Physical Comedy is Everywhere! Exhibit A: Stephen Colbert

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As a physical comedy aficionado, the question I get asked the most is:  “What is physical comedy exactly?” Usually I stammer and say something like, "well, you know, comedy that’s, uh,  physical."

Blank stares. 

So I try to come up with recognizable examples. Buster Keaton? Charlie Chaplin? You might be surprised how many people are not familiar with their work, even young clowns. But if they represent the heyday of physical comedy, does that mean it’s a relic of the past? After all, that was a full century ago! 

There must be some more recent examples... 

Jim Carrey? Yeah, that kinda works, though the work he’s best known for was 20–30 years ago.

Rowan Atkinson? Who? You know, Mr. Bean… That gets some recognition, but doesn't exactly close the deal.

How about today’s clowns, the ones we people in the field think of as being famous? Bill Irwin, Avner Eisenberg, James Thiérrée? Only Bill has penetrated into mass culture, but again probably less than you would think. Plenty of people have seen him acting in movies without making the connection.

All of this leads me to a new recurring blog feature: Physical Comedy is Everywhere!, in which on a semi-regular basis I will draw attention to physical comedy work being seen by millions even if they don’t recognize it as such. While many of the clown greats were Mr. or Ms. Non-Stop Physical Comedy, my examples use it as just one weapon in their arsenal. This will make sense as these posts slowly accumulate, but today let’s start with Stephen Colbert…

Even if you didn’t know Stephen Colbert, you probably do now, thanks to Trump conniving to get his show terminated as of this coming June. Colbert is a sharp and very political stand-up comedian, who since 2015 has hosted The Late Show on CBS, a talk show featuring his opening monolog, celebrity guests, music, and occasional sketches. But especially his opening monolog. Colbert is playing himself, but from 2005-2014 he hosted The Colbert Report (both t’s silent, as if he were French), in which he played a fictitious character —a right-wing talk-show pundit who, in Colbert’s words, was "a well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot."

Most talk-show hosts sit at their desk, but Colbert rarely leaves his feet. His background is in theatre games, improv, and sketch comedy, and Del Close and Second City (Chicago) gave him his formative training. He was never a serious student of mime, but managed to develop some basic mime chops and a mime imagination doing all those theatre games and improv exercises, where props get invented literally out of thin air to fit the situation at hand.

Our first example of Colbert adding physical comedy to his stand-up is Stephen Colbert, Mime Extraordinaire, a collection of clips put together  by Third Beat Productions, a website inactive since 2015, which lists Sharilyn Johnson as its editor. Thank you Sharilyn, or whoever did this! It's the kind of painstaking archival research you can expect to find on this blog, so long as I'm not the one who has to do it.

That was put together eight years ago. The next clip, The Invisible Props Department, is from seven years ago. Funny enough but longer than it needs to be, it shows to what degree mime has been considered to be an integral component of Colbert comedy.

 One more mime clip, this one sparked by Trump's hatred of windmills:

In the next clip, the well-known actor Henry Winkler gives Stephen a lesson in physical acting.

Okay, enough mime and object manipulation, real or imaginary. Time for some (silly) song and dance.

Colbert also makes imaginative use of space to create some unexpected visual comedy. One of his gags is to have people under his desk while he is ostensibly conducting a normal talk show from above.

Another frequent device is to freeze the camera frame, Colbert moving in and out of it, leaving it oddly depopulated in his absence. There is always some comic reason for doing this, and I've seen a couple of dozen examples, but I never made actual notes on them because nobody told me I would be doing this post. And since I do want to get this post out, I will stop here. If I find any in the future, I will add them, or if any kind reader can point me in that direction I would be happy to share them and grateful for your help. And there's a free subscription to the blog in it for you. Yeah, I am aware that the blog is free, but it's the thought that counts.

That should be enough Colbert physicality for you to make my point. Just because physical comedy is not a performer's entire m.o. does not mean that it's not a key part of their act. And you will see in future posts that I have dozens of examples of physical comedy being everywhere.

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• If you're keeping score as to what percentage of comedians had sad childhoods, add Colbert to the list. When he was ten, his father and two of his brothers died in an airplane crash.
• The Wikipedia bio of Colbert is quite thorough.
• One of Colbert's greatest and most controversial moments was as keynote speaker at the 2006 Washington, D.C. Correspondents' Dinner, where he brutally satirized not only the entire press corps, but also President Bush, who was sitting at the speakers table, all of two seats away. You can see it here.