On Losing the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. (Again)

[post 454] 

Despite its enduring popularity, not everyone reads The New Yorker, so some quick background: Founded a century ago primarily as a humor magazine, The New Yorker is known for its fiction writing, in-depth journalism and, yes, still for its humor, in the form of essays and cartoons. The cartoon caption contest is a relatively new feature: a cartoon illustration is presented and readers submit what they think is the funniest caption. Magazine editors select three finalists and readers vote to choose a winner. I've entered a few times and, inexplicably, never won. Well, they do average over 5,000 contestants per cartoon, so....

Which brings us to the captionless cartoon above, drawn by Mik Stevens and appearing in the October 13, 2025 issue. I haven't read the thousands of answers submitted, but below are some samples. 

Many of them play on such clichés as the clown car and oversized clown shoes: 

• "I can’t find your appointment. Have you checked inside your ear?”
• "My boss is busy right now, but if you want to leave your card, I’ll turn it in to a scarf”.
• "Wanna join the carpool? We can always squeeze you in."
• "Coffee, tea, balloon animal?"
• “Would you like some seltzer while you wait?”
• "You'll have some really big shoes to fill."
• “He was juggling too many things on his own, so he hired me.”
• “There are fourteen other clowns under this desk.”
• "Please take a seat, and feel free to honk the nose if you need anything.”
• "He’ll be with you in a minute. Can I offer you a custard pie while you wait?"
• "Yeah, I know. Four years of Clown College and I end up with an admin position.” [4 years??]

The clown being Trump's personal assistant was of course a frequent theme:

• “I have an appointment to see the President…”

• "I’m sorry. The president’s cabinet is full."
• "The previous secretary didn't represent the values and goals of the current administration."
• “It’s not required, but if you want to work for this administration, it doesn’t hurt.”

Yeah, those are mostly groaners. I thought these were some of the better ones:
• "No one told you? It's face-your-fear Friday."
•. "I was assigned 'not funny' at birth"
• “Welcome to Pagliacci and Cohen.”
• “You know what they say, dress for the job you want.”
• “The mime had terrible phone etiquette.” 
• “He didn’t define business casual, and I didn’t ask.”
• “I just knew I wanted something different for my life, so I ran away and joined the office.”

And these two mined famous quotes:

• "Funny how? I make you laugh? I’m here to amuse you??" (Goodfellas)
• “Don’t bother. I’m here.” (Send in the Clowns)

And what was my caption? I can't locate my exact submission from 3 months ago, but I remember disliking the image of the clown being presented, so I chose to comment on that. It went something like this: "Oh, me? I'm only in this cartoon to help The New Yorker perpetuate stupid media images of the clown." I still can't figure out why I didn't win.

And now to the winners:
1. "The boss has an irrational fear of secretaries."
2. "Let me warm him up for you."
3. "You're getting a raise, but it involves stilts."

I like the winner enough, but find the other two pretty meh. I'm such a sore loser! 

Guest Post by Hank SmithBert Williams: Somebody

[post 453] 

I recently had an important experience in Minneapolis, which was working on a play called Nobody No Time, written by Carlyle Brown, a good friend from way back. The play is about Bert Williams and the title is in reference to the song Nobody, which he made popular and co-wrote with Alex Rogers. Since Carlyle knows of my background in mime and African-American performance history, he brought me out to Minneapolis to be the choreographer and dramaturge for the play, which he also directed. But who was Bert Williams, and why was this an important experience for me?

In the early 1970s, I became interested in studying mime, and then performing it. Even though I appreciated someone like Marcel Marceau and liked what he did, I had no interest in going to France to study because I felt more influenced by American vaudeville, and seeing folks on TV like Sid Caesar, Dick Van Dyke, Joan Davis, Buster Keaton, Laurel & Hardy, Jackie Gleason, Art Carney, Red Skelton, Lucille Ball and others who were all adept at communicating very well with their bodies. In fact, the mime group I helped form, the Garden Variety Mime Theater, did all kinds of vaudeville-like stuff, and we often were not silent! At the time, a new generation of performers were doing what became known as "New Mime" and "New Vaudeville," but I did not know of many Black performers doing it, and I definitely was not aware of any historical Black performers of mime or pantomime (still not sure how different those terms are) until I found out about Bert Williams.

I had been doing a lot of research about early Black performers and knew a bit about Bert Williams and his partner of many years, George Walker. These were men who were part of an era of Black theater artists at the transition into the 20th century who were doing a lot to affect the American stage. People like Black Patti, Bob Cole, Will Marion Cook, J. Rosamond Johnson, James Reese Europe, and more, who came out of minstrelsy and the blackface tradition, begun by white male performers. But when I found out more about Williams, and particularly of his work with the Ziegfeld Follies after George Walker's death, I learned of his great skills in pantomime. Putting on a mask, whether it is clown makeup, whiteface mime, or blackface intrigued me in terms of what it could do for a person creatively. One doesn't necessarily hide behind a mask when performing, but rather is in a way liberated behind the mask to thrust a hidden part of his or her personality or observations of human behavior onto the stage. My understanding is that Bert Williams, a light-skinned man from the Bahamas, originally did not perform in blackface, but put it on one day and found that it unleashed his comic skills. The character he developed, as he called it, was an everyday man who always had things go wrong for him. He became the first Black star to be part of the Ziegfeld Follies, where he once played the father of white entertainer, Eddie Cantor, who later wrote that Williams was the best comedy teacher he ever had. As a child, Buster Keaton even imitated him. Here was a role model for me, and I read what I could about him and even did a thesis on him and Stepin Fetchit (look him up!) for my NYU Master's degree.

Being able to help tell the story of this man on stage meant a lot to me. To do it with Carlyle, who is not only a playwright but also a performer who shares with me a love of the variety arts, particularly when Black folks are involved, was special. And it was being presented by Illusion Theater an independent theater company begun 50 years ago with the original name, Illusion Mime Theater, because its work was based on physical theater. In fact, one of its co-founders, Michael Robins, studied in Paris with Etienne Decroux! Their work on social issues has brought national acclaim, and Carlyle is one of the many playwrights they have supported.

For the longest time, the only footage available of Bert Williams that I was aware of were two 1916 short films, A Natural Born Gambler and Fish. Gambler is important because it includes Williams’ famous poker routine, and both films were to be followed by more starring him, but no more were made apparently because of concerns as to how many films with a Black star would go over in certain parts of the country.

But in 2014 I went to a screening at the Museum of Modern Art of recently discovered rare footage of him from a 1913 film called, Lime Kiln Club Field Day. The film was never completed but contained a large predominantly Black cast, which included members of J. Leubrie Hill's Darktown Follies stage company, and was shot in a studio in my native borough of The Bronx and on location in New Jersey.

Of the many things that struck me as I watched the film was a reaffirmation of how good and funny a silent film can be. The packed house was cracking up and the best humor was in the nuances of facial expression and body attitude, not in “over the top” slapstick. It was also refreshing to see Black folks just being people, finely dressed up and just living their lives. There was evidence of Black vernacular dance \ that was very familiar to me and a breadth of a whole world in images that evoked in me memories of stories my parents told me of growing up in the early 20th century (they being born in 1905 and 1906). Even with this, there were divides as to who got to do what in the film. The female love interest was light-skinned and her suitors, other than Bert in makeup, were not too dark and with apparent "good hair." The darker-skinned women and men were more often exaggerated in their roles and movements and you could see some cast members were in blackface and some were not. But overall, I was sitting there spellbound. I was feeling all kinds of stuff in terms of my connection to a particular cultural/performance tradition, and to the art of film.

George Walker, Bert Williams, Aida

Overton Walker (wife of George Walker)

What got me the most was at the end of the screening. The curtains closed on the screen and then the piano accompanist, Donald Sosin, who did a great job, stood up and raised his hands toward the curtained screen to lead the audience in enthusiastic applause that lasted for quite a while. Here, finally, was a full house giving Bert Williams his due as a film star, 100 years after the fact. One of the hosts of the evening said it is believed the film wasn't finished because Birth of A Nation had come out and created such a reaction that the filmmakers felt people weren't ready to see a film populated with a range of Black characters who are not all stereotyped. Yes, wearing blackface is a complicated issue, and Williams was not always admired for doing it. He had wanted to do more dramatic roles without the makeup, but felt he would not be accepted. W.C. Fields supposedly said that Williams was the funniest man he ever saw, and the saddest. But one wonders what would have happened if Williams had had the film opportunities that someone like Charlie Chaplin had. As much as I admire Chaplin, Bert Williams would have given him a run for his money.

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• Hank's tap dance blog: https://storyoftap.blogspot.com/
• In 2023, I had the pleasure of spending two days interviewing Hank for the Oral History Project of the Program in Dance at New York's Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts. The edited interview has yet to appear on their website, but here's where you can check for it, as well as check out some of the other interviews with great dance performers: https://www.nypl.org/research/divisions/jerome-robbins-dance-division/oral-history-project-dance
• A review of the Minneapolis production.

• If you keep scrolling down in the right column of this page, you will see links to other guest posts that have appeared here. I very much welcome guest posts so long as you have expertise in the topic, have something new or little-known to say, and are not merely publicizing yourself. But the best part is you get the same pay I get for doing this blog! If you're interested, just get in touch and we'll talk.

Happy 100th Birthday, Dick Van Dyke!!

 [post 452]

I've already written a lot about Dick Van Dyke and don't want to repeat myself too much here, but as an intro to his work for those of you new to it, here's a classic piece from his long-running tv comedy series, The Dick Van Dyke Show.

And in case you are imagining him at 100 as a semi-conscious, drooling sack of bones in a wheelchair, this video of Van Dyke with Coldplay is from a year ago!

Here are links to my earlier posts. I am sure the internet will be flooded with many more tributes today.

Dick Van Dyke: My Lucky Life

Dick Van Dyke on Slapstick

Dick Van Dyke at 89

But perhaps the best news is that The Dick Van Dyke Show, which ran for five seasons on CBS (1961–1966), is currently available for free on YouTube. (Though it has commercials unless you have YouTube Premium.) The show was created by Carl Reiner, and centered around the home and work life of a comedy writer, Rob Petrie (Van Dyke). Petrie is the head of the writer's room for a tv comedy show, where he collaborates daily with two other writers, played by comedy greats Rose Marie and Morey Amsterdam. Reiner modeled it on his days with The Sid Caesar Show, and in fact Reiner plays the fictitious star of the show, Alan Brady. Check it out!

And just maybe comedy is good for your health: Mel Brooks turns 100 this coming June 28th, and it was recently announced that "Mel Brooks's next major film is the highly anticipated sequel, Spaceballs 2, where he reprises his iconic role as Yogurt alongside original cast members Rick Moranis and Bill Pullman."

IN THIS CORNER, in Black & White, Undefeated in 46 silent films: Buster KeatonAND IN THE OPPOSITE CORNER, also in Black & White, Undefeated in 74 Silent Films: Charlie Chaplin

 [post 451]

Make that 76 for Chaplin if you include City Lights and Modern Times.

I already did a lengthy post, The Great Debate: Chaplin vs. Keaton, where I asked a lot of clowns and clown-adjacent folks to state and justify their preference, if they had any, for Buster Keaton vs. Charlie Chaplin. Most respondents did have a preference, with one clear winner, but of course you don't have to choose. This montage of boxing shots, uploaded to YouTube by one Vincenzo Occhionero (thank you very much!), shows the marvelous (physical) comedy talents of both as they tackle the classic scenario of an apparent weakling fighting a powerful brute.

 

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Of course the underdog overcoming the brawny, arrogant, and often evil adversary was a common theme in silent film comedy. Harold Lloyd mined this comic vein for all it was worth, and in his reasonably successful 1936 sound comedy, The Milky Way, Lloyd's milquetoast character even knocks out the middleweight boxing champion. You can see this (considerably less athletic) sequence here.

Neil Patrick Harris on Broadway: Not Just for Gays Anymore

[post 450] 

Here's a short, fun piece that combines song, dance, group movement, witty lyrics, audience participation, and social commentary. Featuring Neil Patrick Harris, it's from the 2011 Tony Awards celebrating Broadway Theatre. As I said when introducing the Gene Nelson post, musical comedy as a genre is usually too corny for my tastes, but I can still enjoy its many displays of robust physical comedy. I'll be dipping into this well more in future posts, but meanwhile take it away, Mr. Harris!

 

Credit Where Credit is Due
Writers: David Javerbaum and Adam Schlesinger.
Director: Glenn Weiss.
Choreographer: Warren Carlyle.

Physical Comedy is Everywhere! Exhibit A: Stephen Colbert

[post 449]

As a physical comedy aficionado, the question I get asked the most is:  “What is physical comedy exactly?” Usually I stammer and say something like, "well, you know, comedy that’s, uh,  physical."

Blank stares. 

So I try to come up with recognizable examples. Buster Keaton? Charlie Chaplin? You might be surprised how many people are not familiar with their work, even young clowns. But if they represent the heyday of physical comedy, does that mean it’s a relic of the past? After all, that was a full century ago! 

There must be some more recent examples... 

Jim Carrey? Yeah, that kinda works, though the work he’s best known for was 20–30 years ago.

Rowan Atkinson? Who? You know, Mr. Bean… That gets some recognition, but doesn't exactly close the deal.

How about today’s clowns, the ones we people in the field think of as being famous? Bill Irwin, Avner Eisenberg, James Thiérrée? Only Bill has penetrated into mass culture, but again probably less than you would think. Plenty of people have seen him acting in movies without making the connection.

All of this leads me to a new recurring blog feature: Physical Comedy is Everywhere!, in which on a semi-regular basis I will draw attention to physical comedy work being seen by millions even if they don’t recognize it as such. While many of the clown greats were Mr. or Ms. Non-Stop Physical Comedy, my examples use it as just one weapon in their arsenal. This will make sense as these posts slowly accumulate, but today let’s start with Stephen Colbert…

Even if you didn’t know Stephen Colbert, you probably do now, thanks to Trump conniving to get his show terminated as of this coming June. Colbert is a sharp and very political stand-up comedian, who since 2015 has hosted The Late Show on CBS, a talk show featuring his opening monolog, celebrity guests, music, and occasional sketches. But especially his opening monolog. Colbert is playing himself, but from 2005-2014 he hosted The Colbert Report (both t’s silent, as if he were French), in which he played a fictitious character —a right-wing talk-show pundit who, in Colbert’s words, was "a well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot."

Most talk-show hosts sit at their desk, but Colbert rarely leaves his feet. His background is in theatre games, improv, and sketch comedy, and Del Close and Second City (Chicago) gave him his formative training. He was never a serious student of mime, but managed to develop some basic mime chops and a mime imagination doing all those theatre games and improv exercises, where props get invented literally out of thin air to fit the situation at hand.

Our first example of Colbert adding physical comedy to his stand-up is Stephen Colbert, Mime Extraordinaire, a collection of clips put together  by Third Beat Productions, a website inactive since 2015, which lists Sharilyn Johnson as its editor. Thank you Sharilyn, or whoever did this! It's the kind of painstaking archival research you can expect to find on this blog, so long as I'm not the one who has to do it.

That was put together eight years ago. The next clip, The Invisible Props Department, is from seven years ago. Funny enough but longer than it needs to be, it shows to what degree mime has been considered to be an integral component of Colbert comedy.

 One more mime clip, this one sparked by Trump's hatred of windmills:

In the next clip, the well-known actor Henry Winkler gives Stephen a lesson in physical acting.

Okay, enough mime and object manipulation, real or imaginary. Time for some (silly) song and dance.

Colbert also makes imaginative use of space to create some unexpected visual comedy. One of his gags is to have people under his desk while he is ostensibly conducting a normal talk show from above.

Another frequent device is to freeze the camera frame, Colbert moving in and out of it, leaving it oddly depopulated in his absence. There is always some comic reason for doing this, and I've seen a couple of dozen examples, but I never made actual notes on them because nobody told me I would be doing this post. And since I do want to get this post out, I will stop here. If I find any in the future, I will add them, or if any kind reader can point me in that direction I would be happy to share them and grateful for your help. And there's a free subscription to the blog in it for you. Yeah, I am aware that the blog is free, but it's the thought that counts.

That should be enough Colbert physicality for you to make my point. Just because physical comedy is not a performer's entire m.o. does not mean that it's not a key part of their act. And you will see in future posts that I have dozens of examples of physical comedy being everywhere.

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• If you're keeping score as to what percentage of comedians had sad childhoods, add Colbert to the list. When he was ten, his father and two of his brothers died in an airplane crash.
• The Wikipedia bio of Colbert is quite thorough.
• One of Colbert's greatest and most controversial moments was as keynote speaker at the 2006 Washington, D.C. Correspondents' Dinner, where he brutally satirized not only the entire press corps, but also President Bush, who was sitting at the speakers table, all of two seats away. You can see it here.

Gene Nelson: (Almost) The Next Gene Kelly

 [post 448]

Most Hollywood musical comedies are too schmaltzy for my tastes, so until recently I didn't even know who Gene Nelson was. But many of these movie musical comedy performers from the 40s and 50s were wonderfully skilled and talented, and a great example is Gene Nelson, a highly athletic dancer and, later on, a highly successful TV and film director. Nelson was an engaging and charismatic performer, but what I especially like when I think of him in terms of physical comedy is the way he incorporated our physical world into so much of his choreography—furniture, props, pianos, walls, stairs —pretty much everything that surrounds him, whether nailed down or not. It was all an excuse for improbable dancing, leaping, bouncing, and swinging.

Originally, this post was supposed to feature a single video and take me less than an hour to put together, but instead I had a hard time narrowing it down to only these six clips. And that's just to get you started! He did A LOT, and between 1950 and 1953 was in ten movies! So yeah, there's more on YouTube, including one with Ronald Reagan (before he was president).

The first clip is his brilliant stair dance from Tea for Two (1950), starring Doris Day and Gordon MacRae. (No, I haven't seen the movie.)

Most song & dance performers had a few hat moves and cane manipulations in their repertoire; it went with the territory. But once again, Nelson excelled. This clip is from The West Point Story, also from 1950.

Also from 1950 from the movie The Daughter of Rosie O'Grady we get this eccentric dance with June Haver, choreographed to George Botsford's 1910 Chatterbox Rag. Years earlier, when Haver was already a known quantity and Nelson a minor player, she had helped him gain more recognition in Hollywood, introducing him to her agent, who was also the agent for none other than Gene Kelly.

Mention should also be made of his great leaping ability. He loved to jump onto grand pianos, as in this clip from a 1954 appearance on Colgate Comedy Hour.

Our fifth clip is an amazingly singing acrobatic dance sequence from She's Working Her Way Through College. (1952) This is said to have been in rehearsal for three months and taken four days to shoot. 

I thought I had never seen Nelson before, but that was only because I didn't realize he was Will Parker in the 1955 movie version of the classic musical, Oklahoma! The choreography for the show was by Agnes DeMille, and was considered to be groundbreaking because of her ability to tie in the dance with characters, emotion, and plot. Here's Nelson singing the quite funny song, Everything's Up to Date in Kansas City. Singing AND dancing AND rope spinning.

Although touted by many as the next Kelly (or the next Astaire), Nelson never rose to that level of stardom. Serious injuries in the mid-50s curtailed his dance career, but it was also a period when musical comedy became less a staple in Hollywood. Times were changing. And despite his amazing talent and finely honed skill, he was not as funny as Gene Kelly (who was not as funny as Donald O'Connor). He was perfect for light comedy —adjectives such as charming and delightful spring to mind— but maybe too much so. Did he lack gravitas, or was it just because that was how he was cast? Ultimately he was more leading man material than comedian... but then nobody's perfect.

Here are some quick bio factoids gleaned from Miller Daurey's excellent Hey, Dancer! podcast. (see notes below)
👉🏻 Nelson's father was a ballroom dancer, a roller skater, and an acrobat.
👉🏻 When he was twelve and living in Santa Monica, Nelson saw Fred Astaire in Flying Down to Rio and got hooked on dance.
👉🏻 During high school, he enrolled in the Marco School of Dance in Hollywood, where Judy Garland, Anne Miller, and Rita Hayworth had studied.
👉🏻 He also got hooked on skating and got so good that he was hired for the Sonia Henie Hollywood Ice Revue. He was the first person to ever do 13 Arabian cartwheels on ice.
👉🏻 In World War II he joined the army and was in an all-soldier revue show when Irving Berlin was in the audience. (You can't make this stuff up.) This led to Berlin casting him in his show This is the Army, touring for over two years and appearing in the film as well.
👉🏻 Movie acting gigs led to him almost being cast for the lead in Easter Parade, but Fred Astaire came out of retirement and the rest is history.
👉🏻 But the movie roles gradually got bigger and bigger, leading up to Tea for Two.

👉🏻 Before shooting Oklahoma!, he took a bad fall and suffered a herniated disc. He taped up his back and kept going on. A few years later, he fell from a horse and crushed his pelvis, which curtailed his dance career, though he did make a successful comeback at the age of 51 in Follies on Broadway.

👉🏻 Meanwhile he carved out a long and highly successful career as a television director, including directing 21 episodes of The Donna Reed Show, 18 episodes of The Mod Squad, and eight episodes of The Rifleman.

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• You can view Miller Daurey's bio video of Nelson here. Very well done and entertaining. And I highly recommend his Hey, Dancer podcast, which you can find here.  As of this writing, there are 71 episodes, including documentaries on such significant dancers as Ben Vereen, Gregory Hines, Ann Reinking, the Nicholas Brothers, and Irene & Vernon Castle. 

S.Z. "Cuddles" Sakall

• The actor S.Z. ("Cuddles") Sakall, who you see in the Tea for Two clip, may be familiar to you as the waiter in Casablanca (1942); see a clip of that here. Sakall and Nelson were part of Warner Bros. "repertory" company and also appeared together in Lullaby of Broadway and The Daughter of Rosie O’Grady. The Hungarian actor was well-known in Europe and in his younger days had written a lot of comedy, including music hall sketches. He fled Hitler and made a career in Hollywood, often playing befuddled or eccentric types. IMDB has a good bio of him.

• Though hardly a great movie, This is the Army is free if you have Amazon Prime.
• Nelson got the full bio treatment just a couple of years ago from Scott O'Brien in his book Gene Nelson— Lights! Camera! Dance! (No, I haven't read it.) Coincidentally, O'Brien was a student at San Francisco State University in the 60s, I turned down a full-time teaching job there in 1987, and a year or two later Gene Nelson joined their faculty.
• Since I posted this, my friend Hank Smith added a comment which I am copying here so more people see it:
I got to meet Miriam Nelson, Gene Nelson’s wife, a number of years ago when she was honored by a tap organization. I often did presentations for whoever they honored, and did one on her, using clips of her that she provided because she was a dancer, actress and choreographer. She was very nice. This is an example of her dancing.