Tag: Sid Caesar
Sid Caesar (1922–2014), who I worked with VERY briefly (full story here), was one of the truly great American comedians. He was also the King of Gibberish, fluent in faking many a foreign language. I hadn’t seen Gallipacci until Riley Kellogg recently ran across it and clued me in, but it’s already one of my favorite Caesar pieces. And what an ensemble! That’s Nanette Fabray as Pagliacci’s wife, who in fact had opera training at Juilliard (despite a serious childhood hearing problem). Carl Reiner, partner to Mel Brooks and father to Rob, is the rival. And Howard Morris is the elfish Vesuvio. The score is —shall we say?— eclectic.
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.
And Imogene Coca my mother. But only for a day or two, and not as publicly as I might have liked.
TRANSLATE THIS PAGE
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