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A Favorite Website: "Another Nice Mess"
Wow, I love Dave Lord Heath’s website "Another Nice Mess: The Films of Laurel and Hardy." This place is paradise for someone researching the many comedy films from the golden era of 1915 to 1951. I...
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A Tribute to Armstrong and Ashton
The "Let Me Entertain You" musical number is a highlight of a Melbourne State Theatre production of "Gypsy."I always feel great sympathy for the many minor acts that came and went on the vaudeville...
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A Note on the Samuel Goldman Papers and The Authorship of "Slowly I Turned"
Samuel Goldman has been cited in articles as a potential originator of the famous "Slowly I Turned" burlesque routine. Goldman's authorship of the routine is based solely on an undated, handwritten...
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Comedy Routine of the Day: "The Dice Bit"
The "Dice" bit that Abbott and Costello performed in Buck Privates was for years tied to blackface comedians. This fact becomes evident in just a cursory examination of Variety reviews. In November,...
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Comedy Spotlight: The Lost Bass Drum; or, Where Is That Looie? (1907)
The award-winning film Whiplash was not the first narrative piece to detail the trials and tribulations of the drummer. Gaumont introduced a myriad of whiplash cases in a violent and hair-raising...
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Comedy Routine of the Day: “Who Died First?"
"Who Died First?" was once a popular routine in vaudeville. The routine involved a husband and wife who are being plagued by creditors. The couple decide to fake the husband's death to stall off...
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A Phantasmagoria of Nonsense: Tom Mix's Improbable Iron Horse and Other Bad...
Critics have never hesitated to express their displeasure over a bad film. W. Stephen Bush, a critic with Moving Picture World, didn't hold back his feelings in regards to a 1915 embezzlement...
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Why I Could Not Watch More than 15 Minutes of Trainwreck
The summer film season brought the film debut of Amy Schumer. Schumer's devoted followers have been exhaustively thumbing through their thesauruses to offer their smut goddess the most flamboyant of...
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Comedy Routine of the Day: "Crazy House"
I once wrote a fairly sketchy article about the burlesque routine "Crazy House." You can find the article here. It embarrassed me that I could find so little on such a significant routine. But I am...
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Comedy Routine of the Day: "Ghost in a Pawnshop"
I found an old script for the classic "Ghost in a Pawnshop" routine in the Greg Rouleau Papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society. The routine includes three characters at work in a pawn shop - the...
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Comedy Routine of the Day: "Jonah and Whale"
An old routine was never the same once it found its way to Abbott and Costello. Abbott and Costello refashioned routines to accommodate their unique performing style and they managed in the process to...
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Comedy Routine of the Day: "Go Ahead and Sing"
In the past few months, I have made an effort to trace Abbott and Costello routines to their origins in minstrel shows, medicine shows, vaudeville entertainment and burlesque revues. I have now...
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Flugel Street Revisited
I have been looking at old burlesque scripts lately. Often, it seems, these scripts were typed out hurriedly with no attempt by the author to conceive a title. It didn't matter, though, because a...
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The Straw Hat Armageddon
The year was 1919. The "Flugel Street" routine had debuted only the year before and already it was a burlesque standard.Seeing how uproariously audiences laughed at straw hats being destroyed...
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Broadway’s Funny Year: 1948
I wish that I could climb into a time machine and ride freely on the time currents to 1948. My arrival in this time period would undoubtedly provide me with wondrous opportunities. I could head to...
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Shame on Me
I received avid feedback on my recent series of articles on the history of Abbott and Costello's burlesque routines. Unfortunately, not all of the feedback was positive. One person insisted that...
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A Taste of Minsky's
I have had much to say recently about Minsky's "Flugel Street" burlesque, which was intiated with great enthusiasm by Joey Faye and Sid Fields. The only record that I had of this "Flugel Street"...
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A Brief Comparison of Road Warrior and Hondo
Road Warrior (1981) was influenced in many ways by the John Wayne classic Hondo (1953).A bitter loner and his mongrel dog. A bitter loner and his mongrel dog.A good example of this influence can be...
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Random Bits for September
Lloyd Hamilton discarded his checkered cap to be the grand marshal of Straw Hat Day.I thank Steve Rydzewski for letting me know that these photos of Ham and Bud have been posted to ebay. I believe...
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Funny Fruit in the Family Tree
A recent episode of the celebrity genealogy series "Who Do You Think You Are?" traced the family lineage of choirmaster Gareth Malone to the Edwardian era of musical comedy theatre. It was in this...
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