Tag: Lupino Lane
Here’s a Winter Solstice-Chanukah-Christmas-Kwanza-New Year’s present for you, a compilation of Santa’s favorite physical comedy acts. This year you’re being gifted self-contained acts, not physical comedy that’s part of a narrative, which is why there are no movie clips from Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd, and the rest of the gang in your stocking. Sure, some of these 13 acts are from movies, but they were just snuck in there like whiskey in the eggnog to punch things up.
The harlequinade is the holy grail of physical comedy.
Yes, the blog is back! I’ve pretty much been away from it for a year as I worked on a new book (see sidebar), but I’ve got plenty of new stuff to share. Well, this post’s new stuff is actually quite old, but I’m sure new to most of you: a tutorial on pratfalls from silent film great Lupino Lane’s out-of-print book, How to Become a Comedian.
Chain of Fools
Silent Comedy and Its Legacies
from Nickelodeons to YouTube
by Trav S.D.
Trav S.D. —oddly enough named after his gritty home town in the middle of South Dakota’s Badlands — is a so-good-he’s-bad vaudevillian: a performer, producer, historian, popularizer, and blogger whose popular blog Travalanche is a must for the variety arts fan.
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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