All Fall Down: The Craft & Art of Physical Comedy

[post 036]

First Prize for Cello
produced by Pathé in 1907
Length: 2:43
from Europa Film Treasures


I find comic films from the earliest days of cinema — the pre-Arbuckle, pre-Keaton, pre-Chaplin era — to be fascinating but not necessarily funny. First Prize for Cello, on the other hand, really made me laugh. I love the escalating absurdity, I love the assembly line inside the apartment (the dresser up the stairs!), and I especially love the ending. There's no directorial credit on this, but someone knew what they were doing.

Enjoy!




That ending reminds me of the George Burns story, which he used in the title of his memoir, Living it Up: or, They Still Love Me in Altoona! If I'm remembering it correctly, Burns tells of a dismal (pre-Gracie) career in vaudeville, where he was going nowhere fast. However, one night he played Altoona (Pennsylvania) and everything clicked, the audience absolutely loved him. He thought he had finally figured it all out, but in the next town and all the towns after that he continued to bomb. Still he persevered, strengthened by the knowledge that they still loved him in Altoona. And then there's our cellist, undeterred to the end and ultimately triumphant, a testament to the performer's eternal optimism.

[post 035]

This is a physical comedy blog, not a circus blog, which means my main focus is on how physical comedy works rather than on reviewing circuses. However, before I get to my little piece on the delayed gag, a few words on Sweden's Cirkus Cirkör, where I saw this really nice delayed gag and so much more Saturday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

I loved this show. No, it wasn't perfect, and yes it's quite sentimental — two "civilians" get drafted into the world of the circus and discover it's all about heart — but for me it was that rare instance of circus and theatre actually working together. I'm glad not to have read the negative NY Times review until the next day. To tell you the truth, it was odd seeing the Times being critical of a circus at all, since in the past most if not all of their circus reviews have been fluff pieces. ("Golly gee, the circus is in town and ain't that just terrific.")

Cirkör had the bad luck to be picked on by a critic, Jason Zinoman, out to prove them just a pale imitation of Cirque du Soleil. Zinoman's argument is that Cirkör's technical expertise is no match for that of their more famous counterparts: "Cirque serves up this kind of thing as an appetizer, not the main course." Zinoman's own expertise would carry more weight if — here's an idea! — he knew what he was talking about. Take his last paragraph, the only nice thing he had to say about the show: "The one true heart-pounding moment is when a woman climbs a rope in a few bounds and then, from the height of the stage, drops, plummeting almost to her death at an incomprehensible speed. No matter how many times you’ve seen that performed, your jaw still drops."

The only problem is that it wasn't a rope, but a rigid pole, a traditional Chinese pole act. And no, it wasn't some 10-second stunt that went by so fast that such a mistake would be understandable, but a complete act, some 5 to 7 minutes long! Hovey Burgess, who was in the audience that night and in fact for four out of the five performances, commented that it was "the only time I have ever seen this genre performed solo by a woman." He also points out that Zinoman refers to juggling clubs as juggling pins.

And while it's true that the typical Soleil show may have more in the way of technically advanced acts (though not by much), I often find the theatre half of a Soleil show to be very "theatrical" without necessarily being good theatre; glitzy but jejune. With Cirkör, the character interactions and storyline actually made sense. Imagine that!

Here are just a few of the things I liked about Cirkör:
• The troupe is small — eight circus performers and five musicians — and their roles in the production are very clear.
• Most or all of them have been working together for a decade, and it shows in the seamless flow of everything they do. Mirja Tuulikki Jauhiainen and Sanna Kopra perform a really nice stationary trapeze act with transitions that are as smooth as silk, not surprising since they've been working together since 1998.
• Although there are in fact individual acts from time to time, much of what happens is just part of this general flow and is not constrained by traditional variety structure.
• Their use of stage magic and of rear-screen video projection actually worked well with the overall mise-en-scène.
• The band, Irya’s Playground, which the Times only mentions in passing, was not only excellent, but tightly integrated into the performance. You know how the typical juggling act is performed to set music with a few dramatic drum rolls thrown in right before the big tricks? Here there was some terrific interaction between juggler Jay Gilligan (incredible, though from Ohio, not Sweden) and percussionist Erik Nilsson, whose drumming, human sound effects, and scat singing played off of every juggling move to great effect.
• They performed an act walking on bottles that I had never seen live and had only read about being done by the French grotesque Jean-Baptiste Auriol (1806–1881): "He could run along the tops of a row of bottles without knocking them over and then balance in a free headstand atop the last bottle while playing the trumpet." In Cirkör, the performer walks across the tops of a row of bottles on a table. The walk is slow and measured, as the shifts in weight have to be precise to avoid upsetting the bottles, which makes each step more precarious and dramatic than those taken on a tightwire. I'm a bit skeptical of the description of Auriol — c'mon, did he really run across them and do a headstand on one, and were they really free-standing bottles?? — even if that description does come from my book Clowns (p.164). Another nice thing about the Cirkör version was that the table was already there, had been used for other purposes, and the bottles were placed down in order by the "diners" as the equilibrist approached.
















All that being said, it's perfectly fine for someone not to have liked this show. I'm not at all opposed to the idea of serious circus criticism, but I think the "paper of record" might want to apply the same standards to all circuses, and find a writer with real expertise in the area. As my friend Dave Carlyon pointed out, if you're going to write about opera, it's not enough just to know about the performing arts, you actually have to know about music. Likewise... well, you get the point.

Hmm... maybe the Times should hire Hovey as their circus reviewer.

Final salvo: I've been to shows where I was not impressed yet the audience gave them standing ovations, so it's all a matter of opinion, but I still can't resist mentioning that the sold-out crowd at BAM Saturday night gave Cirkör a prolonged, rousing, (mostly) standing ovation.

End of Rant. Here's Cirkör's promo video, which gives you a taste of it all, though without capturing any of the beautiful moments that make it such a strong performance.






Hey, that was more than a few words... no more delays getting to that delayed gag!

First some background. This is what I wrote about the delayed gag in my Yale Theater essay on physical comedy:

Surprise being essential to comedy, the smart performer may play with the cadence of the 1-2-3 gag by initiating the third part either sooner or later than the gag's rhythm would lead us to expect. Most common is the delayed gag. Especially useful in a play or a longer performance piece, it allows a lapse of time between parts two and three. In the interim, the main action of the piece continues. Just when the audience has begun to forget about the gag, the payoff comes, often with doubled effect.

The legendary Swiss clown, Grock, was famous for a heartwarming delayed gag involving his violin bow. After finishing a short flourish on the violin, he tacks on a slight embellishment, flipping the bow up into the air and attempting to catch it back in his hand — unsuccessfully. Embarrassed, he hides himself behind a screen and practices his bow juggling. We see the bow soar repeatedly above the top of the screen. It is clear he has mastered the technique. But back in front of the audience, he again fails. He holds a second rehearsal behind the screen, but when he returns he is beset by new mishaps and soon forgets about the bow.

It is several minutes and one violin later (the first one having been pulverized beneath a Grock pratfall) and he is finally finishing off his tune on the violin. Now comes the payoff. Without thinking about it, he casually tosses the bow up into the air and catches it. Realizing what has happened, he is eager to duplicate his success. He starts to toss the bow up again, but before he can release it he assesses the probable risk, thinks better of it, and decides to leave well enough alone.

By accomplishing without thinking what had been impossible when he tried so hard, Grock creates a splendid clown moment. The delay has heightened the comedic impact, at the same time enriching Grock's characterization.

Got it? So here's the one I loved in Cirkör. It's a bit involved, but I hope worth following. At the very beginning of the show, an audience member is drafted to come onstage and ride a stationary bicycle, which is rigged to generate electricity to power the main spotlight. (Spoiler alert! Spoiler alert! He's actually an audience plant, though not an obvious one.) If he doesn't pedal, the stage goes dark. He resumes pedaling, the spot comes on (and they sneak on some other lights as well, but you get the joke.) There's a bunch of business with this, but after a while you forget about it and tune in to the rest of the show. At a certain point you might notice that he's stopped pedaling but the lights are still on, though presumably he's generated enough power to last awhile. Meanwhile, you're captivated by the whitefaced performer who's attempting to balance in a handstand high atop a tall stack of chairs. I'm guessing we were now 20-30 minutes into the show. Just as he goes into his riskiest trick, far above the stage, the lights go out! There is a panicked shout and the cyclist has to pedal furiously to restore the lights as our acrobat barely manages to regain his bearings.

It deservedly got a big laugh, all the stronger because we knew we had been tricked into forgetting about it.

[post 034]



























Read the whole article here.

P.S. — it's funny.

[post 33]

Why We Make Mistakes
by Joseph T. Hallinan
(NY: Broadway Books, 2009); hardcover, 283 pp.

Mistakes of judgment and mistakes of execution are the stuff of comedy, especially physical comedy. YouTube offers a rapidly expanding video archive of human stupidity in action, from the world's most incompetent criminals to every conceivable mishap awaiting those so foolhardy as to get out of bed in the morning. Likewise Chuck Shepherd's News of the Weird.

When Joel Schechter, editor of Yale's Theater magazine, asked me to do an article on physical comedy way back in 1986, I used it as an excuse to probe the connection between human error and physical comedy. [Read the whole article here.] Admittedly this was my subversive attempt to forge some new connections that would counter the notion that physical comedy was an inferior form of comedy, mindless entertainment that was good for a belly laugh but little else. Instead, I wanted the reader to see physical comedy as embodying a deeper truth about the human condition, and I had no better ally in this than Henry Miller in his clown novella, The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder:

"The beloved clown! It was his special privilege to reenact the errors, the follies, the stupidities, all the misunderstandings which plague human kind. To be ineptitude itself, that was something even the dullest oaf could grasp. Not to understand, when all is clear as daylight; not to catch on, though the trick be repeated a thousand times for you; to grope about like a blind man, when all signs point the right direction; to insist on opening the wrong door, though it is marked Danger!; to walk head on into the mirror, instead of going around it; to look through the wrong end of a rifle, a loaded rifle! -- people never tired of these absurdities because for millennia humans have traversed all the wrong roads, because for millennia all their seeking and questioning have landed them in a cul-de-sac. The master of ineptitude has all time as his domain. He surrenders only in the face of eternity."

Of course I'm not the only one to notice the disastrous results of human error, be it the sinking of the Titanic or our nation's certitude as to the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In many fields, especially those that involve human life, the study of risk assessment and human error is serious business — and often the findings are quite frightening.

Now there comes along a new book on the subject, and one I highly recommend for its research and readability, Joseph T. Hallinan's Why We Make Mistakes.

Subtitled How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average, the book offers both clear analysis and great entertainment. And in most cases, the connections to comedy pretty much jump out at you. A few choice tidbits:

• In an experiment designed to test our ability to recognize change, two researches from Cornell University concocted a scene that could have been right out of a Marx Brothers movie. One of their actors would stop a stranger on the street to ask directions, but in the middle of the conversation two other actors would abruptly walk right between them carrying a door. But the catch was that while passing through, the actor asking directions would use the cover of the door to quickly change places with another actor, who seamlessly continued the conversation with the stranger. In the majority of cases, the stranger did not even notice the change! However, when the experiment was described to a college class and the students were asked to predict whether or not they would have noticed such a switcheroo, 100% were quite sure they would have.

• Overconfidence is indeed one of Hallinan's main themes and, as they teach you in clown school, pride goeth before the fall. Overconfidence makes us buy gym memberships or time shares we'll never fully use, and think we can accomplish complex tasks without following instructions (what he dubs the "bushwhack" approach). It seems to be part of human nature to want to feel on top of things, what Hallinan calls the "illusion of control." In one experiment, subjects guessed the outcome of a series of coin tosses. Students who were told that their first guesses were all correct (they didn't actually see the coin close-up) became convinced that they would be able to continue to predict the outcome well above half the time, and that they would even get better with practice. And who were these overconfident and, dare I say, foolish subjects? Students from a certain ivy league college in New Haven. The same researcher did an experiment in which the subjects bet on the outcome of a simple card game in which whoever drew the high card won. Though the chances on any draw were obviously 50-50, what happened was that when playing against "a guy dressed as a schlub," the subjects bet more than they did when betting against a nattily dressed opponent. Yes, these were Yale University students.

You probably won't be surprised to read that all kinds of tests have shown that men on average are far more overconfident than women and that they (conveniently) forget their mistakes a lot quicker. In the chapter "Men Shoot First," Hallinan gives example after example of this tendency, from men being more likely to kill their fellow soldier ("friendly fire") while in combat, to men overestimating their own IQ scores. Tragically, when it comes to driving a car, men wear seat belts with less frequency than women but are three times more likely to be involved in a fatal accident.

It's not much of a leap to connect this arrogant overconfidence to today's talking heads who assure us that climate change is nothing to get so worried about, that they've got everything under control. Obviously a lot of this drivel comes from those getting rich from oil production, but there are millions of others with nothing to gain — and, like all of us, everything to lose — who are blinded by overconfidence into assuming that somehow it will all work out, but with no evidence to back that up. Somewhere Henry Miller is chuckling.

I haven't seen it yet, but you might want to check out the new movie, The Age of Stupid, in which a man living alone in 2055 in a world devastated by climate change examines old footage from 2008 and tries to figure out how we could have been so stupid. Here's the trailer:




I guess the good news is that clowns know what they're talking about. The bad news is that what we're talking about is pretty scary.

[post 32]

"A comedian is not a man who says funny things. A comedian is one who says things funny." —Ed Wynn


Ed Wynn (November 9, 1886 – June 19, 1966), known to his public as “the perfect fool,” was an American vaudevillian who grew up working with W.C. Fields. He gained nationwide fame as a comedian first on radio and then on television and, in his later years, as a serious actor in television and film dramas. He was apparently the first performer to host a tv variety show from Hollywood, and on his show introduced Buster Keaton to television audiences for the first time. Here's a clip of that intro:



[Yeah, it cuts off there, but apparently Keaton did this more than once on television, because you can see him doing it on something called The Ken Murray Show in 1952 right here. It's the molasses scene from the 1917 Arbuckle movie, The Butcher Boy.]

Wynn was not a physical comedian, but his wacky props (e.g., a piano-bicycle) and giddy personality lent themselves to broad comedy with a touch of the surreal, as in this well known scene from Mary Poppins.



Visual effects fans might be interested to know that Mary Poppins was one of the first large-scale uses of chroma key technology, except they used a yellow screen rather than green or blue!

And finally, Wynn's greatest claim to fame (heh-heh) would have to be his appearing alongside Myrna Loy, Tab Hunter, and yours truly in the 1959 television remake of "Meet Me in St. Louis."