Enter and Exit the Republicans (Physical Comedy is Not Dead, part 2)

[post 417]

In an earlier post I made the argument that physical comedy, far from being dead, is all around us. We just don't recognize it. Today in part two we look at physical comedy in politics, where it can prove especially embarrassing to those so desperate to control their self-image. The first hilarious example is hot off the wireless, last night's Republican debate where, with help from ABC, the presidential candidates proved Chaplin's adage that "good exits and good entrances, that's all theatre is."



Hah!

In fairness to the Republicans, it was pretty clear that Carson couldn't hear moderator Martha Radditz, who amateurishly introduced Carson before the applause for Christie had died down. Carson, already considered by many to be a fool, was unintentionally thrust into that role by Radditz.  Apparently Trump didn't hear her either. And then, as a nice button to the gag, the moderators had to be reminded by Christie that they'd never called on Kasich to enter.  You just can't make this stuff up.

UPDATE 2-10-15: Click here to see Stephen Colbert's spoof of the botched entrances.

For my money, physical comedy is often more real, more visceral, more revealing than verbal humor. Which brings me back to my favorite George W. Bush clip. As many of you surely know, there are many clips of Bush mangling the English language. These were damaging enough to his presidential image, but I always thought that this physical comedy moment of him trying to go through a locked door was far funnier. It's man-in-top-hat falls. It's slipping-on-the-banana-peel territory: the humor is in that initial reaction.


What was it that Chaplin said?

Falling for Prime Minister Trudeau

[post 411]

We've had an action hero as governor of California, a professional wrestler as governor of Minnesota, and now a reality tv star as a presidential contender. But Canada has us beat, a prime minister who's a physical comedian! Yes, the newly elected Justin Trudeau (another JT). And I don't apply that label the way many a politician is characterized as being a bozo, or the way President Ford was so clumsy that spoofing him helped jumpstart Chevy Chase's career. Trudeau really can do stuff. For example, "accidentally" falling down stairs is (or at least was) his favorite party trick.

No surprise this video (of a younger Trudeau) went viral in Canada during the recent election, and was first widely seen in the U.S. when John Oliver included it as part of a hilarious October 18, 2015 piece on Canada.

During the campaign, Trudeau made an ad using an escalator as a metaphor for an economy going nowhere. (I guess a stronger visual than a mime walk.) The Canadian comedian Rick Mercer (The Rick Mercer Report) added on to the ad, turning it into a PSA for elevator safety while slyly referencing the Trudeau video:

Did you notice the stuntman switched escalators for the last shot? (Yes, I'm assuming that's not Trudeau in the second half of the piece.) Another Trudeau physical bit, less daunting this time, led to another pretty funny Mercer parody, "The Pyramid Institute."

And, oh yeah, it also helps that Trudeau's not a fascist.

Sign Language (NOT!)

[post 341]

This really happened, but it could have come right out of the Marx Brothers or Borat, a variation on the old false translation bit. In this case it would be funnier if it weren't quite so despicable.

Somehow — and it's still hard to fathom exactly how — this guy, who literally could not sign his way out of a paper bag, gets himself hired to do sign language for the deaf at the Nelson Mandela memorial service, standing beside and doing gibberish sign language for several high-octane speakers, including President Obama. Apparently he's done it before (for the money??), but his attempt to take his "act" to the big stage backfired when several deaf people took to Twitter to expose him.

Video below, full story here.

Supposedly we live in a more visual culture these days, but I'm not so sure. Those hand gestures fooled people?

UPDATE (12-17-13): I don't want to beat this story to death, but now there's this from NPR:
Mandela Interpreter Says He Was In Group That Killed Two Men

UPDATE (1-4-14):  I am reminded by Aaron Watkins of this classic SNL bit with Garrett Morris and Chevy Chase:

Who's Funnier, Romney or Obama?

[post 266]

A funny Jon Stewart clip from The Daily Show. Even some discussion of "slapstick" in it!

TED Talk: Comedy as Translation

[post 247]

I think you'll find this TED Talk by Chris Bliss not exactly revelatory, but interesting enough. Bliss focuses on effective comedy, especially political comedy. There's no mention of physical comedy, though the same ideas can certainly apply. You can watch the 16-minute talk below or, better yet, temporarily leave this blogopedia and go to the TED Talk site, where you can see it full screen or read a transcript of it.

DVD Report: "Idiocracy" (The Movie Hollywood Doesn't Want You To See)

[post 193]

In case you haven't noticed, I think clowns and physical comedy are like totally RELEVANT and SIGNIFICANT in our modern world because we're all still pretty dumb at least part of the time, though we're less likely to admit it, and human error is still titanically inevitable. Which is what clowns have been telling us for several millennia, and the only good news is that we're still able to laugh about it. So if you need to justify your clown existence to an annoying "friend" or to that condescending uncle, read and steal these quasi-intellectual arguments I wrote about here and here. 

All of which brings me to the futuristic satire Idiocracy (2006), which is more about the overall dumbing down of America than it is about human error afflicting even the most intelligent minds... but close enough. And funny.

I was urged to watch the movie by New York City's own intellectual-in-residence, bon vivant, and man about town — of course I'm talking about Paul Persoff — who enticed me with the following opening scene, which is indeed quite brilliant:

BTW, damn good makeup and acting job on the aging, eh?

Directed by Mike Judge (Office Space; Beavis & Butthead, The Animation Show), Idiocracy sends two statistically average Americans five hundred years into the future, where they discover they're the smartest people on the planet. Now I'm not all that into science fiction, but I found this satirical premise deliciously pertinent to Life As We Live It. It can be hard to translate the resulting gags into a full-length movie, and the laughs are not as rapid-fire or as hardy as in Borat, another 2006 comedy with a similar theme, but the movie worked for me on about a four stars out of five level. Some might find it exaggerated. My reaction was that it won't take five hundred years to reach the dystopia portrayed in Idiocracy. More like fifty.

One of the many troubling aspects is its depiction of the entertainment of the future, which  consists of gross jokes and stupid people watching stupider people suffer. The top movie is Asses: ninety minutes of frequently flatulent butts. And here's the top tv show, Ow, My Balls!

Much more troubling was the shabby treatment the movie received from its distributors. What Variety labeled "a rare piece of rebellious political spoofery from a major studio" may in fact have been too hot for the studios to handle. As Ann Homaday wrote in the Washington Post:

"When Mike Judge's highly anticipated futuristic satire Idiocracy opened and promptly closed in a few cities last fall (it never played Washington), the blogosphere lit up. Did Twentieth Century Fox, the film's distributor, intentionally dump the movie?...  Put simply, did Fox do to Idiocracy what it had done to Judge's 1999 comedy Office Space, and was the new movie eligible for similar cult status? We may never know precisely who did what to whom and why (although a hilarious sendup of Fox News in the movie may not have helped)." 

Check it out yourself on DVD (available on NetFlix). Some links:

• The Movie Hollywood Doesn't Want You To See, a good review of the movie from the online magazine, Slate
• Idicocracy on Rotten Tomatoes, where it garners 73% from the critics but only 57% from the general audience
• Mike Judge on Wikipedia
• A YouTube video, one of many, about how dumb most Americans are.
• A Maureen Dowd column about stupidity in American politics.

Murdoch Pie-Thrower Gets 3 to 6 Weeks in Jail

[post 180]

A short follow-up to post 168, the pieing of Rupert Murdoch at a Parliamentary hearing. Jonathan May-Bowles, aka Jonnie Marbles, has pleaded guilty and been sentenced to three to six weeks and fined £250 costs — plus a £15 victim surcharge.

Read the whole article here.

Marbles has also written a short article for the Guardian (London) explaining his actions.

You can read the article and the reader comments here. Even though the Guardian is a left-of-center newspaper hardly sympathetic to Murdoch, the vast majority of reader comments were negative, calling the pie throwing counter-productive. They have a point: it was a rare occasion when Murdoch was being held accountable in public and all Marbles did was make him more sympathetic. It would have been different, and more effective, had Murdoch been caught at a more arrogant moment.

Splat! — A Pie in the Face for Rupert Murdoch

[post 168]

"It is a far better thing that I do now than I have ever done before #splat" — Tweet earlier today by pie-thrower Jonnie Marbles

Another emergency interruption of our series of complete books on the commedia dell' arte... but definitely in the commedia spirit!

Just a few posts ago, in writing about Improv Everywhere, I also got to talking about the history of guerrilla theatre, and the practice of "pieing" prominent political figures. So this just in: a British comedian/activist who goes by the name of Jonnie Marbles somehow got himself and a shaving cream pie into the Parliamentary interrogation of media baron Rupert Murdoch and managed to plaster the old guy right in the kisser. (If you don't know who Murdoch is or why he's suddenly in trouble, click here... and read the newspaper once in a while, why dontcha?!) Marble had tweeted about his planned attack beforehand, paraphrasing the famous last sentence from Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.

Dickens: It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.
Marbles:  It is a far better thing that I do now than I have ever done before #splat

Here's a video that caught some of the action, as reported by Murdoch's own Fox News:




The event is getting a lot of media attention. For example, from the NY Daily News:

You can read the whole article here.  If you check out the media coverage of the event, you'll see that some news outlets try to frame it as an act of violence meant to harm Murdoch physically rather than as a stunt meant to embarrass him and send a message. Hmm....

Not Riding in the Bike Lane

[post 152]

So yesterday my sweetie came home from the hospital on crutches after she and her bike had an encounter with a truck in a Manhattan bike lane. No broken bones, but thanks for asking. Then later in the day Daniel Wallace, game designer and former student, sent me this video.

Those who know me well know that I am a torn creature, with at least a tri-polar split between politics, would-be athleticism, and all this goofy comedy stuff. For example, I like to bike all over NYC and all over the world, I try to advocate for the environment, and I've always enjoyed comedy cycling..... but how to combine all three?

Don't ask me, ask Casey Neistat, because that's exactly what he did in this cool video, which I am happy to see is already going viral on YouTube.



Ouch!

Ronald McDonald: Obese Creep or Physically Fit Comedian?

[post 138]

I thought some of you might get a chuckle over this piece from the Salon.com web site.  Opponents of Mc Donald's lay some of the blame for childhood obesity directly on the company's trademark clown, but Mickey D's PR people claim he's a symbol of physical fitness.  You decide....

You can read the whole article here.

Life Imitates Art: Bangkok Rope Escape

[post 094]

We live in an age of heat-seeking missiles and biometric surveillance, so when Thai rebel leader Arisman Pongruangrong pulled a Douglas Fairbanks and escaped from a hotel surrounded by Bangkok police by climbing a rope down the side of the building, we had one of our more retro physical comedy moments in recent years. Better yet, the deputy prime minister had just gone on national television to announce that they had their man! Pongruangrong, who's also a pop singer, was hugged by his adoring supporters before being spirited out of there in a get-away car. Zorro, anyone?

Here's a video from Reuters:



And here's an article on it from the London Guardian:

Bangkok Escape

“Whenever we don’t dress up like clowns, they don’t move as fast.”

[post 091]

NY Times, March 19, 2010

Bike Lane Blockers, Beware
by Bao Ong

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

The Bureau of Organized Bikelane Safety, on patrol on 6th Avenue Friday.

“Excuse me, sir,” Barbara Ross said to the driver of a black town car parked on Avenue of the Americas near 37th Street. “You are obstructing a bike lane.”

Considering that Ms. Ross, 46, was wearing a white hazmat suit and an orange traffic cone on her head and riding a large red tricycle, the driver, Ross Ravita, took her relatively seriously. He protested that he was making only a quick stop, and though he did at one point tell her, “Hold your horses, lady, this isn’t your street,” he yielded his ground and drove away.

It was another victory for the Bureau of Organized Bikelane Safety, a provisional wing of the environmental advocacy group Time’s Up, which staged a street-theater action Friday afternoon to urge drivers to stop blocking the city’s more than 300 miles of bicycle lanes.

The six riders started at Madison Square Park before crawling up Avenue of the Americas to Bryant Park. While takeout deliverers and messengers zipped past vehicles blocking bicycle lanes, the bike-lane safety team, armed with crime-scene tape and fake parking summonses, set cones around the illegally parked vehicles and reenacted crash scenes.

“It’s a bike lane, not a parking lot,” one member of the group, Benjamin Shepard, shouted to a minivan driver.

Although the city has pushed to make the streets more pedestrian friendly in recent years, cyclists say drivers still ignore the white bike lines and not enough get slapped with the $115 fines.

Ms. Ross said that enforcing fines would help ease the fears of new cyclists. “We want to make biking for everyone,” she added.

Of the half-dozen lane-blocking drivers ambushed by the enforcement team — from a Fresh Direct delivery truck to a silver Lincoln Town Car — all moved without hesitation, except for a cement truck driver who shrugged his shoulders and said he had nowhere else to park.

The cyclists, who carried a boom box blaring ’80s tunes, called their ride a success and ended with a victory dance.

“Whenever we don’t dress up like clowns,” Mr. Shepard said, “they don’t move as fast.”

Clowns WIthout Borders — Master's Degree in Physical Comedy (Sweden)

[post 074]

I don't know much about this, but it might be right up your clown alley. The Manege Center for Circus, Music Hall and Street Performance, in collaboration with the Swedish branch of Clowns Without Borders and the Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts, is offering a one-year master's degree program in Physical Comedy. Classes are in English and start January 2011. "Upon completion of the programme students will be qualified to work with Clowns without Borders internationally." You might want to ask if "qualified" means "offered a job," but certainly worth looking into.

Here's the info from their web site:

A Year of Physical Comedy

This one-year Master’s programme is intended for performing artists with professional experience in physical comedy and entertainment - clowning, magic, juggling, acrobatics, mime, etc – and with a desire to make the world a better place.

A Year of Physical Comedy, for 60 ETCS credits, is an undertaking in collaboration with Clowns without Borders, Sweden. Upon completion of the programme students will be qualified to work with Clowns without Borders internationally. During the programme each student will create a solo performance and is also required to produce a master’s paper - written or otherwise presented. The year will also include two tours to international crisis areas (i.e. refugee camps). International students are accepted. The language of instruction is English. Good English language competence is therefore a requirement.

The programme begins in January 2011. Applications will be accepted during Spring 2010 with the last date of submission May 31st. Auditions will take place in Stockholm no later than June 2010 or in another European city no later than July 2010.

More information and the application form can be found at http://www.teaterhogskolan.se Do feel free to e-mail any questions you may have to magister@teaterhogskolan.se

Update (Feb. 22, 2010): Malin Karlsson, the program's international coordinator, has written me with this additional information: This year we have a master's programme called Skratt utan gränser (Laughter without borders), which is also a physical comedy-based programme. The class is on tour right now (also a cooperation with Clowns without Borders Sweden). The difference between the ongoing course and the upcoming is that the upcoming programme's tuition language is English. But I will happily report to you about this year's tour (three students are in Kenya, three students are in Burma and three students are on the West Bank) when they get back in the middle of March. There will be both photos, videoclips and reports on our website.

International coordinator

Method in Mime by R.G. Davis, founder of the San Francisco Mime Troupe

[post 065]

In writing about San Francisco on my last post, I mentioned the influence the San Francisco Mime Troupe had on the popular-arts performance scene there. If you've seen their work, you've probably wondered why they label themselves a mime troupe. The answer lies in their early years under the direction of their founder, R.G. Davis (photo, right). This manifesto on mime and pantomime, written by Davis in 1962, shows the troupe's roots and still raises some interesting questions today.

What I liked about this when I first read it sometime back in the 70s were the clear distinctions Davis was able to make between a broad commedia style of physical performance and the more precious tradition of the white-faced pantomime artist. Now that I'm older and wiser (oh yeah, sez who?), I'm a bit more wary of dialectic reasoning where things are either this or that with no wiggle room. People who think like that can be very difficult to deal with! Still, I think it's a useful argument, a provocative read, at least if seasoned with a grain or two of salt. And although Davis was eventually replaced by a collective leadership and the troupe's performance style became less "mime-y," their work has in fact retained an essential commedia feel and flavor.

Anyway, it's only three pages, well worth your time, just be sure to click on "Fullscreen."

Method in Mime

Happy Birthday, Tommy Smothers!

[post 062]

Today is the 73rd birthday of Tommy Smothers and, as much as I think it's important to honor the work of those who have passed away, it's a pleasure to be able to salute a fine comedian who is still very much with us. Tommy Smothers was one-half of the Smothers Brothers, partnering his younger brother Dick (born 11-20-39) on their own CBS television variety show. They are still active and in fact both can be seen in cameo roles in last year's The Informant!.

The Smothers Brothers' m.o. was folk music, not physical comedy, but their act was right out of vaudeville with Dick playing straightman on string bass to a confused, emotional Tommy on acoustic guitar. You never knew what words would come from Tommy's mouth. His character was the one who blurts out what everyone else may be thinking but is afraid to say out loud.

But this is a physical comedy blog, so here's a clip of Tommy showing some pretty cool chops on the yoyo!



And here they are (their actual voices) as part of a Bart Simpson dream (he badly wants a brother) on an episode this past December on The Simpsons:



Fired from CBS? Yes, another reason to praise the Smothers Brothers is that back in the turbulent Vietnam War era, long before cable tv and the internet, when three major networks controlled everything Americans saw and heard on television, and most entertainers chose not to make waves, the Smothers Brothers continuously fought back against this wall of censorship. They engaged in weekly battles with the CBS censors, who insisted that television was entertainment, pure and simple, and that politics was bad for business. They lost most of these battles, but paved the way for the greater freedom enjoyed today by such satirists as Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert.

One of the biggest controversies was over a Harry Bealfonte song that was accompanied by footage of police violence at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. The song (video clip below) was not aired and later that season the Smothers Brothers were booted off the air for refusing to cave to the censors. This Wikipedia summary pretty much nails it:

With the focus of the show having evolved towards a more youth-oriented one, the show became both popular and controversial for those same references to youth culture and the issues that both interested and affected this particular target audience. Three specific targets of satire — racism, the President of the United States, and the Vietnam War — would wind up defining the show's content for the remainder of its run, and eventually lead to its demise.

Whereas most older audiences were tuning into shows like the western Bonanza, the younger generation — ages 15–25 — were watching the Smothers' more socially relevant humor.

The Brothers soon found themselves in regular conflicts with CBS' network censors. At the start of the 1968/69 season, the network ordered that the Smothers deliver their shows finished and ready to air ten days before airdate so that the censors could edit the shows as necessary. In the season premiere, CBS deleted the entire segment of Belafonte singing "Lord, Don't Stop the Carnival" against a backdrop of the havoc during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, along with two lines from a satire of their main competitor, Bonanza. As the year progressed, battles over content continued, including a David Steinberg sermon about Moses and the Burning Bush.

With some local stations making their own deletions of controversial skits or comments, the continuing problems over the show reached a boiling point after CBS showed a rerun on March 9, 1969. The network explained the decision by stating that because that week's episode did not arrive in time to be previewed, it would not be shown. In that program, Joan Baez paid tribute to her then-husband–David Harris–who was entering jail after refusing military service, while comedian Jackie Mason made a joke about children "playing doctor." When the show finally did air, two months later, the network allowed Baez to state that her husband was in prison, but edited out the reason.

Despite the conflict, the show was picked up for the 1969-70 season on March 14, seemingly ending the debate over the show's status. However, network CEO and President, William S. Paley, abruptly canceled the show on April 4, 1969. The reason given by CBS was based on the Smothers' refusal to meet the pre-air delivery dates as specified by the network in order to accommodate review by the censors before airing. This cancellation led the Brothers to file a successful breach of contract suit against the network, although the suit failed to see the Brothers or their show returned to the air.^[2] Despite this cancellation, the show went on to win the Emmy Award that year for best writing. The saga of the cancellation of the show is the subject of a 2002 documentary film, Smothered.^[3]

Here's a telegram from CBS staking out their right to pre-censor the show, followed by the Harry Belafonte clip that did not make it to the airwaves in the fall of 1968.



The Video That Dared Not Be Shown:

As this final note from Wikipedia shows, the Smothers Brothers did receive some vindication decades later:
In 2003, the brothers were awarded the George Carlin Freedom of Expression Award from the Video Software Dealers’ Association. The award recognizes the brothers' “extraordinary comic gifts and their unfailing support of the First Amendment.” In September 2008, during the 60th Primetime Emmy Awards, Tommy Smothers, a lead writer of "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" was belatedly awarded a 1968 Emmy for Outstanding Writing In A Comedic Series. In 1968, Tommy Smothers had refused to let his name be on the list of writers nominated for the Emmy because he felt his name was too volatile, and thus when the writing staff won he was the only member not to receive the award.

Collector Finds Unseen Charlie Chaplin Film

[post 051]

In a first for this blog, I am posting from 37,000 feet above earth, aboard a Delta Atlanta–NYC flight with free wi-fi (trial offer). I'm sure this will soon be standard, even for us bozos in coach, but right now I'm thinking it's pretty cool.


Read the whole article here but — spoiler alert — we're not talking a major find here.

Happy new year to all!

On the Streets at the Copenhagen Climate Summit

[post 048]

Greetings from COP 15, the U.N. climate "Conference Of Parties" in Copenhagen, Denmark. In case you don't get out much, COP 15 is considered a big deal not only because it was designed to forge an environmental treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, but because global warming trends have proven to be even worse than what the "alarmist" scientists were predicting just a few years ago. Thus not only do all the nations of the world have delegates at the conference, like it or not they have us "unofficial delegates" in town in the form of environmental activists staging their own Klimaforum, and taking to the streets with a variety of theatrics and actions intended to pressure the politicians and hopefully grab some international media attention.

Truth be told, it's a madhouse here, with so much going on at any given time that, like the parable of the six blind men and the elephant, it's impossible to ever get much of an overview. Saturday's big 6-kilometer march from Parliament Square to the Bella Conference Center attracted somewhere between 60,000 people (police estimate) and 100,000 (organizers' estimate). The march — I almost wrote "parade" — was quite theatrical, with the clear intention of engaging onlookers and attracting major media. Of course most of the headlines focused on the arrest of a very small number of violent protesters, even in newspapers you would think more attuned to the actual issues and to the not insignificant fact that this was the largest and most international climate change protest ever.

Of course the problem with political theatre is that you are mostly preaching to the choir, but I guess if that choir is empowered and goes on to preach to others, picking up a few tricks along the way, then all is not in vain.


So how do you visualize the politics of climate change? Here's what I saw:

• Depictions of the rich and powerful as puppets, robots or clowns.

• Images of imminent extinction, with the earth's most vulnerable inhabitants dying a grim death. Our 350.org contingent included a boat ("we're all in the same boat"), plus a dinosaur on poles created by a couple of Bread & Puppet Theatre vets.

• Masks, puppets, floats giving voice to the powerless, including endangered species — polar bears, penguins, and assorted wildlife.

• Personifying the positive: the wholesome qualities of the environmental movement (organic, natural, green, warm, fuzzy, etc.). Clowns, bright costumes, and green noses were part of this joyous branding of the movement. The motto for Mr. Green's Circus (see below) is "We are gonna save the planet — and we will have fun doing it."

• Imagery centered on the desirable number 350 (target for safe number of carbon particles per million in the atmosphere).

Here are some images and video of the spectacle. I don't have time for everything while I'm here, but will add some more to this post later, so check back!

Here's my friend Adnan Saabi, from IndyAct in Lebanon, in action inside the Bella Center, in clown nose and glasses unsympathetically portraying a member of the oil lobby. The 850 refers to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere this character is apparently willing to tolerate, and the "recruiting e-mail hackers" refers to the recent brouhaha in England. So in this case the clown persona is basically saying the guy's a bozo.



The Greenpeace puppet of a rich cigar-chomping industrialist manipulating the world's political leaders (including Obama) on marionette strings; all of the "puppets" were in fact human performers.



Mr. Penguin and Mr. Dinosaur.



Clowns on a mission.


Frosty the Snowman says: "I fell down and I can't get up!"



Three puppets (about 35' tall) swaying in the wind, from Seven Meters, whose poster you see toward the top of this post. Seven meters is the height water will rise if all the ice in Greenland melts.


Partial view of our "We're all in the same boat" contingent.


Mr. Green's Circus.


And here's one of their videos.




And here they are at the mall. Not sure what they're doing there, but at least you get to see the whole group in action.





Okay, I admit it, this last one isn't from Copenhagen, but I figured I could sneak it in while we're on the subject of climate change. Besides, it is visual and I did learn about it in Copenhagen. If you like 3D street art, I think you'll love this ice-age video of the summer 2008 work of German street painting artist Edgar Müller .




Physical Comedy in the 21st-Century
One way for physical comedy to break new ground is to move it outside of your standard performance structures and into a remix with everyday life. The work of Improv Everywhere (motto: "we make scenes') offers some good examples of this, as does the history of street theatre. But with street theatre, we're usually talking about a band of outsiders trying to shake up the complacent and the powerful. Think Abbie Hoffman throwing dollar bills onto the floor of the NY Stock Exchange.


You may be pleasantly surprised, therefore, to see similar shock tactics being employed by an actual government, though one that itself is very much on the outside of world power. I am talking about the Maldives, whose president, Mohamed Nasheed, I will in fact be hearing speak later today. The Maldives are an island nation in the Indian Ocean and because of global warming they are literally sinking. Here are the text and the image from an excellent Daily Beast slide show, Our Sinking Earth:

What does it take for a small country like the Maldives to get noticed on the world stage? The nation’s cabinet recently held a meeting underwater, in scuba gear, to call attention to the state — the lowest-lying country on earth. Using hand signals and white boards 20 feet underwater, the cabinet produced a document calling for all countries to cut their carbon dioxide emissions before the Copenhagen meeting.



More to come....

Book Report: Why We Make Mistakes

[post 33]

Why We Make Mistakes
by Joseph T. Hallinan
(NY: Broadway Books, 2009); hardcover, 283 pp.


Mistakes of judgment and mistakes of execution are the stuff of comedy, especially physical comedy. YouTube offers a rapidly expanding video archive of human stupidity in action, from the world's most incompetent criminals to every conceivable mishap awaiting those so foolhardy as to get out of bed in the morning. Likewise Chuck Shepherd's News of the Weird.

When Joel Schechter, editor of Yale's Theater magazine, asked me to do an article on physical comedy way back in 1986, I used it as an excuse to probe the connection between human error and physical comedy. [Read the whole article here.] Admittedly this was my subversive attempt to forge some new connections that would counter the notion that physical comedy was an inferior form of comedy, mindless entertainment that was good for a belly laugh but little else. Instead, I wanted the reader to see physical comedy as embodying a deeper truth about the human condition, and I had no better ally in this than Henry Miller in his clown novella, The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder:

"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."

Of course I'm not the only one to notice the disastrous results of human error, be it the sinking of the Titanic or our nation's certitude as to the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In many fields, especially those that involve human life, the study of risk assessment and human error is serious business — and often the findings are quite frightening.

Now there comes along a new book on the subject, and one I highly recommend for its research and readability, Joseph T. Hallinan's Why We Make Mistakes. (The image you see above is a joke wraparound cover and flaps, not a result of my crooked scanning.)

Subtitled How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average, the book offers both clear analysis and great entertainment. And in most cases, the connections to comedy pretty much jump out at you. A few choice tidbits:

• In an experiment designed to test our ability to recognize change, two researches from Cornell University concocted a scene that could have been right out of a Marx Brothers movie. One of their actors would stop a stranger on the street to ask directions, but in the middle of the conversation two other actors would abruptly walk right between them carrying a door. But the catch was that while passing through, the actor asking directions would use the cover of the door to quickly change places with another actor, who seamlessly continued the conversation with the stranger. In the majority of cases, the stranger did not even notice the change! However, when the experiment was described to a college class and the students were asked to predict whether or not they would have noticed such a switcheroo, 100% were quite sure they would have.

• Overconfidence is indeed one of Hallinan's main themes and, as they teach you in clown school, pride goeth before the fall. Overconfidence makes us buy gym memberships or time shares we'll never fully use, and think we can accomplish complex tasks without following instructions (what he dubs the "bushwhack" approach). It seems to be part of human nature to want to feel on top of things, what Hallinan calls the "illusion of control." In one experiment, subjects guessed the outcome of a series of coin tosses. Students who were told that their first guesses were all correct (they didn't actually see the coin close-up) became convinced that they would be able to continue to predict the outcome well above half the time, and that they would even get better with practice. And who were these overconfident and, dare I say, foolish subjects? Students from a certain ivy league college in New Haven. The same researcher did an experiment in which the subjects bet on the outcome of a simple card game in which whoever drew the high card won. Though the chances on any draw were obviously 50-50, what happened was that when playing against "a guy dressed as a schlub," the subjects bet more than they did when betting against a nattily dressed opponent. Yes, these were Yale University students.

You probably won't be surprised to read that all kinds of tests have shown that men on average are far more overconfident than women and that they (conveniently) forget their mistakes a lot quicker. In the chapter "Men Shoot First," Hallinan gives example after example of this tendency, from men being more likely to kill their fellow soldier ("friendly fire") while in combat, to men overestimating their own IQ scores. Tragically, when it comes to driving a car, men wear seat belts with less frequency than women but are three times more likely to be involved in a fatal accident.

It's not much of a leap to connect this arrogant overconfidence to today's talking heads who assure us that climate change is nothing to get so worried about, that they've got everything under control. Obviously a lot of this drivel comes from those getting rich from oil production, but there are millions of others with nothing to gain — and, like all of us, everything to lose — who are blinded by overconfidence into assuming that somehow it will all work out, but with no evidence to back that up. Somewhere Henry Miller is chuckling.

I haven't seen it yet, but you might want to check out the new movie, The Age of Stupid, in which a man living alone in 2055 in a world devastated by climate change examines old footage from 2008 and tries to figure out how we could have been so stupid. Here's the trailer:




I guess the good news is that clowns know what they're talking about. The bad news is that what we're talking about is pretty scary.

Zen & the Heart of Physical Comedy (Yale Theater, 1987)

[post 001]

This article with the overly-cute title, which I wrote for Yale's Theater magazine some 22 years ago at the behest of editor Joel Schechter, is still the best intro to where I'm coming from on the subject of physical comedy. This was about 11 years after I wrote Clowns, but this time around I had more fun with the writing and tried to make a wider range of connections between performance and the so-called real world. I still like the article, and I welcome your feedback on it.

[A Note on Using Scribd: think of Scribd as just another (free) file sharing service, the YouTube of text documents. I upload my .pdf to Scribd.com and then embed the code in my blog. You the reader can view it in the blog or download it and print it out. To download, click on More and then on Save Document. To view it at full-page rez within the blog, click on the icon on the far right; click there again to return to the blog. And if you open it in Scribd, there are even more options.]