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The Choice
Martin Short in Clifford (1994)One can chose to be a responsible adult just like this fine, upstanding young man, who is employed as a teller at the First National Bank.Just look at this man. He is,...
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The Weirdo Idiot Man-Child
The man-child can at times assume the form of a ridiculously maladjusted weirdo idiot. These characters are, typically, a maelstrom of lunacy, idiocy and juvenility. It is impossible for this sort of...
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Get to Know Your Man-Child, Part 5: The Man-Child Likes to Play Games with...
Let us start with bowling.Harold LloydBill Murray in Kingpin (1996)Woody Harrelson in Kingpin (1996)Aaron Ruell in Napoleon Dynamite (2004)Kelli Garner and Ryan Gosling in Lars and the Real Girl...
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Get to Know Your Man-Child, Part 6: The Man-Child is a Gluttonous Eater
Food is vital to the survival of a growing child, which is the reason that the man-child will invariably demonstrate gluttonous behavior whenever they find themselves in close proximity to...
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Get to Know Your Man-Child, Part 7: The Man-Child Has a Tendency to Cry
Stan Laurel in The Devil's Brother (1933)No explanation is necessary on this topic. Let's just let the tears flow.Andre DeedBuster KeatonJobyna Ralston and Harold Lloyd in The Freshman (1925)Billy...
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Get to Know Your Man-Child, Part 8: The Man-Child is a Slacker
Jeff Bridges, Steve Buscemi and John Goodman in The Big Lebowski (1998)Let us examine the history of the man-child slacker in the history of film comedy. Harold Lloyd in Why Worry (1923)Buster...
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Book review: “Comedy for Animators”
I just finished reading Jonathan Lyons'"Comedy for Animators." Lyons writes, "Many people believe you can't teach comedy. Many comedians don't want to dissect it. My approach is to describe the many...
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Ye Olde Pye in the Face
Peter Reitan has traced the pie-in-the-face gag to a British comic novel published in 1709. The author, Delarivier Manley, gave her book a title that was a real mouthful – "Secret Memoirs and Manners...
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Race Ridicule
Accusations of racist portrayals in entertainment extends back more than one hundred years. The debate on this issue is represented in an opinion piece published in The Moving Picture World on October...
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Tidbits of April, 2016
It was an old trick of the British Music Hall to catapult a comic actor through a trap door at the front of the stage. The device, known as a "star trap," is discussed at length in my book The Funny...
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Musicians on the Range
In the old westerns, a cowboy rode his horse across the open plains accompanied by majestic music from the likes of Elmer Bernstein, Dimitri Tompkin, Max Steiner, Ennio Morricone and Alfred Newman....
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More Man-Child Photos and Notes
Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's famous 1928 Broadway comedy The Front Page was a man-child comedy. Hecht and MacArthur described Peggy, the fiancé of the play's protagonist Hildy Johnson, as...
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Television Overstimulation
As it turns out, a person committing murder has a more calming influence than a person applying make-up.Recently, I managed to binge-watch a complete season of Perry Mason within five days. It felt...
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Does media violence promote violent behavior in young people?
This is a term paper that I wrote for an Abnormal Psychology college course in 2006.In 1997, the Institute for Alternative Media reported, "The average American child will witness. . . 200,000 acts...
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"Gunsmoke" Connections to "The Hateful Eight"
I watched dozens of Gunsmoke episodes this past summer. I found it interesting when the same classic western elements that inspired and informed Gunsmoke turned up in grotesque and lurid form in...
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A Political Tirade that Has Nothing to Do with Films
I know that you have probably had more than your share of political discussion on Facebook lately. Believe me, I have had more than my share, too. I rarely go on Facebook these days because the...
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Walter White Thought that the Lying was Good. Do We Agree?
We live today in anarchy. Not even the most basic and longstanding moral beliefs can take root in anarchy. Let's take, for example, lying. I grew up believing that lying was wrong. A person who...
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Sniggering at The Hollywood Ten
The leftish Grimm's Fairy Tale version of the Hollywood Ten story is no longer relevant in the modern world. So, if you can't get gut-aching drama or political passion out of this spent myth, you have...
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President Parody
John Alexander parodies President Teddy Roosevelt in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) Actors have for a long time entertained audiences with witty impersonations of U. S. Presidents. But the...
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Don't Let An Angry Mob Take Away My Art
"I thought how I hate any kind of mob - I hate mobs of sports fans, mobs of environmental demonstrators, I even hate mobs of super-models, that's how much I hate mobs. I tell you, mankind is...
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