Tag: Ernie Kovacs
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.
Clown friends come to my apartment, look at all my books and DVDs, and are impressed with how much I must know. I do the same thing at my doctor’s office. All those thick volumes line the walls. Surely he’s read them all. He does know what he’s doing, right? Right??
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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