List of Posts
Usually when I do a 100th-birthday salute, the subject of my adulation has long since cast off their mortal coil. Not so “Professor” Irwin Corey, who joins Bob Hope and George Burns in making it into 3-digit territory and proving that comedy is good for your health. Born in Brooklyn a century ago today, the self-proclaimed “World’s Foremost Authority” is, as I write this, celebrating his 100th birthday not far from me in Manhattan. Yahoo!
Another holiday, another excuse to share a sampling of cartoons and pics to satisfy your physical comedy appetite. If you like these, make sure you didn’t miss your…
Christmas stocking
Valentine’s Day chocolates
Premio de Primavera
Easter basket
Cinco de Mayo Piñata
As always, click on any image to enlarge…
I haven’t posted lately because I’ve been so busy with preparations for The (Very) Physical Comedy Institute, which starts in eight days (three student slots still available!), but here’s a short treat in the meantime. It’s a sweet dance number from My Sister Eileen (1955), choreographed by the great Bob Fosse, performed by Fosse (in the white shirt) and Tommy Rall, and filled with physical comedy vocabulary. Enjoy!
Holidays have become an excuse for me to share a sampling of physical comedy morsels with you. They’re each too small to merit their own blog post, but delicious and nutritious nonetheless. If you like these, make sure you didn’t miss your…
According to the title of one of Norman Mailer’s novels, Tough Guys Don’t Dance.
I like parkour and I’ve already written several posts about it. I like it not only because it’s cool and acrobatic and creative, but because its use of the existing environment and everyday objects has a lot in common with physical comedy. No wonder that many parkour devotees adopt Douglas Fairbanks and Buster Keaton as their patron saints.
If you excitedly ripped open your physical comedy Christmas stocking, if you quickly devoured your physical comedy Valentine’s Day chocolates, if you got all giddy over this spring’s Premio de Primavera, then you’ll be hopping like crazy over the dozen goodies the Easter Bunny just brought you. One hundred percent recycled from my private collection and from links that came by way of such usual suspects as Drew Richardson, Lee Faulkner, Greg DeSanto, and no doubt other folks who I am forgetting. As usual, click on any image to enlarge.
Chain of Fools
Silent Comedy and Its Legacies
from Nickelodeons to YouTube
by Trav S.D.
Trav S.D. —oddly enough named after his gritty home town in the middle of South Dakota’s Badlands — is a so-good-he’s-bad vaudevillian: a performer, producer, historian, popularizer, and blogger whose popular blog Travalanche is a must for the variety arts fan.
THE MISHAPS OF MUSTY SUFFER
Starring Harry Watson Jr.
Fresh on the heels of my posts on George Campo, comic acrobat and eccentric dancer, comes this clip of the clown Kotini Junior. Born in Ukraine in 1967, he won a break dancing competition there in 1986, and has toured with Cirque du Soleil and Zirkus Roncalli. In this impressive clip, he melds a frantic, madman clown character with eccentric dance—much like Campo—and with break dance, and also like Campo centering it around a stubborn chair. Enjoy!
Do the Keystone Kops ride again? This “dumbest cops” video has gone viral, initially billed as “actual bank robbery in Detroit.”
Gibberish — the sort that imitates a foreign language without using its actual vocabulary — is the physical comedy of words. Stripped of their dictionary meaning, words become physical actions, all sound and movement, intonation and rhythm. Gibberish has made for some great comic bits as well as some useful improvisational exercises. Viola Spolin, in her seminal work Improvisation for the Theatre defines gibberish as “meaningless sounds substituted for recognizable words so as to force the players to communicate by physicalizing” — and she includes several gibberish exercises.
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