Tag: Comedy Acrobatics
This is an odd bit from the old Ed Sullivan Show, back in the days of early television one of the best places to see variety acts. If you think all partner balancing acts are the same, you might appreciate how the Maxwells underplay this one to comic effect. Not big belly laughs, but some nice subtle humor. I especially love the ending!
A few posts back we looked at Lou Costello taking a dance lesson. This time we see Martin & Lewis going at it. Yes, I know the world is divided into those who like Jerry Lewis and those who don’t, but whichever side you’re on I think you’ll enjoy the physical comedy moves in this piece from the old television show, the Colgate Comedy Hour. Dean Martin is the instructor, Lewis the oafish and slow-witted student. The first half is full of solo gyrations by Lewis, while the second half has some real nice partner work.
This video has a gazillion partner acrobatic tricks. I should know, I counted them. As is probably inevitable in such a fast-paced club act, the character comedy is a bit of a throw-in, sorta hit and miss, but on the other hand you get tons of terrific stuff. (One gazillion = several tons.) But who are they? This was put on YouTube by Show Pals International, but the performers are not identified, which is pretty odd if you’re trying to sell an act. Their web site is a dead-end, so maybe they’re out of business. If anyone knows, drop me a line!
In my previous post, The Fine Art of Impaling Oneself on Heavy Metal Objects, we saw knockabout artists from the past six decades knock into poles, pedestals, platforms, ladders, wire cable and, of course, the ground. This time we take a gentler approach, with a sampling of “quick-change” comedians who have found ingenious ways to get dressed in public and, in the case of a chap named Keaton, an actual reason to do so.
So here’s the idea: (non-comedic) acrobatic performers usually execute a series of graceful tricks in order of apparent difficulty. Comedy acrobats use many of the same skills, and may perhaps finish with a flourish of standard tricks, but their m.o. is to emphasize clumsiness or eccentric movement over grace, and indeed to transform whatever (heavy metal) apparatus they’re on into one big obstacle. That pedestal, that ladder becomes an excuse for missteps, pratfalls, and (hopefully mock) pain. Getting there is more than half the fun.
I’m a semi-serious runner, so I’ve put in my hours on the treadmill, but I never had this much fun. This is OK Go performing Here It Goes Again (The Treadmill Video).
I’m a big baseball fan, I coached Little League for something like seven years, and I still like to play, though I prefer a game of softball, the kind where you grab a beer as you’re rounding first. For two or three decades there was this one fantasy play that my circus brain always used to dream of. And now here it is, done for real and captured on video! Patience is indeed a virtue.
Here’s another strong comedy acrobatic act, which you already saw a short segment of if you read my post on Charlie Rivel. That’s the Three Rebertis doing the “little bridge.” Thanks to Nicanor Cancellieri for sending me this one, which comes originally from Raffaele De Ritis, who I finally got to meet in Barcelona, and whose blogs, Novelties & Wonders and Storia del Circo, are well worth your time. Raffaele is also one of the brains behind the Circopedia web site, the internet’s best English-language resource for circus history.
It is my last night in Barcelona and Jango Edwards brought together for dinner all of the clown / circus /variety historians he could muster in the person of Raffaele De Ritis, whose blog, Novelties and Wonders, is indeed full of wonders; Pat Cashin, whose Clown Alley blog is the place to go for all things clown; Greg DeSanto, director of the International Clown Hall of Fame and Research Center; and yours truly. Or to paraphrase John F. Kennedy, there hasn’t been a greater concentration of clown knowledge at one table since Tristan Rémy dined alone.
Pure acrobatics operates in a precise world where time and 3D space intersect in ways even Einstein could not have imagined without vaudeville. As my old Russian circus teacher Gregory Fedin put it, “if you are able to see space, the acrobat has to go through it… go with the curves, like the tracks of a railway.”
If you’re not into musicals then you’ve probably never seen MGM’s 1954 movie, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Starring Howard Keel and Jane Powell, the movie is especially known for its robust dances, choreographed by Michael Kidd, whose Broadway and Hollywood credits are about as impressive as you can get.
In the most recent entry to this blog, guest poster Jeff Raz left us off in Japan, so while we’re all there let’s just hop one country to our left and pay a visit to China and the Beijing Opera. (Or as we called it back in the good old days, Red China and the Peking Opera.)
This one has recently surfaced on Facebook and YouTube, but probably most of you haven’t seen it yet, so let’s add it to my early film collection, complete with all the background info.
Hey guys, imagine you lived in a city where every move you made was a death-defying Hollywood stunt. Well, if you think that might get you a little wet under the arms, then you need Rexona, the man’s deodorant. That’s what I learned from this funny enough commercial, Stunt City. It was filmed in Australia for a UK audience and won a Gold Lion at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in 2005. Directed by Ivan Zacharias; visual effects by The Mill.
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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