List of Posts
We live in an age of accomplishment, of bigger, better, and the only. Circus and humor are hardly immune to this credo of the modern age. Enter Circus Oz. What this reviewer thought was an allusion to the L. Frank Baum novel is, in actuality, a clever twist on the land from which the troupe is based, Australia. Oz stands for “Aussie,” which here becomes their own mystical land.
Only five days to the new Three Stooges movie! (See previous post.) It’s directed by Peter and Bobby Farrelly, whose many film credits include Dumb & Dumber (1994); the main characters in that one, you may recall, were Harry and Lloyd (get it?).
First we had this post about mimes directing traffic in Caracas, Venezuela, and now by way of my old friend Jim Jackson comes news that the mayor of Paris is employing “nocturnal artistic intervention squads” to help quiet down rowdy late-night partiers.
Hey, I’m 63 and still going strong, still doing triathlons and still teaching physical comedy, but I’m nothing compared to this grand dame, Johanna Quaas.
There’s a thriving clown-theatre scene in New York, but unless you’re Bill Irwin or perhaps Slava, you’re not likely to get reviewed by major publications such as the New York Times. An exception to that is the three-clown, two-musician, one-hour show, That Beautiful Laugh, which just concluded a sold-out two-week run at the La MaMa Theatre Club. No doubt the appearance of a celebrity —movie and tv actor Alan Tudyk — as the head clown helped the publicity effort. The good news is that Tudyk is quite good, and to me at least showed more range as a clown than did his two partners, Carlton Ward and Julia Ogilvie, though Ward does prove to be the most physical performer, both in terms of character movement and tricks.
Here’s a rather amazing oddity, two politicians discussing an issue as though they lived in some parallel knockabout universe. According to its YouTube poster, Ambrosia Voyeur: “Frank Mitchell as Senator Danforth and Jack Durant as Senator Short resolve their rivalry through comic vaudevillian tussling. From the 1934 film Stand Up and Cheer, the working title of which was Fox Follies.” Thanks to Drew Richardson and Randy Kovitz for the link!
The free live broadcasts of Christopher Lueck’s Clown Summit interviews, which I wrote about here, have come and gone, but not to worry — you can now purchase a permanent copy. It’s $17 to download all the mp3s, or $37 for a complete set of CDs. Well worth checking out!
One of Monty Python’s more physical comic sketches. Thanks to Justin Bowen for the link.
World Circus Culture is a new documentary film by Angela Snow that follows five top international circus acts on their road to the Monte Carlo Circus Festival, where they are competing for the “Golden Clown” award. One of the performers is in fact a clown, Rob Torres of the United States. The admirable intention is to showcase the life, history, and culture of the circus on a global scale.
And Imogene Coca my mother. But only for a day or two, and not as publicly as I might have liked.
Ben Robinson’s decades of writing credits include the book Magic & the Silent Clowns and a recent article for this blogopedia, Keaton the Conjuror, where you can also read more about his long and fascinating career in magic.
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.
Not only did The Artist score a touchdown for silent films with its five Academy Awards, but the prize for best animated short went to The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, a movie “inspired, in equal measures, by Hurricane Katrina, Buster Keaton, The Wizard of Oz, and a love for books.” Fans of Buster will recognize the physical resemblance (and the pork-pie hat), but the movie goes further by paying tribute to such stormy Keaton movies as One Week and Steamboat Bill, Jr., as well as to the dance virtuosity of Chaplin’s tramp.
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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