Tag: Slapstick
The Wiere Brothers (previous post) are a hard act to follow. It’s like when my clown partner Fred Yockers and I were in the Hubert Castle Circus and had to go on after the boxing kangaroo.
This has had 10,000+ YouTube hits, so maybe you’ve seen it before but it’s here because this particular dog has clearly read my earlier post, Beating Yourself Up for Fun & Profit, and is no doubt channeling his inner Donald O’Connor, Michael Richards, and Rowan Atkinson. And why not? Fighting yourself has to be one of the quintessential slapstick gags: it’s physically difficult, it’s mime, it’s absurdist humor…. it’s barf-irrific.
Clown is to physical comedy as what is to what?
Here’s a curiosity I stumbled upon while sitting in a bar with some clowns in Vilnius (Lithuania) this summer. In one of those rare moments when television coverage wasn’t devoted to the Olympics, our eyes all took notice of a slaphappy video playing on the tv above us. I am proud to say that I was still sober enough to write down the name that flashed on the screen at the end. I guess it must have been early in the evening.
It doesn’t open until April 13, 2012, but the first trailer for the new Three Stooges movie is out. With our iconic childhood heroes creepily leering after nuns and making an appearance on the Jersey Shore reality tv show, it’s clear we’re not in Kansas any more. Iconic, yes; moronic, very likely; ironic, no.
According to co-director Peter Farrelly, “They are Moe, Larry, Curly as you remember them. It’s not a biopic. It’s the episodes just as you saw but we rewrote, we have all new episodes. We have three episodes. Technically, each episode picks up where the last one left off. Each one begins with its own theme, so it’s about an hour and 25 minutes. Three episodes, fun, old-fashioned, but it takes place present-day, and they look, dress and sound like the Three Stooges.”
Yep, that’s what Wikipedia says: “Physical comedy, also known as slapstick…” And if you go on the Discussions page for their physical comedy entry, you read “I propose this article to be merged with the Slapstick article. There are a lot of information on this article that is much the same in the slapstick article, and hence redundant. In my opinion, the two articles will be more informative and detailed when merged.”
In July, I did a post on Beating Yourself Up for Fun & Profit. Good stuff, if I don’t say so myself. Planning my Bloomfield College visual effects class for the fall reminded me of this pretty sharp VW commercial. All VFX, but a variation on the same theme…
Christopher Lueck, producer and host of The New York Downtown Clown Monthly Revue, has a new project, teaching slapstick comedy by means of instructional videos offered through his new website, LearnSlapstick.com. Here’s the infomercial you’ll see if you go to the site.
If you’ve ever played around with slapstick or stage combat, and I’m betting you have, you know that the victim’s reaction is key to selling the effect. As my old friend Joe Martinez put it, what we’re doing is Combat Mime, the illusion of fighting, not the painful reality. It’s not surprising, then, that many a comedian has had the clever idea of eliminating the attacker altogether, of playing victim to an imaginary foe.
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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