List of Posts
First Prize for Cello
produced by Pathé in 1907
Length: 2:43
from Europa Film Treasures
This is a physical comedy blog, not a circus blog, which means my main focus is on how physical comedy works rather than on reviewing circuses. However, before I get to my little piece on the delayed gag, a few words on Sweden’s Cirkus Cirkör, where I saw this really nice delayed gag and so much more Saturday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Why We Make Mistakes
by Joseph T. Hallinan
(NY: Broadway Books, 2009); hardcover, 283 pp.
“A comedian is not a man who says funny things. A comedian is one who says things funny.” —Ed Wynn
And now for something completely silly. It’s Mookie the Mimegician, who combines illusion mime with magic tricks. Think about it: now you don’t see it, and now you still don’t see it.
Amsterdam is known more for its street performance than its variety theatres, or as Charlie Frye forewarned me,”not too much Variete, except in the windows.” I loved the city, loved biking all over the place, but in my four days there this June I didn’t find much street performance either. Maybe I went at the wrong time or to the wrong place, but several trips through Dam Square netted me only one street performer, a British juggler/contortionist.
In honor of the birthday of Fannie Brice (October 29, 1891 – May 29, 1951), the inspiration for the Barbara Streisand musicals Funny Girl and Funny Lady, here’s proof that Brice was indeed quite funny. This is A Sweepstakes Ticket, a skit from the movie revue, The Ziegfield Follies (1946). There’s some great clowning and physical comedy in here by Brice, but also by Hume Cronyn in a rare broad comedy role. William Frawley, an old-time vaudevillian but best known as landlord Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy, is also the landlord here.
I just ran across this photo of Pablo Picasso (October 25, 1881 – April 8, 1973) made up as a clown and, since it’s his 128th birthday this month, I thought I’d include it with some of his circus paintings. The photo accompanied an article titled “Artists and Clowns” by Albert Faurot from the Third Quarter, 1963 edition of Silliman Journal. (No pun intended; that’s a university in the Philippines!) Note that at the time of writing Picasso still had ten years to live.
But it is physical, and it is funny in a joyous laughter kind of way. Two hundred dancers and a whole lot of hidden cameras descend upon the unsuspecting commuters at the majestic Antwerpen Central Station and go wild to the sound of my old girlfriend, Julie Andrews.
Yep, the start of another new regular feature of the blog:
If the name Georges Méliès rings a bell at all, it probably makes you think of that wacky Trip to the Moon movie from the Dawn of Film that was okay in its time, but… that time was long ago. Yes, Méliès almost single-handedly invented special effects, pioneering such techniques as stop-action substitution, dissolves, multiple exposures, and time-lapse photography, in the process creating the science-fiction film genre, but nowadays his corny sense of humor, flimsy storytelling, and overuse of the same gimmicks make the work seem dated. In fact, it was out of fashion by the time the Keystone Cops came on the scene in 1912
TRANSLATE THIS PAGE
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