Anthony Balducci's Journal

The One-Man Band

2011-12-18T14:41:00.000-08:00

George Méliès in L'homme orchestre (1900)

Buster Keaton in The Playhouse (1921)

Oscar Levant in American in Paris (1951)

Cartoon Network Series Carries On Old Comedy Traditions

2011-12-15T23:47:00.000-08:00

Classic comedy routines have turned up a number of times on the Cartoon Network series Adventure Time. Three routines made their way into the latest episode, "Marceline's Closet."

Finn and Jake get bored waiting for their friend Marceline to get home and seek to break the monotony by playing Cloud Hunt (a variation of Hide-and-Seek). Jake hides inside Marceline's house despite the fact that he is not supposed to go into the house while Marceline is away. Finn sees Jake through the window, but Jake pretends to be Finn's reflection. This results in a variation of the famous mirror routine.

Finn goes into the house to get Jake, but Marceline arrives home suddenly and the pair rush into her closet to hide. When Marceline opens the closet to investigate a noise, Jake crouches down and hides his face to avoid being noticed while Finn tries to squeeze himself inside a boot.

Later, the two of them hide inside a coat.

Harold Lloyd tried a lot of these same tricks to elude police in Bumping Into Broadway (1919). At one point, Lloyd even disguised himself as a table.

Finn never got around to the table gag, but he did try to disguise himself as a lamp by putting a lampshade on his head.

Charlie Chaplin used the same trick to great effect in The Adventurer (1917).

These routines, which were used in various forms by a several different comedians, are discussed at length in two chapters of The Funny Parts - "How to Disguise Yourself as Furniture and Fool Your Friends" and "Into the Looking Glass."

"If I could walk that way I would not need talcum powder!"

2011-12-10T15:26:00.000-08:00

Here are four versions of the classic "Walk this way" routine.

Is My Palm Read (1933)

In Society (1944)

Don't Throw That Knife (1951)

Young Frankenstein (1974)

A variant routine involved a dance instructor who loses control of their actions while leading students through a dance number and the students, unaware of a problem, blindly follows the instructor's disorderly moves. Here is a clip that shows Max Linder performing the routine in Max, professeur de tango (1912). Max, who has had cocktails prior to the lesson, is more than a little tipsy.

A better known version of the routine, in which a bee flies down the back of the instructor's dress, was performed by The Three Stooges in Hoi Polloi (1935).

The Funny Parts, which traces the history of gags and routines, is now available on Amazon.

"The Funny Parts" is Now On Sale

2011-12-08T19:15:00.000-08:00

My latest book, The Funny Parts, is now available. You can click on the links below to purchase the book.

http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-6513-2

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-funny-parts-anthony-balducci/1103874963

Amazon is listing the book as "Temporarily out of stock," but I looked into this and found that the book is expected to be available from Amazon in a week.

The Funny Parts, which deals with a wide range of gags and routines, is recommended to anyone who is a fan of classic comedy. Below is a table of contents.

Table of Contents

Preface      1
Introduction      3

1 And Then There Were Pies      7
2 Mannequins and Other Dummies      16
3 Animals      34
4 Adventures in Eating      77
5 Attack of the Vamps      99
6 Indecent Exposure      107
7 Spooky Apparitions      118
8 Bombs and Burglars      130
9 How to Disguise Yourself as Furniture and Fool Your Friends      135
10 The Amazing Trapdoor Chase      145
11 Science and Magic      151
12 Tooth Extraction and Laughing Gas      158
13 Into the Looking Glass      162
14 Sleepless Nights      168
15 Fathers to Sons of the Desert      178
16 The Big Jangly Box, the Sliding Ladder and Other Comic Props      183
17 The Buster Keaton Variations      192
18 The Harold Lloyd Variations      222
19 Hysterical History      229
20 Bugs      241
21 Scared Black Servants, Dice-Playing African Cannibals, and the Most Racist Comedy in Silent Cinema History      245
22 Other Variations      259

Chapter Notes      299
Bibliography      303
Index      305

The chapter titles should give away most of the subject matter. For instance, the "Hysterical History" chapter involves costume farces.

The "Sleepless Nights" chapter deals with comedians struggling to sleep in Murphy beds, hammocks and train berths.

Full chapters are devoted to Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Laurel & Hardy. Other comedians featured prominently in the book include Charlie Chaplin, Lupino Lane, Harry Langdon, Larry Semon, The Marx Brothers, Abbott & Costello, and The Three Stooges.

Thanks to generous photo contributors, the book features more than 100 photos, many of which have never before appeared in print. I actually had more photos than I could use, which is the reason that I am using a few of the extra photos in this article.

This shaving routine is from Hello, Pardner! (1923).

Harold Lloyd has trouble shaving in a communal washroom during a train trip in Now or Never (1921).

Harry Langdon later found himself in the same situation in The Luck o' the Foolish (1924). Both Now or Never and The Luck o' the Foolish also include berth travails.

Here is Lloyd involved in other stock comedy business, including animal antics, vamp intrigue and mass transit hassles.

I hope that everyone enjoys the book.

Hello, Judge (1922)

2011-12-08T15:30:00.000-08:00

I recently wrote on this site about one of my favorite silent film comedy directors, Fred Fishback. Here are stills from a Fishback comedy called Hello, Judge, which was produced as part of Universal's Century series in 1922. Lee Moran and Ena Gregory starred as a married couple plagued by an overbearing mother-in-law (played by Blanche Payson).

The EYE Film Institute Presents Silent Film Comedy Online

2011-11-19T15:52:00.000-08:00

The EYE Film Institute is in the process of digitizing their collection of silent films to make these rare works available on-line. One of the films already available is Hurry Up (1922), which features a somber-faced Jimmie Adams as a harried commuter. This one-reel comedy from Educational's Cameo series was directed by Fred Fishback, one of the great craftsman of silent film comedy. Among the major comedy stars to benefit from Fishback's many talents were Lloyd Hamilton, Mack Swain, Polly Moran and Baby Peggy (my Facebook friend, Diana Serra Cary).

Hurry Up produces laughs by transforming a commuter's struggle to get to work on time into a daredevil adventure. First, a train leaves the station without Adams.

Adams, determined to catch up to the train, scales a trestle to reach the top of a bridge and then leaps from the bridge onto the train as it speeds past.

Adams' problems are not over as he has to transfer to a trolley. Adams manages to get on board the trolley before anyone else, but a horde of passengers pack the vehicle so tightly that he gets pushed out on the other side.

Adams makes an effort to board a second trolley, but he cannot find the slightest space into which he can squeeze himself. He is left at the side of the road by the trolley, which departs with more than a dozen passengers hanging off its side.

Adams is less willing to give up when the next trolley comes along. He hangs off the side of the trolley by holding tightly onto another passenger's suspenders. When the suspenders snap, he goes tumbling back into the street.

Adams proceeds to dodge heavy rush hour traffic as he races on foot to his office. The nonstop race manages, under Fishback's skillful direction, to be both thrilling and funny. Fishback must have seen a great deal of humor in mass transit as he also dealt with the subject in Baby Peggy's The Straphanger (1922) and Lloyd Hamilton's Crushed (1924).

Another good film made available by the EYE Film Institute is Worries and Wobbles (1917). The film, written and directed by Larry Semon, imaginatively uses trick photography to convey the distorted perspective of a man who has had too much to drink. The drunken man is played by Jimmy Aubrey (pictured with an overturned soup bowl on his head on the cover of The Funny Parts). The premise of the film was not new, having previously served as the basis of Too Much Champagne (1908) and Distilled Spirits (1915). Key elements of the film can be traced further back to Georges Méliès' The Bewitched Inn (1897), which attributes the strange visions of the protagonist to supernatural spirits rather than distilled spirits. Specific gags from Worries and Wobbles were clearly carried over from The Bewitched Inn, including articles of clothing coming to life and a chair moving away as a man bends to sit down.

An optical effect used to open the film makes it seem as if the street is tilting in one direction and then the other as Aubrey staggers home. The Haunted House (1908), a Méliès-style film made by Segundo de Chomón, includes an entire room that dips back and forth in a similar manner (again, due to supernatural forces).

The de Chomón film also features its own inanimate objects that come to life, including a teapot that pours tea of its own volition.

A unique addition to Worries and Wobbles is a liquor bottle that comes to life, manifesting skinny arms and the bare outline of a face. Intolerant of a man who cannot hold his liquor, the bottle literally thumbs its nose at Aubrey. The film improves upon Méliès' old tricks and is elevated beyond these trippy effects by Aubrey, whose pratfalls and comic reactions make the procceedings all the more funnier.

I must add, too, that the print quality is excellent. Take this scene for example. The fact that details of houses far in distance are distinctly visible gives the scene a depth, realism and immediacy that is lacking in so many degraded prints.

I enjoyed a number of other comedies from the EYE collection, including The No-Account Count (1914), Operating on Cupid (1915) and Almost a Scandal (1915).

The No-Account Count (1914) unites the most shapely of ladies, Ethel Teare, with the most mugging of comedians, John E. Brennan. Brennan, posing as a count, is set to marry Teare until the real count shows up and spoils his plans. Brennan is determined to break up the new nuptials planned for his former fiancé and the count. He comes up with the perfect plan when he sees that Teare is secretly wearing a wig.

At the wedding, a snickering Brennan yanks off the bride's wig just as the couple is about to exchange vows. Teare is better off, though, as it turns out that the count is a black-hearted fortune hunter.

In Operating on Cupid (1915), Dr. Cutem (Neal Burns) needs to perform surgery on the patient in Room 9, but he reads his instructions from the wrong angle and thinks he is supposed to operate on the patient in Room 6. The fact that this patient is a romantic rival makes the doctor eager to cut into him.

A few other films caught my attention. Florence Turner plays a weepy lady in the Vitagraph comedy She Cried (1912).

Charlie Chaplin, in animated form, gets fried in the electric chair in Charley's Electric Dream (1916).

Larry Semon guides Hughie Mack through an early "high and dizzy" comedy, The Man from Egypt (1916).

Billie Rhodes (far left) is the charming star of Somebody's Widow (1918).

Also featured in the film is clean-shaven, pre-Sennett Billy Bevan (on the left).

Neely Edwards is so annoying that he gets socked in the face in Accidents Will Happen (1922). Wouldn't it be great to be able to punch annoying people?

Harold Lloyd kept it believable when he was perched precariously atop the ledge of a skyscraper. But Edwards, as Hughie Mack before him, was able to take a dive off a tall building without suffering the slightest injury.

A comic duel from Almost a Scandal (1915) will be useful for an essay that I am writing on Billie Ritchie for an upcoming book.

I understand that, for the EYE Film Institute, this is just the beginning of the archive holdings to be uploaded on the net. I look forward to their other films with the greatest of anticipation.

The Evil Ice Cream Truck

2011-11-19T13:55:00.000-08:00

Since the 1960s, writers have come to establish three types of evil ice cream trucks in films and television. The first is the ice cream truck used as a cover by criminals. This can be traced as far back as 1965, when a bloodthirsty Eastern cult rode around in a Mister Whippy ice cream truck to stalk Ringo Starr in Help! (1965). Ice cream trucks have concealed drug dealers, gun dealers and spies in a variety of films, including Friday (1995), Inspector Gadget 2 (2003) and Southland Tales (2006). The truck that appears in Inspector Gadget 2 is specially outfitted to include an escape jet.

Here, a KAOS ice cream truck is used to kidnap Hymie the Robot in a 1968 Get Smart episode titled "The Worst Best Man":

The idea that ice cream men were cranky individuals who hated children apparently started with the Hey Arnold! series introducing an ice cream man named Willie the Jolly Olly Man as a reoccurring character. This lead to a spate of similar characters in other cable cartoon shows, including Dexter's Laboratory ("Ice Cream Scream," 1997), Codename: Kids Next Door ("Operation: I.-S.C.R.E.A.M.," 2002) and The Mighty B! ("Ben Screams for Ice Cream," 2009). The idea was carried to the extreme in Adult Swim's Moral Orel ("The Lord's Greatest Gift," 2006), which exposed an ice cream man named Mr. Creepler as a pedophile. The hostile ice cream man made it to primetime with a 2000 Malcolm in the Middle episode called "Traffic Jam" and, soon after, made it to the big screen with Max Keeble's Big Move (2001).

The evilest of the ice cream trucks concealed serial killers as they traveled through unsuspecting suburban neighborhoods. This may have started with an illustration by Gahan Wilson. The illustration displays a group of children gathered beside an ice cream truck as the driver is holding open a freezer door and revealing the stiff and bluish corpses of children. The caption reads, "Wrong door!" Since the time of Wilson's cartoon, ice cream trucks have come to deliver death and destruction in numerous films and television shows.

A possessed ice cream truck becomes a threat in Maximum Overdrive (1986).

Freddy Krueger uses an ice cream truck to lure young victims on Freddy's Nightmares ("No More Mr. Nice Guy," 1988).

Clint Howard plays a deranged ice cream man in a 1995 film titled, appropriately, Ice Cream Man.

An undead clown is able to melt down children as quickly as ice cream in the Masters of Horror episode "We All Scream for Ice Cream" (2007).

A demonic ice cream man is hungry for humans in Legion (2009).

A psychotic clown snatches up automatic weapons and commandeers an ice cream truck to initiate a killing spree in The Last Circus (2010).

The fact that the ice cream truck, with its happy jingle, brings back such good memories from my childhood makes it difficult for me to endorse this trend. The trend has gone beyond the ironic twist. It seems to be part of Hollywood's war on everything wholesome and old-fashioned. Leave it to miserably cynical Hollywood writers to try to destroy something good in the world. These are the same grinches who attack Christmas by regularly trotting out the dirty, alcoholic "bad Santa" in films and television. They get a charge out of throwing a cherished icon on the pyre and it doesn't surprise me that they would want to hang my old friend, Mister Softee, in effigy. But fear not, Mister Softee and the Good Humor Man, I believe in you. I believe that the Banana Boat and the Chocolate Eclair Bar are nothing but sweet, chilly goodness. Neither Ben nor Jerry has ever delivered ice cream to my front door. And I do not even know what this Häagen Dazs fellow looks like, but I do not see where the children in his Scandinavian homelands are too happy for his efforts.

For all I know, the buttercream for Häagen Dazs ice cream is churned by virgin girls stolen away from their villages by a bunch of plundering Vikings.

I love you, Mister Softee.

Film of the Day: Der Kurzsichtige Willi Heiratet (1913)

2011-11-19T13:32:00.000-08:00

In 1913 German comedy Der Kurzsichtige Willi Heiratet (translated as The Nearsighted Willi Gets Married), a nearsighted man is set up on a date by a marriage bureau. The man, warned that his potential bride does not like eyeglasses, removes his own eyewear prior to their meeting. The man, half blind, has a hard time finding his way to the woman's home. He walks into a closet, he knocks over a hat stand, and he gets trapped in a revolving door. The couple meets, falls in love, and agrees to marry. On their wedding night, the groom finally puts on his glasses and is able to see his bride clearly for the first time. He is so repulsed by the woman's looks that he instantly takes flight. The final moments of the film show the man struggling to exit the spinning revolving door as his bride and the doorman rush to the scene.

Disability Humor

2011-11-19T13:23:00.000-08:00

Possibly the most tasteless comedy of early film history was a 1905 Pathé Frères comedy called L'Automobile et le cul-de-jatte, the English translation of which is The Motorcar and the Cripple. At least the comedy is tasteless if you believe Richard Abel, who wrote The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896-1914. Abel described plot details as well as camera shots after he had reportedly viewed the film. The plot, as described by Abel, is simple. Four well-dressed men coming out of a cafe are approached by a legless beggar, who is traveling around on a pushcart. The men refuse to drop a coin in the beggar's outstretched palm. Moments later, when they realize that their car won't start, the men hitch the legless beggar to the car like a draft horse and have him drag them to the nearest garage. However, entirely different plot details were provided by the Pathé Frères catalog that was distributed to exhibitors at the time of the film's release. The plot, as described in the catalog, is more involved and more reasonable. The well-dressed men do give the beggar a coin and even offer to give the man a ride in their car. The beggar turns down their offer, boastful of the efficiency of his pushcart. It is partly out of gratitude and partly out of a desire to demonstrate his pushcart's versatility that the beggar later volunteers to be hitched up to the car and haul it to the garage. This version of the story manages, with a few slight differences, to depict the beggar as capable and even heroic. This is a film history Rashomon that I cannot figure out.

More on the Trapdoor Chase Routine

2011-11-19T13:18:00.000-08:00

A few months ago, I wrote about a trapdoor chase routine that dates back hundreds of years. Dave Gadsden, a film collector, sent me a rare film clip that shows Lupino Lane performing the routine in Joyland (1929).

Also, a more fantastic version of the routine has now turned up recently on the Cartoon Network series Adventure Time.

A Pictorial Tribute to the Bomb Ride Routine

2011-11-19T13:10:00.000-08:00

Boobs in Arms (1940)

Keep 'Em Flying (1941)

Have Rocket Will Travel (1959)

Dr. Strangelove (1964)

Hillbilly Blitzkrieg (1942)

After Dinner Bloat

2011-11-19T09:10:00.000-08:00

The Library of Congress Paper Print Collection includes an early American Mutoscope and Biograph comedy called A Champion Beer Drinker (1903). The library's records describe the film as follows: "The action begins with one waiter after another bringing our hero glasses of beer, which he drinks in rapid succession. Time after time the waiters carry in trays filled with glasses of beer. Finally, two waiters arrive and the beer drinker turns into a beer barrel." Presumably, this final gag looked something like this:

Below Zero (1930)

Or this:

Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983)

Corporal distortion was common in early comedies. In The Chinese Rubbernecks (1903), a Chinese laundryman becomes infuriated when a co-worker clumsily burns him with a hot iron. He grabs the co-worker by the head to stop him from fleeing, which causes the co-worker's neck to stretch across the frame. As soon as the head is released, it snaps back into place. In Happy Hooligan Turns Burglar (1902), a maid attempts to reassemble a policeman blown to pieces by a burglar's bomb, but she makes a mess of the job and the policeman comes out with a foot for a hand and a hand for a foot.

The Hat Mix-up Routine, Part 2

2011-11-19T08:20:00.000-08:00

I wrote recently about Laurel & Hardy's famous hat mix-up routine. I neglected at the time to provide precedent for the routine simply because I was unaware of anyone performing the routine before the boys. Annette D'Agostino Lloyd, author of Harold Lloyd: Magic in a Pair of Horn-Rimmed Glasses, suggested to me that traces of the routine could be found in a scene from Harold Lloyd's Spring Fever (1919), but it strikes me that a vague relationship at best exists between the two routines. Judge for yourself from this clip of Spring Fever taken from the documentary Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius.

But my persistence has finally paid off. I have now found a version of the hat mix-up routine in an early Charlie Chaplin comedy called By the Sea (1915). The mix-up is brought about by winds that make it impossible for two men (Chaplin and Billy Armstrong) to keep their hats secured to their heads. Understand that this was at a time in film comedy when every complication, even those not man-made, resulted in a tussle.

A Race Comedy Curio from Monty Banks

2011-10-04T11:25:00.000-07:00

The Funny Parts includes a discussion of a film that earns the title of "The Most Racist Comedy in Silent Cinema History." This film went awry for taking the conventional "scared black servant" routine to an extreme. But I came across a second comedy that uses black characters in a highly questionable manner and yet expresses little to no regard for convention. The film is a Monty Banks comedy, Where is My Wife? (1921).

Banks, who is roaming along a sunny beach, is thrilled by the silhouettes of bathing beauties visible on the outside of a changing tent. He makes his way to meet the ladies, but the ladies startle him when they emerge from the tent and reveal themselves to be black. Banks, in the grip of terror, wastes no time in fleeing the scene.

Black people plague Banks throughout his weekend. The next day, Banks has to leave town unexpectedly on business. He is exiting his hotel when a black janitor accidentally smacks him in the face with a broom. Banks becomes so incensed that he grabs the broom and snaps it in half. Banks then goes outside and hails down a cab. The driver who pulls up is also black. Banks has just finished loading his luggage into the back of the cab when the driver, pressing down hastily on the gas pedal, drives off without him. Banks races after the cab and, when he finally catches up, he breathlessly demands his luggage. The men get into an argument as Banks refuses to pay the driver. Banks observes the driver reaching into his pocket and, assuming the man is about to pull a knife, he quickly concedes to pay the fare and surrenders a fistful of cash to the driver. It is at this point that the driver brings his hand out of his pocket and Banks sees that all the man is holding is a handkerchief. Banks has already argued with a black janitor and a black cabdriver and now, as he enters the train station, he has an altercation with a pair of black train attendants.

The film ends with Banks sprinting back to the hotel due to an irrational suspicion that his wife is cheating on him. He has the worst possible shock when he sees the black janitor leaving his lodging and assumes that this man must be his wife's lover. He is so overwhelmed that he faints. His wife rushes to his side to revive him and, when he realizes the error of his ways, he feels so diminished in stature that his body literally shrinks in size.

Banks is not normally at odds with black people in his films. Clyde Bruckman, who wrote the story, did not generally treat black characters in this heated manner. Examples can be found in Bruckman's oeuvre of other less than competent black janitors (Willie Best in Feet First, 1930) and the point could be made that Bruckman created his share of scared black servants (Dudley Dickerson in Nervous Shakedown, 1947), but the attitude of Where is My Wife? is not expressed in the writer's other known work.

The routine with the black bathing beauties is a standard routine, which Bruckman later reworked for Buster Keaton's Seven Chances (1925). But the other scenes, where a relentless stream of black service workers create problems for Banks with their assumed ineptitude and unsavory habits, are wholly unique. This does not resemble the random leakage of racist sentiments from the filmmakers. By every indication, the filmmakers were looking to service the story with these incidents and specifically designed this series of scenes as a build up for what happens at the end. All of this businessman's fears and frustrations about black service workers and his anxiety about interracial coupling culminate in the moment when he believes that his wife has had sex with the black janitor.

Admittedly, the film's logic (if any) cannot be stated with decisiveness. The black characters are stereotypes of the day. The black janitor (a white actor in blackface) carries around a horseshoe for luck and walks around looking perpetually dumfounded. But it is important to consider that the janitor didn't have sex with Banks' wife; the janitor might not have hit Banks with a broom if Banks had been looking where he was going when he sprinted out of the hotel; and the cab driver, incompetent or not, did not try to pull a knife. The paranoia of Banks' character seems to be less about jealousy, which the film overtly addresses, and more about racism. The viewer is free to interpret the film as a mockery of the black workers or interpret it as indictment of racism, the message being that making assumptions leads to foolish mistakes and makes a man small. In either case, it is a curious little film.

Billie Reeves Makes His Film Debut

2011-10-04T11:10:00.000-07:00

Charlie Chaplin achieved popularity on stage playing a drunk theater patron in the Karno troupe's classic "Mumming Birds" sketch. The sketch was well established by the time that Chaplin stepped into the role, which had been originated by Billie Reeves when the sketch debuted in 1904. It was due in no small part to Reeves' performance that the sketch became an immediate sensation. The actors who succeeded Reeves in the role would have no doubt felt pressure to follow Reeves' example in order to assure the sketch's continued success. Under the circumstances, it is conceivable for Reeves to have served as an early role model to Chaplin.

I considered Reeves' possible influence on Chaplin as I was looking through 1915 issues of The Moving Picture World and came across ads, notices and reviews for three short films starring Reeves. The films, Counting Out the Count, The Substitute and The Clubman, happen to be the first three films made by the comedian. Counting Out the Count, in which Reeves poses as a count at a society function, sounds much like a later film by Chaplin called The Count (1916). The Substitute finds Reeves up to acrobatic tricks. The comedian dons roller skates at a restaurant and, as he rolls across the floor, he collides with waiters, topples patrons, and becomes hopelessly entangled with other skaters. No doubt remains from the plot description provided by The Moving Picture World that the film was a forerunner to Chaplin's The Rink (1916). The plot of Reeves' The Clubman is described as follows:

He is the ridiculously inebriated man about town who is summoned home by his wife during the course of a wild night at his club. He zig-zags homeward. Billy's tour of inspection of his rooms leaves in its wake the desolation of an earthquake. He is hard on the furniture and bric-a-brac. He wanders to the music room and becomes entangled in a tiger-skin rug. The thing coils itself around his leg and Billy's foot somehow gets between its jaws. His wife, awakened by her husband's frenzied howls, hurries downstairs to encounter Billy deliriously endeavoring to escape the beast. He finally succeeds and so frightens his wife with it that she scampers upstairs. After battling with a pillow and becoming almost stifled by the clouds of feathers which rise from the scene, Billy silences the innocent chirp of the canary by eating him and, exhausted, falls into deep sleep.

This is the same basic plot that Chaplin later used in One A.M. (1916). Chaplin, in his inebriated state, also does battle with a tiger-skin rug and other inanimate objects around his house. These various actions make the films comparable though, admittedly, Reeves' battle with a pillow is less ambitious than Chaplin's battle with an entire bed.

It is possible that a tramp posing as a count, a bungler creating havoc on roller skates and a drunken man stumbling through his home were skit premises shared by many comedians in the English Music Hall. Still, it was Reeves who brought these ideas in full form to the silver screen and it suggests that perhaps Chaplin looked to Reeves, in every sense a forebear, for inspiration at this early stage in his career.

In either case, it is a shame that prints of Reeves' films are rare and the comedian is largely unknown even to silent film comedy fans. He deserves to be known just for the fact that he may have had the original Shemp haircut. Just read the description of his hair style as described by Kalton C. Lahue and Sam Gill in Clown Princes and Court Jesters: "His long hair, parted in the middle and combed down around his ears, gave Billy a rather shaggy appearance, especially when he was excited."

In closing, here is a photo of Reeves in tramp garb.

The Dick Van Dyke Show Blogathon Bonus

2011-10-02T22:54:00.000-07:00

As a Dick Van Dyke Show Blogathon bonus, I have written a second article consistent to my blog's ongoing efforts to recount the history of gags and routines.

Carl Reiner, who ran the daily operation of The Dick Van Dyke Show for its entire five-year run, was determined that the series never be a conventional sitcom that relied on standard plots. This attitude was reflected by his on-screen surrogate, Rob Petrie, who made it his goal as head writer of The Alan Brady Show to produce material that was new and different. This is evident in writer meetings between Rob, Buddy and Sally. Buddy is always quick to offer an old vaudeville joke, but Rob invariably dismisses these jokes and encourages his staff to come up with something better. It is the height of embarrassment for Rob when, in the 1963 episode "When a Bowling Pin Talks, Listen," he learns that a sketch idea he got from his son is not original at all and in fact came from his son's favorite series, The Uncle Spunky Show. Still, as much as Reiner was determined to be original, I can think of at least two Van Dyke episodes based on old tropes that went as far back as silent films.

The script to the first season episode "The Curious Thing About Women" was written by Frank Tarloff. The plot was simple. Rob, looking to discourage Laura from opening his mail, arranges for a mysterious package to be delivered to their home. Laura, unable to contain her curiosity, opens the package and a self-inflating raft bursts loose.

Reiner was reluctant at first to accept the script. According to Vince Waldron, the author of The Official Dick Van Dyke Show Book, Reiner believed the script "hewed a bit too close to traditional sitcom conventions for his somewhat less formulaic sensibilities." Reiner's reluctance is explained at length in the following excerpt from Waldron's book:

"I didn't love the fact that we made Mary so silly that she had to open the package," says Reiner, who confesses that his biggest problem with Frank Tarloff's script was that he simply couldn't imagine his own wife - or anyone else's, for that matter - behaving as Laura Petrie does in the episode. "I made Laura a little sillier than my wife," explains Reiner, "but I was still basing things on Estelle. And I never liked that show particularly, because that wasn't my wife."

But, despite his reservations about the script, Reiner was willing to loosen his standards as needed to produce 30 episodes that season and this meant occasionally accepting scripts less than faithful to his principles.

Reiner's instincts were correct about "The Curious Thing About Women" for the script was not new and different. It was a story that had been handed down from generation to generation. I do not know how far back the story goes exactly, but I can point to a silent comedy that made use of the premise. In Canned Curiosity (1915), a man is determined to prove to his friends that all women are curious. He fills small tin cans with smoke from his uniquely scented cigar, attaches a note demanding that the cans not be opened, and then leaves the cans at the homes of various women. As the man expects, every woman winds up opening the cans and allowing the smoke to escape.

Partnered with Arthur Stander and Phil Sharp, Tarloff originally made use of this idea for a 1950s sitcom, I Married Joan. The writers took the vague idea of a man trying to make a general point about women's curiosity into a specific disagreement between a husband and wife and, by making it that the package contained a raft, they put something more substantial and laugh-provoking in the package than smoke. The finished episode, which was titled "Joan's Curiosity," was broadcast on December 3, 1952.

Reiner was likely unaware that he was remaking an old I Married Joan episode. It didn't matter though. Regardless if the episode was unoriginal, or if the material failed to meet Reiner's standards, or if a lead character was depicted in an inappropriate manner, the episode has remained a favorite among fans of The Dick Van Dyke Show for half a century.

An episode titled "That's My Boy??" (1963) deals with a trope that can at least be traced back to a Biograph comedy called The New Baby (1912). Rob Petrie is nervous bringing his wife Laura to the hospital to give birth and, in time, he allows his nervousness to get the better of him. Problems begin when a nurse admits to Rob that she keeps confusing the Petries with another couple in the maternity called the Peters. Rob later questions if his baby looks like either him or Laura and becomes convinced that the nurse mixed up their baby with the Peters' baby. He invites the Peters to his home to discuss the matter, but he has a big surprise when he opens the door to greet the Peters and he discovers that the couple is black.

The trope essentially involved a white baby getting mixed up with a black baby and a nervous, expectant father reacting with shock and outrage. By Stork Delivery (1916), a Keystone retelling of the story, had the white father (Mack Swain) and his uncle (Vin Moore) throttling the black father (Bobby Dunn, in blackface) and battering him with chairs and dresser drawers. The routine originally had a father realizing that he had the wrong baby because the baby is black and the routine in its updated form had a father realizing that he had the right baby because the baby isn't black. Van Dyke said that, when he opened the door and revealed the black couple (Greg Morris and Mimi Dillard), they received the biggest laugh in the history of the show.

The attitude expressed towards the black characters in the earlier versions of the routine was less than kindly. This is evident in the plot description provided by The Moving Picture World for The New Baby. The plot description reads as follows:

The nervous, expectant papa leaves for the office in a fever, for the stork is expected at his home. On the same day a new cook is engaged. She is a colored woman with a small baby, which she brings with her and ensconces in the kitchen. The gardener, hearing the cry of the picaninny, runs off to the nearest telephone and calls up the expectant papa, informing him that the baby has arrived. A few moments later the proud papa, rushing into the kitchen, followed by a crowd of friends he has collected en route, finds the cause of the excitement to be a little human "chocolate drop." His gloom, however, only lasts a moment, and the joys carry the day.

Fifty-one years after the "chocolate drop" days of The New Baby, the entertainment business had gotten a lot more sensitive about the portrayal of black characters. The script for "That's My Boy??" had to be submitted to a number of people in authority for approval. The NAACP raised no objections, but the script was initially rejected by all other parties - CBS, Procter & Gamble, and Benton & Bowles. It was only because the show's executive producer, Sheldon Leonard, stood firm on the matter that the episode eventually got made.

The episode's director, John Rich, made sure to cast attractive actors to play the Peters and he set up the scene to, in words, "give control of the moment to the black man." Rob is embarrassed, awkward and foolish while his guest is cool, calm and collected. Rob asks, "Why didn't you tell me on the phone?" Mr. Peters replies, "And miss the expression on your face?"

In time, the routine reverted back to its original form in several films, including The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult! (1994) and Due Date (2010).

The Dick Van Dyke Show Blogathon: "My Blonde-Haired Brunette"

2011-10-02T22:05:00.000-07:00

This article is proudly brought to you as part of The Dick Van Dyke Show Blogathon hosted by Ivan G. Shreve Jr.'s thrilling blog, Thrilling Days of Yesteryear. It is also brought to you by Joy dishwashing liquid, which gives your dishes that See Yourself Shine.

I assume that people reading this will be familiar with the premise of The Dick Van Dyke Show. The show followed television writer Rob Petrie (Dick Van Dyke) as he made his way through misadventures at home with his wife Laura (Mary Tyler Moore) and son Richie (Larry Mathews) and at work inventing funny sketches for the fictitious Alan Brady Show.

The series creator, Carl Reiner, was determined to forget about stock sitcom devices and draw material from his own experiences as a comedy writer and suburban family man. He wanted this sitcom to be funny, of course, but he also wanted it to be smart, sophisticated and grounded. Its grounded situations made it more real than The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet Show or Father Knows Best. And it was, due to its leading lady, more sexy. In a review of a Dick Van Dyke DVD collection, Donald Liebenson declared Laura Petrie "television's first babe-mom."

Another unique aspect of the show was its timbre. The show was never noisy or, in any other way, abrasive. It only made sense for a series that showcased Van Dyke's easygoing charm to develop a natural and relaxed quality. Jackie Gleason shouted. Sid Caesar shouted. Danny Thomas shouted. Dick Van Dyke didn't shout. Much of television comedy in the 1950s showcased a raucous vaudeville style, but the early 1960s offered a number of comedies that were quieter and more natural. Other obvious examples are The Andy Griffith Show and Leave it to Beaver.

I have selected for discussion today the first season episode "My Blonde-Haired Brunette" (1961). The plot of the episode is set into motion by a simple rift. Laura is disappointed that Rob would rather sleep late on a Saturday morning than join her for an intimate breakfast. It makes it worse that Rob is not polite in his refusal. He snaps at his wife for waking him with a kiss.

For the rest of the weekend, Laura becomes increasingly distressed thinking that Rob is no longer attracted to her. She obsesses over possible signs that the romance has gone out of her marriage and finally convinces herself that she must take desperate measures to remedy the situation. On the advice of her friend Millie (Ann Morgan Guilbert), Laura dyes her hair blonde hoping that it will make her look as attractive as Bridget Bardot. But Laura is appalled to see how she looks with blonde hair, believing that the only movie star she resembles is Harpo Marx.

Laura desperately tries to dye her hair back to its natural color before Rob arrives home, but she has only managed to dye one side of her head when her husband comes strolling through the door. The audience got two good comic reveals out of the situation - they initially got to a laugh seeing Laura with her hair blonde and then they were able to get an even bigger laugh seeing Laura's two-tone dye job.

Laura, feeling defeated, falls into Rob's arms sobbing. Moore's comic sobbing would prove to be one of her greatest stock-in-trade on the show. Moore has said in interviews that it was her work on this episode that convinced Reiner that she could be funny and didn't have to always play straight woman to Van Dyke.

Now comes the denouement. Once the sobbing stops, Rob assures Laura that she doesn't need to change herself to get his attention. He may not always be as demonstrative of his affection as Laura would like, but he insists to her that he loves her exactly the way she is. Fans of the show never doubted the affection between this couple. The show presented a couple deeply in love with one another. It was the wholesomeness of their relationship that viewers found so endearing.

John Rich, who directed this episode, later directed an episode of All in the Family called "Black is the Color of My True Love's Wig" (1973). This is the Dick Van Dyke episode in reverse. Laura used hair dye to go from brunette to blonde. Gloria (Sally Struthers) uses a wig to go from blonde to brunette. But the reversal goes deeper than that. Rob didn't, for a moment, like Laura as a blonde. He liked her as her natural-born, unadulterated self. But Gloria's husband, Mike (Rob Reiner), likes this change in his wife's looks and he no doubt likes it too much. He tries to coax Gloria to wear the wig while they're having sex. Gloria is hurt and angry that her husband doesn't appreciate her for who she is. She complains, "It's this pile of hair from Kresler's that's getting to you! I just happened to be standing underneath it!" This is a more cynical perspective of marriage. Rob and Laura faced simple doubts and misunderstandings that could be resolved with a warm embrace. But some greater ills are at work in this new situation. A shouting match erupts between the couple and feelings of resentment and dissatisfaction are exposed.

Laura's decision to dye her hair was developed reasonably and patiently over the first half of "My Blonde-Haired Brunette." Gloria introduces her wig early on and offers an abrupt motive for buying the hairpiece. She explains that, on days that she doesn't feel like washing her hair, she will be able to use the wig to cover up her greasy locks. No wife in New Rochelle looked more well-scrubbed than Laura Petrie. A housewife as stylish as her would not be caught dead with greasy, stringy hair. But only in the gritty world of seventies television could a wife admit that she couldn't be bothered to wash her hair. It had to make a man long for Laura Petrie, who surely wasn't wearing capri pants simply to hide the fact that she hadn't had time to shave her legs.

Attitudes change from generation to generation and Rob Reiner, who happened to be Carl Reiner's son, was certainly part of the next generation. He had in fact been the real-life model of the Petries' son, Richie. How was his character to get out of this awkward situation? In the closing minutes of the episode, Mike reconciles with Gloria by making a hollow speech about how she is more important to him than a wig. But Mike is still left looking lascivious, superficial and even perverse. The studio audience can be heard laughing loudly when Mike's infamously cranky father-in-law, Archie Bunker, sneers at him and calls him a "hair lover."

The Dick Van Dyke Show celebrated family and marriage. All in the Family, and too many shows that followed it, denigrated family and marriage. Everyone Loves Raymond was often likened to Dick Van Dyke, but the acrimonious shouting that often occurred on that show made it a lot more like All in the Family.

The Petries were a model couple who were always able to plausibly resolve their misunderstandings and differences before the end of the half hour. Blogger Bob Sassone wrote, "I pretty much became a writer because Rob Petrie was one. I also hoped I could get a woman like Mary Tyler Moore." Many fans feel this way about the show. The show's enduring appeal comes from the fact that fans liked the Petries and recognized the value of their relationship. And, besides, who wouldn't want to hang around the office all day telling jokes with Sally and Buddy?

Dance Your Pants Off

2011-09-23T18:22:00.000-07:00

A popular comedy routine in silent films involved a man tearing his pants as he strutted around a crowded dance floor. The earliest known version of the routine was performed by Max Linder in a 1908 film simply titled Torn Trousers.

Later versions incorporated one contrivance or another that led to the man losing his pants entirely. The evolution of the routine culminated in the famous party scene of Harold Lloyd's The Freshman (1925).

Dropping trou is no longer exclusive to men. A recent update of the routine featured on the BBC series Miranda placed a woman (Miranda Hart) into this embarrassing situation ("Date," 2009). Hart's character figures that she can readjust her pants without being noticed by keeping to the rhythm of the music.

A Kovacs Variation

2011-09-23T15:38:00.000-07:00

Ernie Kovacs staged a variation of the water-spurting-out-of-bullet holes gag. A cowboy gunslinger expects to unwind after a shootout by lighting up a cigar, but he no sooner takes a puff on the cigar then streams of smoke rise alarmingly from bullet holes in his body. I was able to find a clip online, but the quality is not the best.

Honesty is Still the Best Politics

2011-09-23T15:05:00.000-07:00

Sons of the Desert (1933) involves Laurel and Hardy skipping out on a trip to the mountains with their wives to sneak off to a lodge convention. Their scheme goes as planned until the wives witness the duo featured prominently in newsreel footage of the convention. This was a stock comic premise used frequently in silent films, but no other comedians had ever used the premise to greater advantage than Laurel and Hardy.

The team may have had the last word on the routine if it wasn't that television scribes had to sometimes revive old material to meet the demands of television production. The Sons of the Desert premise found its way into television by way of a 1959 episode of Leave It to Beaver called "Beaver Plays Hooky." Fate is just as cruel to Beaver and friend Larry, who are exposed as truants while being featured in a live television broadcast.

The boys concoct a story about a flood at their school. The story is more believable than Stan and Ollie's "ship-hiking" alibi, but it isn't good enough to fool Beaver's mother. Beaver realizes that he has no choice but to tell the truth. His mother is willing to forgive him as long as he apologizes to his teacher. Larry, acting in the same capacity as the portly Hardy, is less willing to be honest and this incites his father to throw Larry across his knee and spank him.

Stair Masters

2011-08-24T11:35:00.000-07:00

The success of a routine depends in large measure on motives and performance. A YouTube clip showing a man randomly walking up and down a flight of stairs would not be funny. But Buster Keaton was able to handle this simple premise expertly in The Cameraman (1928). His motive? Keaton is in his room at a boarding house waiting anxiously for a girl to call. Every time the phone rings in the lobby of the boarding house, he races down three flights of stairs to see if it is the girl on the phone. His actions in this context are reasonable, relatable and funny. His affection for this girl renders Keaton human even though the comedian, in his precision and tirelessness, whizzes back and forth across the screen like a wind-up toy. See for yourself.

Now, let us see Jerry Lewis do the same basic routine in Artists and Models (1955).

Lewis plays the scene in complete contradiction to the way that it was played by Keaton. Unlike Keaton, Lewis does not comes across as an inexhaustible athlete. Lewis has no great stamina or coordination and it isn't long before he is reduced to a crawling, gasping mess. It is an entirely different approach to the routine, but the scene works well and Lewis could not be funnier.

Still, the scene has one flaw. You will have noticed that motive is different in this scene. Lewis answers the phone for partner Dean Martin, who is upstairs in the bath. Martin keeps sending Lewis up and down the stairs for more information from the caller. This motivation is less than reasonable. Lewis could have gotten the caller to provide him with all the necessary information before he started up the stairs. He could have demanded that Martin get out of the tub and take the call himself. Keaton has no other option - he will lose out on a date with the girl of his dreams if he misses her call. This makes his character more sympathetic.

Keaton was able to capture himself running up and down the stairs in a single shot by using a cutaway set. He had created a similar set for a chase scene in The High Sign (1921). That earlier routine was more clownish, with the comedian racing upstairs and downstairs through a home using trapdoors instead of stairs.

Cutaway sets have been used to comic effect in a number of films.

The Ladies Man (1961)

Tout va bien (1972)

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)

Wait, I hear the phone!

The Hat Mix-up Routine

2011-08-24T11:09:00.000-07:00

A gag can sometimes travel an odd route. Laurel & Hardy made it their stock-in-trade to occasionally mix up their derbies by mistake. Hardy would look silly in a derby too small for his head and Laurel would look silly in a derby too big for his head. The routine made its debut in Do Detectives Think? (1927).

Director Leo McCarey presided over a number of these derby mix-ups starting with one fast-paced version featured in the 1928 comedy We Faw Down.

Years later, this comic business came up again when McCarey was put in charge of adapting the stage play The Awful Truth into a film. The play had already been the subject of two previous film adaptations and McCarey decided to make his adaptation different by reshuffling scenes and inserting more exaggerated comedy into the proceedings. As it worked out, he centered a pivotal scene on another hat mix-up. Cary Grant and Irene Dunne are having second thoughts about finalizing their divorce. Grant arrives at Dunne's home to discuss the matter without realizing that Dunne has another visitor - suave music professor Armand Duvalle (Alexander D'Arcy), who was the cause of their break-up in the first place. Dunne quickly hides Duvalle in her bedroom for fear that Grant might get the wrong idea. Grant is getting ready to exit the home when he picks up the wrong hat - Armand's hat - and the hat, which is much larger than his own, slips down over his eyes. Grant becomes suspicious and soon discovers Armand.

Ray Milland recreated this scene in a musical remake of The Awful Truth called Let's Do It Again (1953). Writer Richard Matheson was watching this very scene when a strange idea popped into his head. Matheson imagined a man suddenly finding his clothes are getting smaller and coming to the realization that he is shrinking. The strange idea went on to form the basis of the sci-fi classic The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957).

In a span of thirty years, the hat mix-up routine went from inspiring slapstick comedy to inspiring screwball comedy to finally inspiring science fiction. That is truly a hat trick.

The Headless Farce Man: A Brief Discussion of Decapitation Comedy

2011-08-24T10:40:00.000-07:00

A darkly funny scene about a guillotine execution appears in the Carry On Gang's Don't Lose Your Head (1966).

Decapitation gags were popularized in early films by Georges Méliès. An example can be found in Méliès' The Four Troublesome Heads (1898).

But comic decapitation had occurred on stage before Méliès. In 1867, the popular Hanlon-Lees pantomime troupe presented a sketch called "The Village Barber" in which a barber accidentally cuts off a customer's head and then works diligently to glue the head back into place.

Comic labors to reattach a head can get more gruesome nowadays. Take, for instance, this clip from Idle Hands (1999).

More on this subject can be found soon in The Funny Parts.

Distortions

2011-08-24T10:25:00.000-07:00

Distorting the camera's view of a comedian can be a source of laughs. Harold Lloyd achieved this effect with a funhouse mirror in Number, Please? (1920).

Larry Semon produced a number of twisted images of himself using a cracked mirror in Kid Speed (1924).

But a favorite of mine is the way in which a water cooler deforms the image of Jerry Lewis in Artists and Models (1955).

What's Russian for "Boobs"?

2011-08-24T09:54:00.000-07:00

I found an American movie that works better in Russian. I can't decide if it's because the dialogue of Piranha 3D (2010) is so bad that it is better not to know what the actors are saying or because the scenes are uplifted by the enthusiasm of the Russian voice-over actors.

Elaborations and Commentary on the Banana Peel Gag

2011-08-03T14:58:00.000-07:00

A gag as simple as a man slipping on a banana peel can develop into something elaborate. In The High Sign (1921), Buster Keaton plays off audience expectations by revealing a banana peel in his character's path but then allowing his character to walk over the banana peel unharmed. Keaton makes a defiant gesture to the camera before walking on and slipping on a second banana peel. Years later, Keaton acknowledged that he added the second banana peel only after preview audiences failed to laugh at his character's cleverness.

In his very next film, Keaton staged the following gag.

The track switch gag, which has the comedian averting a disastrous encounter with one train only to fall victim to a second train, is nothing more than the banana peel gag writ large.

Red Skelton repeated the High Sign gag in The Fuller Brush Man (1948), making no changes except that he used roller skates in place of banana peels. This was less contrived since it can be assured that, when one roller skate turns up, a second one must be lurking nearby.

Skelton had the opportunity to expand the routine when he received Keaton's assistance as a gag writer on The Yellow Cab Man (1950). This time, Skelton is unable to see the banana peel because he is carrying a grandfather clock. He misses stepping on the banana peel not because he is clever but because a sweeper happens at the right moment to push the banana peel out of his way.

But this reprieve from danger is momentary. Skelton, still unable to see where he's walking, approaches an open shaft of a sidewalk elevator. He is just about to take a tumble into the shaft when the elevator rises up and allows him to safely walk across.

Even though Skelton has not been clever or conveyed an arrogant attitude, it remains inevitable for him to suffer a downfall. On cue, he enters the street and gets hit by a car. From Keaton's perspective, fate is malevolent and it will not be cheated. Keaton would have enjoyed the Final Destination movies.

Larry Semon, whose outlook was less pessimistic than Keaton's, often had his clownish character benefit from humorously fortuitous events. A nearly identical version of the elevator gag was performed by Semon in The Bakery (1921). But Semon did not feel the need to have his character defeated in the end. It was in the same way that Harry Langdon's "Little Elf" character later came to survive many troubles by sheer luck.

Throughout his career, Keaton held to his belief in the perversity of fate. Film critic Dan Callahan wrote, "[E]ven if things worked out, Buster knew everything would soon fall apart again, which led to some of the most ruthlessly unsentimental endings in film history." Keaton left sentiment to Charlie Chaplin and optimism to Harold Lloyd. Instead, he lamented about the banana peel that could be lying in wait around the next corner.

A Big Prop

2011-08-03T14:56:00.000-07:00

A scene in A Southern Yankee (1948) features a wheel-like contraption that chases Red Skelton down a hill. Wooden blades in the wheel make it look like a giant lawn mower. The scene is set on an old Southern plantation and one could reasonably assume this type of wheel was something used in farming. I am the last person in the world to identify the item as I grew up in the city and I do not know a harrow from a cultivator. I sent screen captures out to Sue Cochran, who is an expert on antique farm equipment. She consulted reference books, forwarded the screen captures to colleagues, and showed printouts of the screen captures at an antique exhibit. This was not an apparatus that anyone was able to identify. Some people speculated that it could be something the military devised to repel men and horses. I am left to believe, though, that this was a prop specifically designed for the film and it has no practical purpose in the real world. This belief is strongly supported by the fact that the likely author of the routine, Buster Keaton, was known for his imaginative props. A good clown is not bound to reality when it comes to creating a funny prop. That's how we got the rubber chicken and the squirting flower.

Crazy, Stupid, Skanky

2011-08-03T14:54:00.000-07:00

Caution: Angry Rant Ahead!

It has been a long time since I sat in a theater and laughed at a film. Each week, I search through theater listings to find the one new comedy that might possibly give me a chuckle. I sometimes use the IPhone app Flixster to look at trailers. I can't believe how bad some of these trailers are. I get it, children like talking animal comedies. But is it necessary for the trailer to Zookeeper to turn into a TGI Friday's commercial? The most annoying are the the smutty trailers made for horny teenagers. The sexual hijinks of Bad Teacher and Horrible Bosses, which are meant to shock viewers into laughter, is wasted on me. It simply doesn't get me convulsing with laughter to hear Cameron Diaz mutter that she'd like to sit on Justin Timberlake's face.

I was outright offended by the trailer to Crazy, Stupid, Love.

The film cannot decide if it's a silly romantic comedy or a meaningful true-to-life relationship drama. Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman said that the film has a "bone-deep sadness" and "observational shrewdness." Is that what the film is when Carell learns that his wife has cheated on him and reacts by tumbling out of a moving car? The trailer leads me to believe that the film is about how Carell takes lessons from a stud (Ryan Gosling) to become more of an alpha male so that he can win back his wife. The lessons have something to do with a man wearing stylish suits and doing a massive amount of sit-ups to define his abs. And it also has something to do with Gosling sticking his junk in Carell's face.

The foolish wimp that Carell plays is too pathetic to earn my sympathy or hold my interest. The film's perverse values are even less appealing. The Hollywood principle is that, when a man cheats on his wife, he deserves to get kicked to the curb. Some women would cry out for the man to be castrated, too. However, a woman cheats on her husband and the husband is supposed to hang his head in shame and do everything he can to win back the cheating skank. Oh, please, I feel a bone-deep nausea.

I saw Carell on Charlie Rose. As he spoke about Crazy, Stupid, Love, he expressed no interest in making people laugh. He was, by no indication, the old-fashioned clown willing to knock himself out in a commitment to the all-consuming make-'em-laugh ethos. He came across, instead, as a serious artist only interested in indulging his own whims. He made it clear in his remarks that he was content to have made the film that he set out to make. He spoke about wanting to spend more time with his family (the reason he left The Office) and finding film projects that allowed him to work with actors whom he admired. This was not a man willing to break a sweat to please his fans. It was, in the end, all about him.

These days, a comedian does not need to create a substantial body of work to be declared an icon. A comedian can have one big hit and coast on it for years. Rose praised Carell for his work on The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005), which is the film that made the actor a star, but he never mentioned the lesser films that followed. It is probably wise not to talk about Evan Almighty (2007), Dan in Real Life (2007), Get Smart (2008), Date Night (2010) and Dinner for Schmucks (2010). Date Night, which teamed Carell with Tina Fey, was actually a success at the box office, but no one would dare to call the film a comedy classic. But Carell has no reason to worry. His current net worth is $54 million. His salary for Crazy, Stupid, Love alone was $15 million. Here is a photo of the man's lavish estate.

Carell has enough money to live in luxury for the rest of his life if no one comes to see another one of his films. He does not need to be a funny clown when he has the money to be a smug millionaire.

It could be that I got the wrong impression. Maybe, Carell wasn't so jaded as he seemed. It could be that the subdued setting of the Rose show put him into a more sober mood and he decided to save up all of his funny faces for the Jimmy Kimmel show. Still, I might be feeling more gracious if I could see something funny from Carell or his illustrious peers. Really, is Mr. Popper's Penguins the best that Jim Carrey has to offer these days?

The Benefit of Sharing

2011-08-03T14:51:00.000-07:00

Today, comedians are willing to gather together as a posse to lynch a joke thief. But it wasn't always like that. At one time, comedians willingly shared material and it was through this sharing that routines were able to develop and improve. We would have lost out on a lot of great comedy if comedians refused to ever borrow material from other comedians. The following clip is from a golf sketch performed by Sid Field and Jerry Desmonde in 1946.

This became the inspiration for a much funnier and better known golf sketch performed by Jackie Gleason and Art Carney on The Honeymooners ("The Golfer," 1955).

Lloyd Hamilton's The Optimist (1923)

2011-08-03T14:50:00.000-07:00

During the last two years, I have been able to gain access to a number of Lloyd Hamilton films that were unavailable to me while I was writing my biography of Hamilton. A chapter of my upcoming book, Sixteen Comedians of Silent Film, will thoroughly examine these films. Here, as a sneak preview, are screen captures from The Optimist (1923).

Hamilton makes the mistake of feeding a starving bird, which draws other birds to his home and brings about a vicious attack. The comic scene ideally anticipates the more scary bird attacks of Hitchcock's The Birds (1963).

Hamilton tells the story of his Pilgrim ancestors, which leads to a clever dissolve to Hamilton in 17th Century America.

Hamilton keeps score as he shoots down Indians.

Hamilton protects the modesty of a toddler.

The Optimist is a funny film that shows Hamilton at his best. My thanks to the Filmmuseum in Amsterdam for providing me with a copy of this rare film.

Gag of the Month: The Multiple People Hidden Under a Trench Coat Gag

2011-08-03T14:48:00.000-07:00

This classic gag, which has been used by many great comedians, appeared most recently in an episode of Cartoon Network's Adventure Time ("Power Animal," 2011).

A Growing Mob

2011-07-27T14:32:00.000-07:00

A routine can be planted in the celluloid turf as an acorn and grow into a mighty oak. This explains how a simple American Mutoscope & Biograph short named Personal (1904) eventually inspired the grand "bridal run" climax of Buster Keaton's Seven Chances (1925). Footage from Personal is not available, but here's a clip from the Edison remake How a French Nobleman Got a Wife through the New York Herald Personal Columns (1904):

In filmmaking, CGI is equivalent to plant growth hormones. Here is how that same routine looks with current technology.

Obviously, the clip also reflects a change in sexual attitudes. Women in bustles look much different than women in bikinis. I should add, though, that the sexual content of this clip is tame when compared to a scene in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983) in which Graham Chapman is chased off a cliff by a horde of topless models.

Walk-in Meat Freezer, Part 3

2011-07-27T14:29:00.000-07:00

The other day, I got to see yet another version of the meat freezer routine. This version is unique for two reasons. First, it's animated. Second, the characters escape from the meat freezer by following talking hot dogs through a teleportation device. I'd like for them to have tried that on I Love Lucy. Anyway, all of this happens on an episode of Cartoon Network's Regular Show called "Meat Your Maker" (2010). Here is a clip:

This routine, in its persistent reenactments, makes the walk-in meat freezer look like the most diabolically dangerous device in the history of food storage.

The Big Gag

2011-07-27T14:24:00.000-07:00

The cyclone scene of Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) provided the single most famous gag in silent films. Buster Keaton, who is standing in front of a building as its facade collapses, avoids being crushed underneath the debris by passing through an open window. I really want to call this astonishing stunt the most famous gag in film history, but I am not in the mood to argue with fans of There's Something About Mary who are more impressed by Cameron Diaz's glazed hair wave.

I set out in my new book, The Funny Parts, to analyze the various permutations of this gag and separate out the good ones from the bad ones. Adaptations of this gag came from a variety of strange and unexpected sources. Can you imagine a MacGyver version? What about a Star Wars version? No need to imagine as I have included clips of these versions below.

The most audacious reworking of this gag came from Keaton himself. He came up with a steam-powered version of the gag while working as a gag writer on the Marx Brothers' Go West (1940). Take a look.

A significant percentage of an artist's time is devoted to conceiving ideas, but much more of his time is devoted to revision, refinement and restatement.

I was confident that I had seen every version of the gag in existence, but then I came across an unfamiliar version while watching TCM's Red Skelton marathon last week. Several of Skelton's MGM films, including A Southern Yankee (1948), The Yellow Cab Man (1950) and Watch the Birdie (1950), are well-stocked with old Keaton gags as Keaton worked on these films as a consultant. But this greatest of Keaton gags was reworked without Keaton's involvement. The film was A Fuller Brush Man (1948), a feature that Skelton made while on a loan-out to Columbia. Skelton, in flight from criminals in a war surplus factory, encounters an inventory of prefabricated homes and attempts to topple multiple facades on top of the criminals. This version of the routine actually has much in common with the MacGyver version except that the criminals safely pass through openings in the facades and it is Skelton who eventually has a slab of plywood and drywall land on top of him.

In 1950, Keaton performed a scaled-down version of the gag on his television show.

Here is a clip of the same scene.

Routine of the Month: Lazzi of Fear

2011-07-17T19:25:00.000-07:00

Jerry Lewis performs a gag from the Commedia dell'arte routine "Lazzi of Fear." Many famous comedians performed variations on this routine, including Stan Laurel (A Chump at Oxford, 1940) and Lou Costello (Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, 1948).

The Horror. . . the Horror. . .

2011-07-17T19:18:00.000-07:00

Adam Sandler sorely tested his fans' loyalty with the excruciatingly unfunny Grown Ups and Just Go with It. His fans may be brought to the breaking point with Sandler's latest farce, Jack and Jill.

It may be of interest to history buffs that Lupino Lane employed the same premise more than eighty years ago in Listen Sister (1928).

Print Edition of "Life, Liberty. . . and all the rest" Now Available on Amazon

2011-06-18T11:16:00.000-07:00

The book is available to Amazon customers at http://www.amazon.com/Life-Liberty-all-rest/dp/1461143640/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1308419476&sr=1-4.

Three Questions for Daniel H. Wilson, Author of Robopocalypse

2011-06-16T18:03:00.001-07:00

Recently, Entertainment Weekly book critic Keith Staskiewicz predicated that "the next big thing" in publishing will be mechanized men and the book poised to launch the trend is Daniel H. Wilson's Robopocalypse, which has already been optioned by DreamWorks and is expected to be adapted into a big screen spectacle by Steven Spielberg. It is fun to speculate about the impact that robots will one day have on our lives. It is the reason I wrote my own robot novel and the reason that I did not hesitate to read Robopocalypse. If this book stands to whet the public's appetite for robots stories, I am more than happy to lend it my support.

Wilson, who earned a Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, is serious about robots. A man who has dedicated himself to the design and construction of robots must be hopeful that these clanking automatons will continue to benefit our lives. Yet, it seems that Wilson needed to purge underlying misgivings he has about robots in both Robopocalypse and an earlier novel, How to Survive a Robot Uprising. (Wilson expressed a more positive view of robots in his two other books, A Boy and His Bot and How to Build a Robot Army.)

Robopocalypse opens with a series of vignettes in which machines suddenly attack their owners. A companion robot molded in the likeness of a sweet old woman bites off a piece of its owner's face and then nearly strangles the poor guy to death. A baby doll seeks to brainwash a senator's young daughter. Sappy, a "safety and pacification" robot deployed with an American combat unit in Afghanistan, grabs hold of an AK-47 and opens fire on the men in its unit. A domestic robot on a shopping errand attacks and slaughters the workers in a frozen yogurt shop. The robots, rallied together by a massively powerful AI entity named Archos, achieve world domination by slaughtering and enslaving millions of humans, but the survivors band together to mount an all-out rebellion against these robot tyrants.

Wilson has said that he drew on real-world robotics research in his preparation of the book. Search-and-rescue robots that exist today are able to identify the location of human targets by the body heat that they generate. Wilson installed this same technology in the novel's "stumper" robots, which are designed to hunt and kill humans. The stumpers' behavior is fairly simple by the standards of robotics engineers and yet this robot, described by Wilson as a "crawling landmine," could not be more lethal. Wilson wrote in a recent article, "Stumpers typically hide themselves in cold environments and emerge in swarms upon detecting warm, bipedally-walking targets." The stumpers no sooner reach their target then they self-detonate. These swarming robots are insect-like, just like many real-life robots that have been modeled on ants, cockroaches and crickets. Using a well-developed cricket trick, the stumpers keep a fixed distance from each other simply by recognizing the vibrations their fellow stumpers generate while in motion. It is the fact that these robots rely on credible technology that makes them so scary.

Wilson was kind enough to consent to a brief interview with me. Let's hear more of what he has to say about the real-life robots that inspired his novel.

Q: What was your most frightening encounter with a machine?

A: I once stood too close to an industrial arm in the Robot Learning lab at Carnegie Mellon. It made a sudden movement that didn't hit me, but could have smashed my face in without the robot even knowing.

Q: How did your knowledge of robotics help you in writing this book?

A: I was able to draw on my real-world experiences with robots. For example, I've had the opportunity to ride inside an autonomous car, worn a real exoskeleton, and stood across from a Honda Asimo.

Q: Where do you believe robotics will be in twenty-five years?

A: I think those self-driving cars, exoskeletons, and humanoid robots that are prototypes today will be in our homes tomorrow!

I am personally willing to take the risk of a robot biting me in the face as long as it has a scrub-brush claw it can use to get rid of that nasty ring in my bathtub.

Tintinnabulating Tin Cans of Fun

2011-06-16T18:02:00.000-07:00

Blow the trumpets. Release the confetti. I am here to announce the release of my first novel, Life, Liberty. . . and all the rest. The story has to do with a robot uprising occurring in the near future. Wait, the word uprising may be overstating the situation. It's not so much an uprising as it is a flap or a rumpus. Okay, wait, how's this instead? The story has to do with a robot hullabaloo occurring in the near future. Details can be found at http://lifelibertyandalltherest.blogspot.com/.

I figured that a second blog was needed to keep my film comedy articles and my robot articles separate. This is not to say that the subjects of robots and comedy could never find a point of convergence. The robots featured in my book do a number of funny things. Also, experts in both the robotics and comedy fields have been willing to consider the possibility of a robot acquiring the ability to effectively perform comedy.

Robot entertainers can do everything from juggle balls to play the violin. But the lack of personality makes these acts somewhat boring. See for yourself if you don't believe me.

Comedy is a form of entertainment that relies heavily on personality. It is hard for me to believe that a machine telling a joke could get me to laugh. But not everyone agrees with me. Robotic engineers have designed a mechanical stand-up comedian called Data. Data learns what jokes are funny and what jokes are not funny by measuring the level of laughter that a joke elicits from audience members. The developers of the robot explain their objectives as follows: "By creating audience sensing technologies that can help a robot parse crowd response and developing more effective emotive, communicatory and animation capabilities for the robot itself, we hope to accelerate innovation in social robotics on and off the stage as well as to create new forms of expression and collaboration for human performers."

This strikes me as a fool's errand. It doesn't alter my opinion in the least to see an audience laughing enthusiastically at Data.

Data's creator is clearly nervous about how the audience will react to her robot. The audience feels sympathy towards her and that sympathy is instantly transferred to the robot. The fact that the robot looks and sounds like a child makes the audience even more sympathetic and this further contributes to their willingness to accommodate the act with laughter and applause. Also, the familiarly of the robot's recycled jokes is likely to have prompted audience members to remember hearing the jokes recited by flesh-and-blood comedians. The robot could have said, "I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I'll never know." I would have laughed at that only because I would have remembered Groucho Marx's classic delivery of that line in Animal Crackers.

Meet a robocomedian named Funnybot, who was featured on a recent episode of South Park. (Beware of mature content.)

Comedy involves so much more than the ability to deliver a punch line. It depends on timing, spontaneity and surprise. It depends on a comedian creating a character with emotional depth and making a meaningful connection with the audience. It is a form of expression beyond anything that a robot could ever manage.

A robot stands to gain more laughs as a satirical device. Thirty-five funnybots serve this purpose in Life, Liberty. . . and all the rest.

A Cowboy Bites the Dust

2011-06-11T18:23:00.000-07:00

I was a big fan of Justified during its first season. Timothy Olyphant, as cool U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, was always three steps ahead of the bad guys. He barely mussed his hair as he rescued hostages, hunted down an escaped convict, and broke up a murderous drug ring. I couldn't have been more fond of this kick-ass lawman. He reminded me of the movie heroes of my childhood. Sometimes when I watched the show, I squinted my eyes to make Olyphant's face blurry so that I could pretend I was a child again and I watching a new Clint Eastwood movie.

'zat you, Clint?

However, a number of critics complained that this hero was so much in control that he never seemed in danger. So, the next season, Marshal Raylan Givens was shown to be deeply flawed in character and judgment. The good marshal was no longer able to do anything right and it is beyond credibility that he made it out of the season alive. It disturbed me to see how far this hero had fallen.

It took a larger-than-life hero to battle the cruddy, bristly criminals that populated the marshal's home in the hill country of Harlan County, Kentucky. But, when it came to the second season of Justified, the marshal's true grit, equal parts courage, wit and toughness, had been transferred to a variety of female characters. Never had a television series featured such a formidable group of women. This gave prominent roles to several actresses, including Margo Martindale, Joelle Carter, Linda Gehringer, Erica Tazel, Rebecca Creskoff and Kaitlyn Dever. Not one of these women would duck for cover during a gun fight or buckle at the knees if a bomb exploded. Natalie Zea, whose main job seems to be to provide male viewers with eye candy, was the one woman on the show exempt from the tough-as-nails sisterhood. Her character, who was dependent on the men in her life for happiness and security, often came across as foolish and inept.

Compared to Harlan County's hard-ass women, the men with whom they associated were pathetic. Dever's character, 14-year-old Loretta McCready, took care of her hopelessly drunken father (Chris Mulkey). Gehringer's Helen Givens took care of her no-good husband (Raymond Barry) - a broken-down, two-bit crook who was prevented from leaving the house by a clunky ankle-bracelet locked to his leg. Barry dragged around his trapped leg as if it was deformed. Martindale's Mags Bennet took care of two defective adult sons - a scraggly, crippled, sociopathic crybaby (Jeremy Davies) and an oafish, violent half-wit (Brad William Henke). The sons lived in terror of their mother, who would not spare the rod to keep her overgrown boys in line. Mags only showed respect to a third son, Doyle (Joseph Lyle Taylor). Unlike his neutered layabout brothers, Doyle was married, had children, and was employed as the local police chief. Still, Doyle was no less submissive to his big mama. He may have worn a police uniform but he only got the job to protect his mother's drug trade. He may have been a father and husband but we never once saw him attending to his wife and children. He was, in truth, a paper man.

Hollywood has lost the ability to depict masculinity in a meaningful and appropriate manner. Television viewers are led to believe that men are foolish boys who need the women in their lives to act as their mothers. This is also evident in children's shows, including Hannah Montana and iCarly. The girls on these shows are smart, brassy and controlling while the boys are either timid and sensitive or goofy and poorly regarded.

It shouldn't surprise me that the marshal found himself in so many undignified situations. He got beat up more often than Jim Rockford. I remember in particular a scene where Givens was hanging upside down in a tree while Mags' crippled boy, Dickie, whacked him with a baseball ball.

Earlier this month, we had to say goodbye to James Arness, who played the greatest marshal on television. Arness' Marshal Matt Dillon never hesitated to resort to violence to subdue a villain, but the violence was just part of the job and it did not define him as an person. He was, as a man, wise, kind and honorable. His intuitive nature prevented wrongdoers from catching him off guard and fans of the show never saw this as a reason to complain. It is sad that Hollwood no longer sees value in this type of hero.

I am Ryan Reynolds' Abs

2011-06-11T14:05:00.000-07:00

My teenage son, who regularly runs and lifts weights, is in good physical shape, but he will not be satisfied with his appearance until he has the sort of quality six-pack that other men will envy. I explained to him that he has been taken in by a Hollywood scam.

The rectus abdominis muscle was emphasized in ancient Greco-Roman statues to put forth an idealized form of the male body. Often, the subjects of the statues were gods with impossible physical strength. It was inevitable that these statues would occupy the minds of filmmakers producing sword and sandal epics. Still, the tunic-clad actors of early Hollywood saw no need to show off their abs. Here is a picture of early Hollywood strongman Francis X. Bushman in a publicity still for Ben-Hur (1925).

Bushman demonstrated his fitness without being ostentatious about his muscles.

Perceptions didn't change until Charles Atlas introduced clever marketing ploys to popularize bodybuilding in the 1930s. Atlas gave special attention to his abdominal muscles. He wrote, "It is all very well to have strong arms and a grip of steel, but of what use are these unless the abdominal area is in perfect condition?" He assured the public that, if they followed his exercise program, "[t]he rectus abdomus muscles will stand out firmly like a washboard." It is believe that Atlas and his partner, Charles Roman, coined the terms "washboard abs" and "six-pack abs."

Atlas never missed an opportunity to show off.

This did not have an immediate effect on Hollywood. Healthy, manly physiques did not have to be bursting with muscles.

But bodybuilding continued to grow in popularity during the next two decades. This became evident in movies in the 1950s. Marlon Brando became a sex symbol as soon as his Stanley Kowalski t-shirt revealed his burly weightlifter arms. Burt Lancaster, a former circus acrobat, made a lasting impression displaying his athletic physique in the beach scenes of From Here to Eternity. And Brando and Lancaster were far from alone in their muscularity. Take a look at these pictures of Paul Newman and Montgomery Clift.

Steve Reeves, a bodybuilder with movie star looks, took muscle definition to new heights when, in 1958, he showed off his bulging muscles in the low-budget Italian action film Hercules.

Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger had much greater success than Reeves when they flexed their muscles in big-budget films in the 1980s. This was a cartoonish form of masculinity that was measured by muscles rather than character. It is not surprising both of these overgrown actors later got caught up in steroid scandals.

The trend has continued unabated.

Spartacus (1960)

Spartacus (2010)

In recent years, the abs have become a status symbol for the physically fit and it isn't necessary for an actor to be playing a centurion for him to go shirtless and show off his bumpy midriff. The fact is that filmmakers will use any excuse to have these actors go shirtless. The abs obsession has gotten so bad that actors are being given pronounced abs on screen through the use of CGI and make-up tricks. Gerard Butler's abs are not real in 300 (2006).

Nicolas Cage's abs are not real in Ghost Rider (2007).

It is only to be expected that, with the virulence of this media propaganda, young men today have unrealistic expectations about their appearance and are experiencing growing body image issues.

Chill Stills

2011-06-11T11:27:00.000-07:00

I thank visitor vp81955 for making me aware of another "meat freezer" comedy. Out Cold (1989), a dark comedy about adultery and mariticide, involves multiple characters getting locked in a meat freezer.

As long as we're back on this subject, I should add that the summer hit The Hangover Part 2 happens to feature Ken Jeong getting locked in an ice machine.

Comedy Films of 1916

2011-06-08T23:30:00.000-07:00

The University of Michigan continues to make digitized editions of The Moving Picture World available for viewing online. I always make a point to search through these editions to make note of the comedy films of the period. The other day, I read about a number of comedy films from 1916.

The plot of He Wouldn't Wear Glasses, a comedy produced by the short-lived Rolma Films, relied on a simple situation. Max Figman removes his eyeglasses because his girlfriend doesn't like how he looks in them, but his vision becomes so blurry that he mistakes another woman for his girlfriend.

Domestic relations were the source of comedy in Charity Begins at Home. Harry Myers, angry that his wife (Rosemary Theby) has given away some of his clothing to beggars, allows his wife to experience the drawbacks of charity by bringing home a bunch of stray animals.

Parents believe that their daughter and son-in-law have a baby on the way when in fact they are awaiting the delivery of a dog in a Mutual comedy called That Dog-gone Baby.

Harold Lloyd directs raw army recruits in a comic drill in Luke's Prepardedness Preparations.

The L-KO comedy The High Diver's Curse relied on the stock premise of an incompetent stagehand who disrupts a variety of acts. First, the stagehand (Dan Russell) blasts an actor with a hose during a rain scene. Next, during an acrobat routine, he reveals that an actor standing on his partner's shoulders is in fact being held up by a rope. Soon after, he carelessly tosses a banana peel on stage, which causes a troupe of dancers to lose their footing and slip across the stage. Finally, a high diver is preparing to dive from a platform into a bucket of water when the stagehand removes the bucket and causes the diver to come crashing headfirst into the hard floor.

The High Diver's Curse fits well in a discussion of gag traditions. To start, Russell relies on two common props - hoses and banana peels. Other film comedians had sprayed a hose in a crowded theater. Max Linder did it in Max plays at Drama (1912) and Charlie Chaplin did it in A Night at the Show (1915). Even more notable, the film showed how the scope of a gag could be expanded. The standard gag of a man slipping on a banana peel was now transformed into a full-scale comic dance number. As it worked out, the tradition of the incompetent stagehand was carried forth in the coming years by such comic luminaries as Larry Semon and Buster Keaton.

How about a cartoon, too? A robot amok story formed the basis of the Bray cartoon Percy and the Mechanical Man (1916). Percy sets out to prove the capabilities of his new robot creation by getting the mechanical man a job as a window dresser. Unfortunately, Percy presses the wrong button and the robot proceeds to forcibly carry the store manager and various customers behind a dressing screen to randomly clothe them in a series of inappropriate outfits.

Book Announcement

2011-06-08T07:16:00.000-07:00

An announcement for The Funny Parts has been posted to McFarland's website at http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-6513-2. The photo is from Laurel & Hardy's That's My Wife (1929).

The Meat Freezer Routine

2011-05-05T13:05:00.000-07:00

One of the most popular episodes of I Love Lucy was "The Freezer" (1952), in which Lucy accidentally locks herself in a walk-in meat freezer and becomes frozen stiff. This comic business did not entirely originate with Lucy. Curly Howard became frozen while locked in the back of a refrigerated ice cream wagon in the Three Stooges' Violent Is the Word for Curly (1938).

Still, it was through the influence of the I Love Lucy episode that getting trapped in a meat freezer turned into a stock sitcom premise. Nearly the same scene is played out in a Car 54, Where are You? episode called "Boom, Boom, Boom" (1962).

Writers expanded on the premise for a number of other sitcoms, including Brady Bunch ("Big Little Man," 1972), Three's Company ("Baby, It's Cold Inside, 1984), It's Garry Shandling's Show ("Go Go Goldblum,"1988), Due South ("They Eat Horses Don't They?," 1994), Kenan and Kel ("Freezer Burned,"1999), Desperate Housewives ("Into the Woods," 2007), and Trailer Park Boys ("I Fuckin' Miss Cory and Trevor," 2007).

The Brady Bunch

Three's Company

A frozen cod makes a funny prop in the Kenan and Kel episode.

This episode enlarged the number of participants by having Kel accidentally turn the arrow on a restaurant's restroom sign to point in the direction of the meat freezer. One by one, patrons stumble inside the freezer and shut the door before they realize where they are. Eventually, the freezer is packed wall to wall with people.

Due South's heroes remain warm by wearing meat jackets.

A married woman falls into the embrace of a co-worker to keep warm in Desperate Housewives.

A meat robbery goes wrong results in the hapless Bubbles being locked in a freezer in the Trailer Park Boys episode.

A quirky Belgium comedy, L'Iceberg (2005), uses this incident as the jumping-off point for an entire feature. Fiona, the manager of a fast-food restaurant, accidentally locks herself in the restaurant's walk-in freezer overnight. She escapes only to find that her family didn't notice she was missing. Depressed, she looks to her near-death experience to find meaning in her life and develops a strange affection for ice and cold. One morning, she climbs into a frozen goods delivery truck and leaves home in search of an iceberg.

The Losing Pants in Public Routine

2011-05-05T12:07:00.000-07:00

The timeworn routine of a man losing his pants in public can be traced as far back as a 1905 Dutch comedy, The Misadventure of a French Gentleman Without Pants. The routine is being kept alive by a number of sitcom writers.

The Big Bang Theory "The Pants Alternative" (2010)

Mad Love "The Young and The Reckless" (2011)

Gag of the Month

2011-04-21T13:00:00.000-07:00

The gag is simple. A man who has been riddled with bullets takes a drink of water and water comes spurting out of the bullet holes. The above screen capture displays a variation of gag featured in The Three Stooges' Three Pests in a Mess (1945). Following are other three variations of the gag.

Olsen & Johnson's Hellzapoppin’ (1941)

Abbott & Costello's The Time Of Their Lives (1946)

The gag is used for a pivotal moment in the story when Costello's character realizes that he was fatally shot by soldiers and has turned into a ghost.

Married with Children (1991)

Television Advertisers are Obnoxious Jerks

2011-04-21T12:42:00.000-07:00

As a child, I was rarely able to stay up past ten o'clock on a school night, but I remember that those times I did stay up late commercials transformed into something out of the ordinary. The lighting was subdued and the announcers spoke in low tones. The commercials often promoted cigarettes or liquor. Presumably, the sponsors respected the fact that the viewers at this time were mostly moms and dads who had gotten the kids to bed and had finished their final chores of the day. Now, these people were trying to unwind before they themselves went to bed. It was conceivable that many were collapsed in front of the television holding a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. They did not need to be blasted with loud jingles or have a jokey cartoon pitchman storm their way into their living room. Better to have tranquil voices waft through the air to prepare these people for a good night's sleep. After all, they had to be alert for their jobs the next day if they planned to earn the money to buy these products.

I recently had the opportunity to watch a broadcast recording of a 1962 Alfred Hitchcock Hour episode complete with original commercials. It was like taking a trip back in time. The commercials were mostly like I remembered them to be. Sultry Julie London is sitting in a dark living room with a fireplace burning in background as she softly extols the mellow flavor of Marlboro cigarettes. An announcer speaks in a hushed tone to explain that an elegantly dressed woman enjoying a romantic candlelight dinner is wearing Coti lipstick and perfume. This was soft sell at its best.

The commercial breaks were, in their gentle way, much more appealing than the commercial breaks that television viewers have to endure today. The Hitchcock episode included five commercial breaks while the program was in progress and an additional break after the closing credits. This last break allowed a local commercial to be aired prior to the start of the local news. Four of the breaks that occurred during the show lasted no more than one minute and included no more than a single commercial message. The viewer was brought in and out of the break before they had a chance to get antsy. The one other break, which came at the middle of the hour, was three minutes long and included a station identification, a local commercial and two national commercials (one for Marlboro cigarettes and another for Lavoris mouthwash). The commercial breaks in total, including 20 seconds spent on sponsor identification at the opening and closing of the program, totaled 8 minutes and 24 seconds.

I compared this to the commercial breaks on a current primetime show, NBC's The Event. In this instance, the total time given to commercial breaks was 17 minutes and 44 seconds. There still were five commercial breaks during the course of the hour-long program. The commercial break between shows has been eliminated. The closing scene of The Event was directly followed by an opening teaser for the next program, which was designed to grab viewers before they had a chance to switch away to another channel. However, the commercial breaks are not consistent from show to show. I learned through further research that other hour-long shows, such as Blue Bloods, make room for as much as 20 minutes' worth of commercials per episode.

Most surprising is the number of commercial messages that were broadcast during The Event. Eight commercial messages aired during Hitchcock, but shockingly The Event shoehorned in a total of 42 commercial messages. The modern day philosophy of network broadcasters is to bombard audiences with ads. Buy! Buy! Buy! It is a mind-boggling fever dream of consumerism. Julie London is not whispering these messages in your ear. Today, sponsors do not care if commercials are annoyingly loud and brightly lit as long as they are able to catch your attention in the Great Commercial Expressway. Loud commercials are likely to remain ringing in your ears and shiny commercials stand a chance of burning into your retinas.

The Hitchcock commercials looked to sell mouthwash, shampoo, perfume and lipstick. But high-dollar items, including cars and electronic devices, were prominent in the advertisements aired during The Event. Other commercial messages solicited viewers to be socially conscious, participating in recycling efforts and supporting the National Math and Science Initiative. NBC is not even directly earning money for all of these commercials. Several of the commercials promoted other NBC shows, including The Office, 30 Rock, Law and Order: LA, Parenthood, The Biggest Loser and The Voice. A commercial for The Voice aired during three of the five breaks.

I assumed that basic cable channels aired more commercials than the networks, but it only seems that way because basic cable channels have six commercial breaks in an hour. Here is a list of the commercial breaks for an episode of 16 and Pregnant broadcast on April 19, 2011:

10:08:54 to 10:12:02 3 minutes and 08 seconds

10:18:11 to 10:21:34 3 minutes and 23 seconds

10:26:22 to 10:28:56 2 minutes and 34 seconds

10:35:16 to 10:38:19 3 minutes and 03 seconds

10:43:38 to 10:45:54 2 minutes and 16 seconds

10:51:08 to 10:54:55 3 minutes and 47 seconds

The length of these breaks, in total, is 18 minutes and 11 seconds.

If this is not enough advertising, an increasing amount of product placement is being include within the program content. By 2006, product placement had evolved into something that advertisers call an embedded commercial. Here is an embedded commercial for Acuview contact lenses included in a 2006 episode of Smallville.

Blogger Wayne Schmidt wrote, "During a 2008 summer episode of Eureka, the lead star picked up a deodorant dispenser in such an awkward way to keep the label facing the camera that is was insultingly obvious it was a commercial. Worse still, this was a science fiction show in which the actor was caught in a repeating time loop. That's right, the viewer was forced to watch the clumsy bit of embedded commercialization every time the time loop repeated."

Chuck frequently uses a character's addiction to Subway subs to promote Subway as a part of their storylines.

The Amazing Race proves that Goths are not so anti-establishment that they cannot take the time to provide a good word on the Ford Focus. A good drinking game would be to take a shot every time you see the Ford logo or hear Ford name-checked during this clip.

A map of Austria cannot be displayed on The Amazing Race without a credit for Google Maps being emblazoned across the bottom of the screen.

Network executives are trying to find ways to thwart DVR users who fast-forward through commercials. My son, Griffin, is a big critic of what he calls "DVR traps" (advertisers call them "interstitial ads" or "DVR busters"). This is when a commercial is designed to look like a scene from the show so that the viewer, thinking the show has started again, eases up on the fast-forward button. Unsuspecting viewers lured into stopping to watch will not get wise to the trick until it is too late.

Mad Men

Desperate Housewives

30 Rock

I have personally had enough of this advertising overload. I refuse to buy a product just because an advertiser is determined to cram it down my throat. I am a brand loyalist anyway. When I visit the supermarket, I stock up on same products that I have been using for years. I am largely influenced by word-of-mouth when it comes to purchasing a book or seeing a movie. I ran out and bought a IPod only after my nephew swore to me how useful his own IPod was. I am not the type of person willing to buy a Ford car because he sees it on The Amazing Race or Hawaii Five-0 (another showplace for Ford cars).

By their aggressiveness and deceit, network executives have scared away many consumers and have severely diminished the trust of others. They need to find a compromise, otherwise no one wins.

Funny Food

2011-04-03T12:23:00.001-07:00

A highlight of Grandma's Boy (1922) is a scene in which Mildred Davis makes an effort to feed Harold Lloyd a piece of candy without realizing that she has in fact picked up a mothball that has gotten mixed up with the candy. Variations of this routine were performed by a number of comedians. Routines involving comedians consuming inedible objects or adulterated food is the subject of a Funny Parts chapter entitled "Misadventures in Eating." The chapter covers classic routines from Chaplin's struggle to eat a boot to Abbott & Costello's "Turkey Sandwich and a Cup of Coffee" fracas.

Honoring the Goofs

2011-04-03T10:46:00.000-07:00

A person who holds their comedy icons in reverence could not approve of New Year's Evil (1980), which features a serial killer stalking victims in a Stan Laurel mask. But, unfortunately, fans of classic comedy have long had to endure seeing the likeness, catchphrases and mannerisms of beloved comedians turn up in a variety of guises and permutations. What would Groucho Marx have said if he knew that his act would one day be co-opted by a cartoon stork hawking pickles.

Stork? Hawk? I believe I just made a joke, son!

By the way, Foghorn Leghorn was one of the first in a long line of cartoon characters modeled after a popular comedian. The model for the talkative rooster was the talkative radio comedian Kenny Delmar. As fond as I am of Foghorn, I can't help but feel bad that a cartoon counterfeit of a comedian can be better remembered than the actual comedian.

Perhaps, though, a disservice to Stan Laurel greater than transforming his lovably buffoonish screen character into a knife-wielding psychopath was the woefully misguided way in which Lucille Ball impersonated him on her 1960s sit-com.

Someone should have let Ball know that, although Laurel often scratched his head for comic effect, he never once scratched his derby.

These representations tend, in their wake, to diminish if not tarnish the memories of the originals. I, as one humble fan, celebrate these men and women in their true form at this and every other opportunity.

Trapdoor Escapes

2011-04-03T10:34:00.001-07:00

A standard in silent films was for a comedian to make a resourceful use of trapdoors to avoid capture during a breakneck chase scene. This type of routine goes back to nineteenth-century British Pantomime.

Here is an early film version of the routine performed by Harold Lloyd for a 1918 comedy called Follow the Crowd.

One of the best choreographed versions of the routine appeared in Buster Keaton's The High Sign (1921).

This routine was used to a lesser extent in sound films. Here is an example of the routine from Marx Brothers' last M-G-M feature, The Big Store (1941).

A Good Comedy Routine is Worth Repeating

2011-04-03T10:27:00.001-07:00

In The Gold Rush (1925), Charlie Chaplin's life is endangered when his cabin is dislodged by storm winds and ends up teetering on the edge of a cliff.

Less than six months after the release of The Gold Rush, a copycat routine was touted on posters for Min's Home on the Cliff (1926).

In Seven Chances (1925), Buster Keaton appeared on screen being chased by a horde of hopeful brides.

Months later, Sid Smith suffered a similar fate in a Fox two-reel comedy called The Heart Breaker (1925).

Leapin' lizards!

2011-04-03T10:21:00.001-07:00

Zach Galifianakis recently garnered praise from Entertainment Weekly and assorted commentators in the blogosphere for a Saturday Night Live sketch in which he appeared wearing Little Orphan Annie's cute red dress. I need to say, though, that no one could ever look funnier in this gabardine frock than Chuck McCann, who regularly donned the outfit on his television series in the 1960s. McCann went all the way with the getup by wearing a big curly yellow wig and concealing his eyes behind blank white circles. It was truly a sight to behold.

A Peek at Alice Howell

2011-04-03T10:12:00.001-07:00

A further example of kick-the-brat comedy is provided by Alice Howell in Neptune's Naughty Daughter (1917).

Howell demonstrates her trademark walk during a fracas at the beach.

A Lloyd Hamilton Table Stand

2011-04-03T09:56:00.001-07:00

Bad Grief!

2011-04-03T09:22:00.001-07:00

A person grieving the death of a loved one will resort to desperate measures to cope with their loss. This idea has been explored in strange and disturbing ways in two recent films, Wake Wood and I Saw the Devil. These films differ vastly from the more true-to-life Rabbit Hole (2010), in which people get past tragedy and heal in a a reasonable fashion. Rabbit Hole is an excellent film (one of my favorite films of last year), but its realism worked against it in some quarters. A number of critics numbed by the CGI that passes for modern drama and content with the immoral and emotionally flat characters of The Social Network were offended, maybe even threatened, by a film that showed characters working through deeply painful emotions and maintaining with love and duty the most significant relationships in their social network. The film, for all its real emotion, was dismissed by many as grief porn. But those haters in the mood for a film that addresses grief in a more fantastic manner need look no further.

Wake Wood, with its ominously quiet townsfolk, fiery pagan rituals and child-coming-back-from-the-dead-wrong, is a combination of The Wicker Man and Pet Cemetery. The strength of the film comes from its ability to be creepy and heartbreaking at the same time. Like Rabbit Hole, Wake Wood is set into motion by the death of a young child. The grieving parents, portrayed movingly by Aidan Gillen (The Wire) and Eva Birthistle (Waking the Dead), move to a distant town to escape memories of their daughter's death and start their lives anew. But the couple soon learn that the local squire is able to conduct a ritual that can bring their daughter back to life for three days and allow them the closure necessary for them to accept her death and move on. The viewer is given the sense from the start that something bad is going to happen to this couple for daring to play with fate. As evil doings unfold, a grave lesson, or a lesson of the grave, is to be learned. Insert your own Crypt Keeper cackle here.

I Saw the Devil, unlike Wake Wood, disregards poignancy and moral to focus strictly on blood and gore. Any message that is offered quickly becomes lost in pools of blood. Wake Wood takes the terror approach, which is designed to provoke fear and suspense, while I Saw the Devil takes the horror approach, which is designed to provoke revulsion.

The film starts with a young woman (San-ha Oh) getting her car stuck on a dark, desolate road and calling on her cell phone for a tow truck. While she us waiting for the truck, a hooded figure appears outside of the car and suddenly raises up a sledgehammer to smash open the windshield. The director, Jee-woon Kim, is skillful in building up the tension. The superbly stylishness cinematography provided by Mogae Lee further enhances the haunting mood of the scene. But all of this talent can do nothing to elevate a story as gruesome and muddled as this one. In the end, the terrifying opening promises much more than the film can deliver.

The woman is tortured and murdered. Her fiancé, played by Byung-hun Lee, is devastated when the woman's head is found floating in a river the next day. Lee, a highly skilled and well-regarded federal agent, decides that he will hunt down the killer himself to enact revenge. The agent soon gets hold of the killer and beats him mercilessly. But then, after planting a GPS device on the psychopath, he lets him go so that he can catch him and punish him all over again. It is obvious from the start that Lee's catch-and-release scheme will go wrong. Planting a GPS device on Choi hardly gives Lee control of the situation. The plan might make sense if the killer had his hands chopped off so that he no longer was a threat and real escape was never possible.

Min-sik Choi provides a chilling performance as a hulking homicidal maniac as unstoppable as Jason and as morally perverse as No Country for Old Men's Anton Chigurh. Although Lee is supposed to be a super-cop, he seems greatly outmatched by Choi. Lee's beating only makes the killer angry and, the angrier he gets, the more dangerous he becomes. Unleashing this enraged beast on the general public cannot serve anyone's sense of justice. The killer now, in this cat-and-mouse game with Lee, is able to come into his own and willfully slaughter anyone unfortunate enough to come into his blood-soaked path. To be honest, I became so disgusted by all of the killings that I never made it to the end of the film.