Tag: Book Report
Clowns make great subjects for paintings, but what I like about the clown cartoons of Scapa is that you get the clown in action — perfect for a physical comedy blog. I discovered these over thirty years ago, at the time in the form of a coffee-table book, which has long since gone missing. I hadn’t been able to find a copy since then, but was thrilled when my sweetheart Riley surprised me with a new (smaller format) edition of it for Christmas.
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.
This is the second of four posts in remembrance of the life and work of Ken Feit, “itinerant fool.”
The only chance you or I will have to see Bill Irwin play the fool in King Lear (see previous post, below) would be a visit to the NY Public Library for the Performing arts, whose Theatre on Film & Tape Archive offers a second chance to see most of the major shows mounted in New York, as well as a few regional offerings. (Not guaranteeing they’ll have it, though.) Meanwhile you can have a lot of LOL fun by diving into the wacky antics of Christopher Moore’s 2009 novel, Fool, a loose and raunchy retelling of King Lear from the fool’s point of view.
Old joke:
Two professors chatting.
First Professor: I say, Rodney, have you read Derrida’s treatise on grammatology?
Second Professor: Read it? I haven’t even taught it!
Let the Great World Spin
a novel by Colum McCann
NY: Random House, 2009
349 pages
Why We Make Mistakes
by Joseph T. Hallinan
(NY: Broadway Books, 2009); hardcover, 283 pp.
All those popular entertainments that we associate with physical comedy — circus, pantomime, street performance, to name just a few — have always been the poor cousins of the so-called legitimate theatre. A few centuries back, when ruling royalty wanted to clamp down on public expression, they only granted theatrical licenses to a couple of theatres, relegating everything else to the streets and the fairground.
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