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From today’s NY Times, an article about a study published this month in BMJ (the British Medical Journal) that proves once and for all that laughter is harmful to your health. Yes, harmful. The BMJ article drew upon 785 actual case studies that involved laughter-incited conditions.
I don’t think I have to tell you that respect for circus has been on the rise, and not only in Europe, where circus schools and shows — both classical and “nouveau” — are thriving. In the United States, we can be grateful for the success of shows in the tradition of the European one-ring spectacle, such as the Pickle Family Circus, the Big Apple Circus, Circus Flora, and the Sarasota Circus. And of course from Canada, with Cirque du Soleil, Cirque Éloize, and a national circus school, there’s more and more happening on this front.
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.
There are a lot of books on comedy out there that try to explain how and why things are funny. Everything from how-to manuals to Freud and Bergson. I’ve shied away from them, especially the latter, which tend to be dry, over-intellectual and, well, not funny. (I dare you to read “Theories of Humor” on Wikipedia!) But I was eager to read Steve Kaplan’s book because I knew Steve back in the 80s when he ran the Manhattan Punchline Theatre. I took a workshop he led at our NYC rehearsal loft and he directed one short piece that had come out of one of my physical comedy classes.
Viterbo College, La Crosse, Wisconsin
A History by Jef Lambdin
I thought these were pretty funny! They’re from one of my favorite web sites, instructables.com, and each one comes with more photos and detailed instructions on how to build them.
When I learned in early September that Gregory Fedin had recently passed away, I looked online for obituaries and for any bio material. There was next to nothing about Gregory or his wife, Nina Krasavina, who had died of breast cancer in 1996 at the way too young age of 57. Gregory had been away from the circus scene for a long time, and was never a master of self-promotion, but still I found the neglect surprising and unfair.
Jerry Lewis’ over-the-top clowning doesn’t appeal to everyone, but in his prime he was an excellent physical comedian, not to mention being a skilled filmmaker with quite a few technical innovations to his credit. Lewis directed and starred in over twenty films, but one from 1972— The Day the Clown Cried — was intentionally never finished.
Parkour and physical comedy have a lot in common: a similar technical vocabulary, creativity interacting with real-world physical structures, and many of the same heroes — Buster Keaton, Douglas Fairbanks, Georges Hébert. I’ve already written extensively about all that in this earlier post, one of my personal favorites, so today I just want to alert you to this NY Times article:
Johnny Hutch, one of the unsung heroes of physical comedy, would have been 100 years old today. As things turned out, he not only made it past his 93rd birthday, but remained active as an acrobatic performer until age 69, and as a teacher and choreographer late into life, last working as a stunt coordinator for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the age of 87. He was also married to the same woman, Jane Phillips, for 66 years, passing away — probably not coincidentally — months after she did in 2006.
Huh? Orson Welles? The guy whose “first film” Citizen Kane made movie history in 1941?
Yes, right here! I hit the jackpot this past weekend, and of course I’m sharing the wealth with you. Here’s the story….
I was researching something else on Dominique Jando’s excellent Circopedia web site (which I highly recommend!) and came across this gem and thought it worth a cross-posting. After all, if I had never seen this it’s likely many of you haven’t either.
After six months with only a handful of posts, this blog is back, and what better way to restart than with something sublimely silly: Japanese Synchronized Walking!
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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