The Maestrositites — in "Topeka Tomorrow!!"

[post 315]

I've been enjoying the oddball music and physical comedy of the Maestrositites for a couple of years now, but didn't want to write about them until I first did my Spike Jones post.  I didn't realize it would take me two years to get around to it!

The Maestrositites shows I'd seen were all wild and wooly musical presentations, very much in the great tradition of maestro Jones, so I was intrigued to hear that their newest project was a pilot for a television comedy or webisode, with stories based on the characters developed for their concerts. You know, like The Monkees, only the Maestrositites were a band first. Oh yeah, and funnier.

I was lucky enough to see the pilot with a live audience, and the laughter was pretty much non-stop. See for yourself!



I asked company member David Gochfeld if they would like to add anything about their work, and he and his cohorts were kind enough to put together the following overview:

We've been working together in this group for over 5 years, in a lot of different formats (among other things, we've been on the radio, on TV in China, played corporate events, been strolling entertainers, guests at innumerable variety shows, and hosts of our own.)  During that time our characters have grown deeply dimensional, with very rich backstories and common history.  There are a million story ideas below the surface, which we intend to continue to explore.

This piece was conceived as a pilot for a TV (or Web) series.  This is an idea we've been discussing for several years, and finally decided that we needed to make this so we could show other people what we had in mind.  We funded it through Kickstarter, and it was great to finally get the funding and be able to start writing the stuff we've always known was in there. We have ideas for a bunch more episodes, and are looking forward to having opportunities to further develop this world.

We also want to acknowledge our director, Morgan Nichols, who has understood our aesthetic and our comedy from day one, and who has an amazing talent for helping clowns bring what's really funny about them to the screen.  He knew exactly how to come into our process and help us focus and make what we had in our heads, and also how to keep us on track even when our clowns were going off in different directions.

In terms of our creative process, Andy Sapora notes: "We often end up writing funny stuff when we are sitting around learning the music and we start to fool around. It's very common for our music rehearsals to turn into the five of us sitting around making ourselves laugh. And then we say, "let's write that down" and "we'll do that someday— when we have a budget".  Another great thing is that we know all of our characters so well, that we're all capable of writing in the voice of each other's characters.  For instance, when we have an idea of something funny, it's fairly easy for us to agree on which character should do the set-up and which  character would say which part of the joke."

Finally, we have a couple of other projects in the works.  One is further development of the show we have developed with the orchestral conductor Dorothy Savitch and the Brooklyn Conservatory Community Orchestra.  In it, the Maestrosities become involved in narrating Peter and the Wolf, with hilarious results... and then perform a comic movement piece to The William Tell Overture.  We have a trailer from one of the productions of this piece at this youTube link.

We're also starting to work on a full-length stage show, which will allow us to explore more of our backstory and many more of the comic ideas we've generated along the way, along with more of the music we've been working on.

Click here for the Maestrositites web site.

DVD Report: The Best of Spike Jones

[post 314]

No, not the very modern film and music video director Spike Jonze, but comedy musician and television variety star Spike Jones (1911–1965). My first introduction to the loony imagination of this latter-day vaudevillian was via audio tapes in the 1970s. I could only guess what his antics looked like, but it was funny enough, and I seem to recall my partner Fred Yockers and I sometimes using it as pre-show music. It certainly got us in the mood, if not the audience. Some material made it to VHS by the 1980s, and eventually to DVD, but The Best of Spike Jones is the first remastered, fairly definitive sampling of his work. It actually came out a couple of years ago and I bought a copy right away, fully intending to write a blog post on it "next week." Well, better late than never....

So why should you care about Spike Jones? Easy, because he....
• kept alive the "crazy comedy" tradition of Olsen & Johnson (Helzapoppin'), the Ritz Brothers, and the Marx Brothers
• was very funny and innovative
• used a lot of physical gags
• bridged the gap between vaudeville and television, featuring a lot of old-timey physical comedians on his show
• worked with funny people like Doodles Weaver (uncle of Sigourney!), Eddie Kline (directed Keaton and W.C. Fields), and the banjo player and natural clown, Freddy Morgan (see below).
• was a major influence on the comedy of Ernie Kovacs, “Weird Al” Yankovic, Dr. Demento, Laugh-In, Frank Zappa, George Carlin, and Billy Crystal, as well as such current New York groups as Polygraph Lounge and The Maestrosities.... but more on them soon.

....and, most important...
• frequently used whistles, cowbells, gun shots, mouth sounds, feathers, rubber chickens, pants drops, and trapdoors

This is a 3-dvd set, with 3½ hours of material on the first two discs, and the two pilots they shot (tv tryout episodes, not aviators!) comprise disc three. You can pick it up for $25 on Amazon, and it's well worth the price. Here are just a few samples...

The self-deprecating introduction to their show:

Followed by a typically insane and fast-paced music number, which ends up involving eccentric dancing, juggling hatchets, oddball instrumentations, and the destruction of instruments (decades before The Who).

Peter James, slapping himself silly and showing some fancy chops that predate break dancing by half a lifetime:




And the rubber-faced Freddy Morgan:

There's so much more I could include, but I have Christmas shopping to do. Maybe you should just buy this one for yourself!

Beating Yourself Up for Fun & Profit

[post 158]

If you've ever played around with slapstick or stage combat, and I'm betting you have, you know that the victim's reaction is key to selling the effect. As my old friend Joe Martinez put it, what we're doing is Combat Mime, the illusion of fighting, not the painful reality. It's not surprising, then, that many a comedian has had the clever idea of eliminating the attacker altogether, of playing victim to an imaginary foe.

The earliest reference I found to this idea was something I wrote about the acclaimed 19th-century British clown Billy Hayden, who made his reputation in Paris at Franconi's, first as an acrobatic clown, though later as a talking clown:  "He practiced acrobatics alone in the ring for two hours every morning — dancing, tumbling, falling, delivering blows at imaginary partners, and being struck by imaginary feet." (Clowns, p.200) I'm not sure how much from these practice sessions actually ended up in his act.

If you're having a hard time imagining what this might look like, the sofa sequence from Donald O'Connor's classic physical comedy piece, "Make 'Em Laugh," from Singing in the Rain (1952) is a short but sweet example:

Silent film comedian Charley Chase had actually taken this idea several steps further 26 years earlier in his wonderful Mighty Like A Moose, though his fight is heavily (and jokingly) dependent on film editing. The silly but useful premise is that Charley and his wife (Vivien Oakland) are embarrassingly homely, he with buck teeth, she with a big nose. They both have plastic surgery without telling the other, and when they accidentally meet, they flirt heavily without recognizing each other. (Yes, it takes more than a little suspension of disbelief, but then so does Twelfth Night.) Charley figures it out first and, as a staunch advocate of the double standard, is determined to teach her a lesson by staging a mock fight between husband and lover.




Now here's Peter James from the old Spike Jones Show who says "I like to slap myself" and who was breakin' way ahead of his time.




This is the talented Alex Pavlata from his show Francky O. Right, showing what happens when Romeo breaks up with Juliet.

And finally, here's Rowan Atkinson (see this previous post) being tormented by an unseen adversary during his morning commute: A Day in the Life of the Invisible Man.

Drop me a line if you know any more examples!


July 4th Update:  Blog reader Paul Reisman has done just that, providing us with a worthy addition to our collection. Paul writes: "It's from a pretty horrible movie called Trial and Error [1997], but the clip of Michael Richards getting beat up by invisible enemies has always stuck with me."



Let's just say I liked it a whole lot better than that audience of casting directors.

July 18 Update: Steve Copeland writes that the physical comedian on the Spike Jonze show was Peter James. Click here to check Peter James out on IMDB. Click here for a very watchable video about Steve and his partner Ryan Combs and their life on the American one-ring show, the Kelly-Miller Circus.

October 29, 2012 Update: Here's James Corden at the Tony Awards performing his schizoid self-fight from One-Man, Two Guvnors:



Links:
• Four short instructional videos based on material from Combat Mime.
• The World of Charley Chase web site.
• The Francky O. Right web site.
• Official site for Rowan Atkinson's Mr. Bean.