Tag: Vaudeville
When movies started to sound the death knell for vaudeville and burlesque houses, one fortunate by-product was the preservation of physical comedy routines on film. Performers and sketch writers transitioning to the latest media naturally made use of the bag of tricks they’d spent half their life crafting. Some of these films were slapdash affairs, hardly memorable as cinematic art, and seemed destined to be forgotten. But survive they did, thanks to the advent of DVDs and Netflix streaming, and it turns out there are diamonds to be found in these rough cuts.
Today we celebrate the birth and career of Ray Bolger (January 10, 1904 – January 15, 1987), vaudevillian and song & dance man best known for his portrayal of the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz (1939).
“A comedian is not a man who says funny things. A comedian is one who says things funny.” —Ed Wynn
I already threw a lot of stuff at you in post 008 about the comic uses of human pyramids (On the Shoulders of Giants: From the 2-High to the 1200-High). Since then I discovered these two short but very cool clips of the Julians Acrobats from 1902-3. It’s not comedy, but the series of rapid-fire two-high, risley (foot juggling of people), and tumbling moves is fantastic. The clips are similar and very likely shot at the same time, but with some different tricks in each one. You gotta love the group choreography.
I’m no expert on Frankie Manning or the lindy hop, but both are worth knowing about regardless of any indirect connection with physical comedy. Manning made it to just short of his 95th birthday, active almost to the end, and left behind a lifetime of achievement in developing and popularizing the lindy hop. The NY Times obituary is a good starting point, but also check out the Frankie Manning web site and the Wikipedia entry.
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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