Tag: Burlesque
Remember the excitement you all felt when you decided that, gosh darn it, we’re going to convert this run-down junk heap into a snazzy theatre and put on a show that will knock ’em dead? Well, that kind of enthusiasm no doubt predates Mickey Rooney by a few millennia, but he sure did come to personify it in all those MGM movies with Judy Garland. And what better representative of the eternal optimism of show business than Rooney? At 93, he was not only one of the last of the vaudevillians—having joined his parents’ act at the age of 17 months—but was even a veteran of the silent film era. Just a couple of weeks ago (!!) a print was found of Mickey’s Circus from 1927, in which he played the ringmaster of a kids’ circus.
When movies started to sound the death knell for vaudeville and burlesque houses, one fortunate by-product was the preservation of physical comedy routines on film. Performers and sketch writers transitioning to the latest media naturally made use of the bag of tricks they’d spent half their life crafting. Some of these films were slapdash affairs, hardly memorable as cinematic art, and seemed destined to be forgotten. But survive they did, thanks to the advent of DVDs and Netflix streaming, and it turns out there are diamonds to be found in these rough cuts.
Think Abbott & Costello and you think Who’s on First? and other classic verbal routines from the heyday of burlesque. Lots of intricate wordplay, the comic effect multiplied by Lou Costello’s expressive reactions. While Bud Abbott stands there, calm and “reasonable,” his feet firmly planted, Costello’s takes and double-takes convulse his body, a quivering bowl of jello on the verge of spilling over. More robust movement — I’m talking dance, acrobatics, slapstick — is seen less often in their work, which is why I enjoyed the following piece so much.
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.
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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