de Luciano Emmer ha sido de un prolífico que aturde. Realizador
de pretigiosísimos documentales de a...
Slap Scenes For July 2026
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*With Commentary*
*Without Commentary*
These videos contain scenes from the following films:
*Strange Cargo *(1940)
*The Prodigal* (1955)
*The Reveng...
Remembering Catalan Clown Claret Papiol
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A video was posted today on Instagram, marking the one year anniversary of
the passing of Claret Papiol. The name sounded vaguely familiar, and when
I l...
Here's a list of complete books available for free as pdf documents right here on this here blogopedia, arranged in chronological order; dates are publication in the original language. Clickhere for a Tech Note on these books. Click on the book title to go to that post. More books coming!
Posts
