What happens when a circus and clown performer marries the owner of an organic dairy farm? Well, in this case you combine the best of two worlds to create a unique and quite wonderful hybrid enterprise, the Circus ‘n’ Cheese farm (Biohof Luftensteiner) in upper Austria.
As some of you may have heard me wail, my six weeks in Europe this past spring ended on a dismal note, as my backpack was stolen in the Cherbourg train station, and with it my laptop containing a lot of recent (brilliant!) writing. And because I am —when all is said and done— a Total Idiot, most of it was not backed up.
Last night, on its USA opening day, a bunch of us piled into two cars and over-anxiously drove them right into the movie theatre where Coyote vs. Acme was having its local premiere. No, we had not become terrorist cartoon characters. Into the theatre in that it was the Warwick Drive-In, a 3-screen outdoor movie theatre 20 minutes from us. We like drive-ins (all that nostalgia for bygone days), but being in separate vehicles for a comedy does put a dent in that whole laughter-is-contagious thing.
It would seem so, but as with most comedy, the funniest stuff is unintentional.
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!
I will state categorically that Jerry Lewis (1926–2017) was a top-notch physical comedian, skilled and often very funny, and I’ve already written about him in four previous posts (see below). Comedy is to some degree a matter of taste, and Lewis sure had his supporters and detractors. He was a megastar, who by 1959 had signed the highest-paying Hollywood contract ever, and one with unprecedented artistic control. But as the years passed he was dismissed by many as being corny, abrasive, over-the-top and, well, tasteless. Not funny!
“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
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Workshops & Other Events
My first book (1976)
My book Clowns has long been out of print, but you can borrow it for two weeks at a time from the Internet Archive. More information is available here.
My second book (2015)
Visual and verbal humor for the cognitively and artistically curious! Available here.
“A book to treasure!”
—Bill Irwin