Tag: Dance
I will state categorically that Jerry Lewis (1926–2017) was a top-notch physical comedian, skilled and often very funny, and I’ve already written about him in four previous posts (see below). Comedy is to some degree a matter of taste, and Lewis sure had his supporters and detractors. He was a megastar, who by 1959 had signed the highest-paying Hollywood contract ever, and one with unprecedented artistic control. But as the years passed he was dismissed by many as being corny, abrasive, over-the-top and, well, tasteless. Not funny!
When I want to sound old, I like to tell the youngins about how it wasn’t always quite so easy to study the work of the classic physical comedians. I’m talkin’ back in the day, before YouTube, before the internet, before DVDs and CD-ROMs, yes even before our obscure heroes showed up on VHS. Yep, in the 1970s, we’d have to wait for one of the movie revival houses in Manhattan to run an annual festival of the works of Keaton or Lloyd or Chaplin. We’d go to the Elgin (now the Joyce) and study Keaton’s shorts like the Holy Grail. And when I say we, I mean it seemed like half the clowns in NYC were in the audience, worshipping and taking notes.
Last night I made it out to Triskelion Arts in Williamsburg for a totally fun double-bill of comedy dance with a Valentine’s Day theme, and it got me thinking how some of the best physical comedy is to be found in the world of dance. [The double-bill was the Red Gloves’ Flannery and the Valentine’s Day Ninja, created by Billy Schultz and Geneviève Leloup; and Tough Cookie Dance’s Love Letters, by Josselyn Levinson. If you happen to be reading this on Valentine’s Day in NYC, don’t miss the last performance tonight.]
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!
I’ve already written about Abbott & Costello’s “Who’s on First” in this post, which is chock full of interesting stuff, but now I have three more takes on it to share with you.
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.
Here’s another gem from the Pathé vaults, again courtesy of Betsy Baytos, our Eccentric Dance quadruple threat (performer, teacher, choreographer, historian). I don’t know anything about these guys, but they’re a tap-dancing knockabout team with some sharp moves with chairs, hats, and one another. There’s no audience, so this was apparently filmed in the Pathé studios. Our gratitude to that unsung hero back at Pathé who had enough sense to get acts like these recorded on film.
Sure, you’ve all seen the “Naked Towel Dance” video that’s gone viral on YouTube, but do you know what’s behind it? Probably not, which is why you come to this here blogopedia for the full monty.
If you’ve ever taken a class with me, you know I’m fond of physical comedy involving chairs, tables, doors, stairs, etc., so you can imagine how happy I was to see this comedy chair piece featuring eccentric dancer George Campo. The clip is from a 1932 film, which Pathé lists as La Boite a Matalots, which I take to be a triple misspelling of La Boîte à Matelots (“Sailor’s Club”). I don’t know anything about Campo, but he does appear (if it’s the same performer) as a lead actor in the 1938 film Murder with Reservations and — 35 years after this clip! — doing a “vaudeville style act” on the Ed Sullivan Show (season 20, episode 25; Feb. 26, 1967).
This very funny parody of a ballet pas de deux, choreographed by Christian Spuck of the Stuttgarter Ballet, has apparently become a repertoire favorite. Here are two versions. The first, from the year 2000, features Julia Krämer and Robert Tewsley , and is performed in front of a live audience. The second, with ballerina Alicia Amatriain (male dancer not identified), has no audience but better lighting and tighter camerawork. Spoiler Alert: Neither has a dancing cow, much to my disappointment.
Another scrumptious treat from our resident eccentric dance expert, Betsy Baytos. I don’t know much about Jack Stanford, but the Pathé site where this 1935 clip comes from at least explains that he is dancing to the Hungarian Rhapsody (Franz Liszt)… but the web version is just a “preview” without the audio.
(Click image to play.)
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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