List of Posts
Any idea what a 30-second Super Bowl commercial cost this year? Wanna guess? Sure, go ahead… No, not a million dollars. Not two, three or four, but over five million. For 30 seconds. For real. And some of these are a full minute. No wonder the sponsors go out of their way to create memorable ads, succeeding enough that some people say they just watch the game for the commercials.
Most practitioners and aficionados of physical comedy, myself included, have a strong preference for either Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin. So I asked dozens of people in the field to share their perspective in a paragraph or two. The results were fascinating and insightful. Enjoy!
A couple of weeks ago I was interviewed over Skype by Abraham Dover for his podcast, Ridiculous: Life of a Clown. I had fun, and you can see the results here.
In the 1980s I kept hearing a lot about a highly-regarded physical comedy act by the clown Flip, a member of the New England troupe, Loco-Motion Vaudeville. Loco-Motion had impressed everyone mightily at the annual convention of the International Jugglers Association (IJA), winning Bronze in 1979. They later moved their operation to Key West, and Flip ended up resettling in Australia, and I never saw the act.
Bottom Line: I wouldn’t review this book if I didn’t like it. I liked it a lot. I think you will too.
Here’s a Winter Solstice-Chanukah-Christmas-Kwanza-New Year’s present for you, a compilation of Santa’s favorite physical comedy acts. This year you’re being gifted self-contained acts, not physical comedy that’s part of a narrative, which is why there are no movie clips from Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd, and the rest of the gang in your stocking. Sure, some of these 13 acts are from movies, but they were just snuck in there like whiskey in the eggnog to punch things up.
Way back in the day, 1980 to be precise, when I was working with Joe Killian and Michael Zerphy, whenever we saw other performers do a bit we really liked, we’d say “consider it stolen!” I think the phrase originated with Joe, but he may have stolen it.
I collect cartoons —even wrote a book that had some great ones! Of course, I collect those that have something to do with physical comedy, directly or indirectly. One of my favorite cartoonists is Dan Piraro, whose Bizarro strip is consistently funny, on a daily basis no less. He seems to have a special interest in clowns and variety performers. Many of his cartoons are based on clichés —the clown car, the custard pie in the face, balloon animals, etc.— but a good number of them are still pretty damn funny. Here are some of my favorites. Enjoy!
The Wiere Brothers (previous post) are a hard act to follow. It’s like when my clown partner Fred Yockers and I were in the Hubert Castle Circus and had to go on after the boxing kangaroo.
When I want to sound old, I like to tell the youngins about how it wasn’t always quite so easy to study the work of the classic physical comedians. I’m talkin’ back in the day, before YouTube, before the internet, before DVDs and CD-ROMs, yes even before our obscure heroes showed up on VHS. Yep, in the 1970s, we’d have to wait for one of the movie revival houses in Manhattan to run an annual festival of the works of Keaton or Lloyd or Chaplin. We’d go to the Elgin (now the Joyce) and study Keaton’s shorts like the Holy Grail. And when I say we, I mean it seemed like half the clowns in NYC were in the audience, worshipping and taking notes.
“Memoirs of Mime for all Time –The Emergence of Physical Theatre in the 21st Century” by Louis H. Campbell
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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