Tag: Rube Goldberg
When I was setting up The (Very) Physical Comedy Institute in 2014, I heard from a prospective student who said he was a kinetic artist who had been building Rube Goldberg machines for many years and was now trying to integrate human performance into his work —thus his interest in physical comedy. It was Joseph Herscher, a New Zealander living in Brooklyn, and though I didn’t know Joseph personally, I’d actually read about his work (which has millions of hits on YouTube) and had even done a blog post on him way back in 2012.
When it comes to popular music, I’m a few decades behind, but I do pay some attention to music videos. So while I don’t really follow the music of the band OK Go, I do know their videos play a lot with physical comedy, and I couldn’t help wonder why. Did one of the performers have a weakness for our favorite form of merriment, or was it a particular choreographer or director they were working with?
Parkour and Rube Goldberg both overlap with the athleticism and inventiveness of physical comedy, and I’ve already written about them on this blog, especially here and here. And while parkour freerunners usually tackle found environments, here’s a wild video of parkour being staged on what may be the world’s largest Rube Goldberg machine. It features German freerunner Jason Paul and was sponsored by Red Bull™. Best viewed at full screen!
Rube Goldberg was an inventor and cartoonist born the same year as Max Linder (1883), which is to say a few years after Mack Sennett and a few years before Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel. He drew popular cartoons of elaborate gadgets that performed simple tasks in the most convoluted way imaginable.
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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