Slapstick Stickback

“A boisterous form of comedy marked by chases, collisions, and crude practical jokes.”  - American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
(This is why I so rarely quote - the reference is three times as long.)

Slapstick goes back to Rome.  Along with crucifixion, it’s one of those wonderful innovations of civilization that separated the Republic from the barbarians.
It’s named for a stick that sounds painful, but isn’t so much.

 I don’t think that was the intention with crucifixion.

Aptly or not, modern comedy has incorporated Crucifixion into the slapstick genre.  But it's not all so grisly.

Early films incorporated a great deal of slapstick.  Clever repartee was difficult without sound.

Chaplin was considered a cinema god for his mastery of the art.

Until we deported him for having different political views than most of his audience.

And so the entertainment industry sought out acts to take up the slack.

The Little Rascals

Laurel and Hardy

Abbot and Costello

and of course...

The Three Stooges

For eighty years they have defined American Slapstick comedy

Even when Shemp replaced Curly, they were better than any other team,

Then slapstick got relegated to cartoons.

Live comedies relied on snappy dialog as opposed to physical comedy.

With some wonderful exceptions.

Maybe that's why we're so angry all the time.  We take ourselves too seriously.  What America - the World needs today is...

A good pie in the face.

Or maybe just to watch a bit more Monty Python

Pacifism and Misc.

Have you ever noticed that you can’t spell PACIFIST without making a FIST?

That’s all I have to say about pacifism in spite of it being in my title. I don’t know much about it, and I don’t want to insult the pacifists and start a fight. So this post is really much more about misc than pacifism – meaning that it’s a bunch of unrelated items, none of which is big enough to be expanded into a post of its own.

Like this:

Decades ago, the state of Wisconsin decided it was time to replace America’s Dairyland on their license plates. They asked the public for suggestions. One citizen, let’s call him Harvey Curdcrusher, expressed admiration for New Hampshire’s slogan, “Live Free or Die,” (impressed on their plates by incarcerated felons.) He suggested that Wisconsin adapt a similar slogan, “Eat Cheese or Die.”

Another helpful citizen, let’s call her Hildegard Wheystrainer, thought the purpose of the license plate slogan was to encourage tourism. In that effort, she recommended, “Come Smell Our Dairy Air.” (Those of you who took High School French, try saying that out loud.)

I don’t promise that this really happened – just that I believed it when I heard it.

In a similar vein:

Perhaps twenty years ago Canada reorganized their tundranous territories in order to give the impression that people actually lived there. They decided that to make provinces, or provincials or something like that of what used to be called the Northwest territories. That meant that the Northwest Territories couldn’t be called the Northwest Territories anymore. The great Canadian poo-bahs in Ottawa decided to poll the burgeoning populace about possible names, take the two most popular and decide between them in a ballot. Maybe they decided to do this because it had worked so well with Wisconsin, (who you will note, still uses the phrase, “America’s Dairyland” on their plates.)

The most popular response was… Northwest Territories which either shows that bitter cold saps the imagination or that it makes you cranky with bureaucrats who can’t just leave well enough alone.

The number two response (thanks to a slick internet campaign, back when many people in rural Canada hadn’t yet seen a computer,) was Bob. No other response got enough votes to compete with Northwest Territories and Bob.

The proponents of Bob argued that it was a word that meant the same thing in English, French, and every Native American dialect present in the Northwest Territories, (or Bob.)

My haggard (and now quoted without permission,) supervisor at the time thought that Bob was a fine name for a province as long as they named the capital, Yessiree.

And now this reflection on aging:

When I was a youngster, I dreamed of running fast and easy.

When I was in my twenties, I dreamed of fast and easy women.

When I hit forty, I dreamed of making fast and easy money.

Now as I approach sixty, I dream of fast and easy bowel movements.

And that’s all the misc that’s fit to post.

All I know about Pacifism I learned from British comedy.  Now if someone could please explain British comedy.

Art of Terry Gilliam by Walter Bego

Walter Bego has asked to use this blog to play tribute to his favorite artist.

He was the only American-born member of Monty Python, and perhaps the most accomplished director of the cast as well, but Terry Gilliam has always been the artist - the man who took us away from the familiar faces of the players and gave us something completely different.

The era leading into Python was a time of Pop, influenced by the Beatles, and by LSD.

It seemed like all the rules were broken already.  How is an artist supposed to deal with that?  Gilliam found ways of breaking rules we didn't know we had - like art was supposed to either be animated or still.  Gilliam refused to follow.

The largely stationary head with one moving part - frequently the jaw, eye or teeth, became something we identify with him to this day.

Gilliam brought the absurd to the spiritual - a favorite theme of Monty Python.

He also held a mirror to the absurdity of modesty.

It was well that he was taken in by Monty Python - American broadcast television in the 60s and early 70s never would have tolerated him.

A little girl harvesting hands from a grave-site would not have meshed well with Mayberry RFD.
But Gilliam didn't shock for the sake of shock.  In Holy Grail, Arthur and his knights run in fear of a great monster.  Gilliam might have created something truly fearsome.

Instead he gave us something so absurd, that the chase scene had no element of terror.

It wasn't because he lacked the talent to do otherwise.
Gilliam gave us great landscapes.

And streetscapes.

And interior scenes where the characters are dwarfed by their surroundings.

And, of course, he gave us countless images of the human foot.

And the reconstituted human body.

Why is he relegated to the title of comedian, while Warhol and others are called artist?  I don't know.  But I think he understands.

I am grateful to share in this suffering.

Now in his words.

Monty Python and the Limitation of Print

“You’re funny, Headley,” said an unidentified person to me recently, “but you can’t hold a candle to Monty Python.”

Like most people raised in the 60s and 70s, I didn’t take offence; I only nodded my head in agreement. There isn’t/wasn’t/ever will be any human or collection of humans as funny as Monty Python. It has become an article of faith in my generation, much as Elvis’ supremacy had been to the generation preceding mine.

So I thinks to myself – how can I do what they did? What can I write that is as brilliant as Holy Grail, Life of Brian, and the Flying Circus shows?

When you love something, never try to figure out why. To have one’s faith shaken is a disturbing sensation.

Observing the scripts of Monty Python without the stork-like posturings of John Cleese,

 the quirky art of Terry Gilliam,

 the smarmy naïveté of Eric Idle,

 the bulging bombast of Graham Chapman,

 or the shrill transvestitism of Terry Jones

 is to look at a bag of Doritos after the last chip has been masticated.

As Chapman, in army uniform informed us

 it’s just silly.

(oh, and Michael Palin showed up too – but he was just a tosser.)

(What is a tosser, anyway?)

Consider this:

A man and a woman are lowered into a diner where they find that Spam is considered an essential (or several essential,) part to every menu choice. A group of Vikings interrupt the dialog with a song about Spam.

It looks like a pathetic idea there in black and white – until you add the talent…

Or, a man walks into a pet shop to complain about a parrot he’s just bought there that is dead.

Sounds like a loser, but…

How about, a man pays to have a five minute argument. Almost the entire dialog consists of the service provider denying everything his customer says until the police break the thing up for being a pathetic sketch.

Pathetic sketch or not, add the Monty Python cast and it’s…

So until I can get the surviving (and perhaps the dead,) members of Monty Python to play out Trouble in Taos, link or Volition Man, link I’ll never really know if my stories are funny or not.

And getting the Coen brothers to direct wouldn’t hurt either.

There is one sketch that I think was brilliant even read from the page.