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
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.
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:
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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