Guest Post by Hank SmithBert Williams: Somebody

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I recently had an important experience in Minneapolis, which was working on a play called Nobody No Time, written by Carlyle Brown, a good friend from way back. The play is about Bert Williams and the title is in reference to the song Nobody, which he made popular and co-wrote with Alex Rogers. Since Carlyle knows of my background in mime and African-American performance history, he brought me out to Minneapolis to be the choreographer and dramaturge for the play, which he also directed. But who was Bert Williams, and why was this an important experience for me?

In the early 1970s, I became interested in studying mime, and then performing it. Even though I appreciated someone like Marcel Marceau and liked what he did, I had no interest in going to France to study because I felt more influenced by American vaudeville, and seeing folks on TV like Sid Caesar, Dick Van Dyke, Joan Davis, Buster Keaton, Laurel & Hardy, Jackie Gleason, Art Carney, Red Skelton, Lucille Ball and others who were all adept at communicating very well with their bodies. In fact, the mime group I helped form, the Garden Variety Mime Theater, did all kinds of vaudeville-like stuff, and we often were not silent! At the time, a new generation of performers were doing what became known as "New Mime" and "New Vaudeville," but I did not know of many Black performers doing it, and I definitely was not aware of any historical Black performers of mime or pantomime (still not sure how different those terms are) until I found out about Bert Williams.

I had been doing a lot of research about early Black performers and knew a bit about Bert Williams and his partner of many years, George Walker. These were men who were part of an era of Black theater artists at the transition into the 20th century who were doing a lot to affect the American stage. People like Black Patti, Bob Cole, Will Marion Cook, J. Rosamond Johnson, James Reese Europe, and more, who came out of minstrelsy and the blackface tradition, begun by white male performers. But when I found out more about Williams, and particularly of his work with the Ziegfeld Follies after George Walker's death, I learned of his great skills in pantomime. Putting on a mask, whether it is clown makeup, whiteface mime, or blackface intrigued me in terms of what it could do for a person creatively. One doesn't necessarily hide behind a mask when performing, but rather is in a way liberated behind the mask to thrust a hidden part of his or her personality or observations of human behavior onto the stage. My understanding is that Bert Williams, a light-skinned man from the Bahamas, originally did not perform in blackface, but put it on one day and found that it unleashed his comic skills. The character he developed, as he called it, was an everyday man who always had things go wrong for him. He became the first Black star to be part of the Ziegfeld Follies, where he once played the father of white entertainer, Eddie Cantor, who later wrote that Williams was the best comedy teacher he ever had. As a child, Buster Keaton even imitated him. Here was a role model for me, and I read what I could about him and even did a thesis on him and Stepin Fetchit (look him up!) for my NYU Master's degree.

Being able to help tell the story of this man on stage meant a lot to me. To do it with Carlyle, who is not only a playwright but also a performer who shares with me a love of the variety arts, particularly when Black folks are involved, was special. And it was being presented by Illusion Theater an independent theater company begun 50 years ago with the original name, Illusion Mime Theater, because its work was based on physical theater. In fact, one of its co-founders, Michael Robins, studied in Paris with Etienne Decroux! Their work on social issues has brought national acclaim, and Carlyle is one of the many playwrights they have supported.

For the longest time, the only footage available of Bert Williams that I was aware of were two 1916 short films, A Natural Born Gambler and Fish. Gambler is important because it includes Williams’ famous poker routine, and both films were to be followed by more starring him, but no more were made apparently because of concerns as to how many films with a Black star would go over in certain parts of the country.

But in 2014 I went to a screening at the Museum of Modern Art of recently discovered rare footage of him from a 1913 film called, Lime Kiln Club Field Day. The film was never completed but contained a large predominantly Black cast, which included members of J. Leubrie Hill's Darktown Follies stage company, and was shot in a studio in my native borough of The Bronx and on location in New Jersey.

Of the many things that struck me as I watched the film was a reaffirmation of how good and funny a silent film can be. The packed house was cracking up and the best humor was in the nuances of facial expression and body attitude, not in “over the top” slapstick. It was also refreshing to see Black folks just being people, finely dressed up and just living their lives. There was evidence of Black vernacular dance \ that was very familiar to me and a breadth of a whole world in images that evoked in me memories of stories my parents told me of growing up in the early 20th century (they being born in 1905 and 1906). Even with this, there were divides as to who got to do what in the film. The female love interest was light-skinned and her suitors, other than Bert in makeup, were not too dark and with apparent "good hair." The darker-skinned women and men were more often exaggerated in their roles and movements and you could see some cast members were in blackface and some were not. But overall, I was sitting there spellbound. I was feeling all kinds of stuff in terms of my connection to a particular cultural/performance tradition, and to the art of film.

George Walker, Bert Williams, Aida

Overton Walker (wife of George Walker)

What got me the most was at the end of the screening. The curtains closed on the screen and then the piano accompanist, Donald Sosin, who did a great job, stood up and raised his hands toward the curtained screen to lead the audience in enthusiastic applause that lasted for quite a while. Here, finally, was a full house giving Bert Williams his due as a film star, 100 years after the fact. One of the hosts of the evening said it is believed the film wasn't finished because Birth of A Nation had come out and created such a reaction that the filmmakers felt people weren't ready to see a film populated with a range of Black characters who are not all stereotyped. Yes, wearing blackface is a complicated issue, and Williams was not always admired for doing it. He had wanted to do more dramatic roles without the makeup, but felt he would not be accepted. W.C. Fields supposedly said that Williams was the funniest man he ever saw, and the saddest. But one wonders what would have happened if Williams had had the film opportunities that someone like Charlie Chaplin had. As much as I admire Chaplin, Bert Williams would have given him a run for his money.

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• Hank's tap dance blog: https://storyoftap.blogspot.com/
• In 2023, I had the pleasure of spending two days interviewing Hank for the Oral History Project of the Program in Dance at New York's Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts. The edited interview has yet to appear on their website, but here's where you can check for it, as well as check out some of the other interviews with great dance performers: https://www.nypl.org/research/divisions/jerome-robbins-dance-division/oral-history-project-dance
• A review of the Minneapolis production.

• If you keep scrolling down in the right column of this page, you will see links to other guest posts that have appeared here. I very much welcome guest posts so long as you have expertise in the topic, have something new or little-known to say, and are not merely publicizing yourself. But the best part is you get the same pay I get for doing this blog! If you're interested, just get in touch and we'll talk.

Happy 100th Birthday, Dick Van Dyke!!

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I've already written a lot about Dick Van Dyke and don't want to repeat myself too much here, but as an intro to his work for those of you new to it, here's a classic piece from his long-running tv comedy series, The Dick Van Dyke Show.

And in case you are imagining him at 100 as a semi-conscious, drooling sack of bones in a wheelchair, this video of Van Dyke with Coldplay is from a year ago!

Here are links to my earlier posts. I am sure the internet will be flooded with many more tributes today.

Dick Van Dyke: My Lucky Life

Dick Van Dyke on Slapstick

Dick Van Dyke at 89

But perhaps the best news is that The Dick Van Dyke Show, which ran for five seasons on CBS (1961–1966), is currently available for free on YouTube. (Though it has commercials unless you have YouTube Premium.) The show was created by Carl Reiner, and centered around the home and work life of a comedy writer, Rob Petrie (Van Dyke). Petrie is the head of the writer's room for a tv comedy show, where he collaborates daily with two other writers, played by comedy greats Rose Marie and Morey Amsterdam. Reiner modeled it on his days with The Sid Caesar Show, and in fact Reiner plays the fictitious star of the show, Alan Brady. Check it out!

And just maybe comedy is good for your health: Mel Brooks turns 100 this coming June 28th, and it was recently announced that "Mel Brooks's next major film is the highly anticipated sequel, Spaceballs 2, where he reprises his iconic role as Yogurt alongside original cast members Rick Moranis and Bill Pullman."

IN THIS CORNER, in Black & White, Undefeated in 46 silent films: Buster KeatonAND IN THE OPPOSITE CORNER, also in Black & White, Undefeated in 74 Silent Films: Charlie Chaplin

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Make that 76 for Chaplin if you include City Lights and Modern Times.

I already did a lengthy post, The Great Debate: Chaplin vs. Keaton, where I asked a lot of clowns and clown-adjacent folks to state and justify their preference, if they had any, for Buster Keaton vs. Charlie Chaplin. Most respondents did have a preference, with one clear winner, but of course you don't have to choose. This montage of boxing shots, uploaded to YouTube by one Vincenzo Occhionero (thank you very much!), shows the marvelous (physical) comedy talents of both as they tackle the classic scenario of an apparent weakling fighting a powerful brute.

 

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Of course the underdog overcoming the brawny, arrogant, and often evil adversary was a common theme in silent film comedy. Harold Lloyd mined this comic vein for all it was worth, and in his reasonably successful 1936 sound comedy, The Milky Way, Lloyd's milquetoast character even knocks out the middleweight boxing champion. You can see this (considerably less athletic) sequence here.

Neil Patrick Harris on Broadway: Not Just for Gays Anymore

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Here's a short, fun piece that combines song, dance, group movement, witty lyrics, audience participation, and social commentary. Featuring Neil Patrick Harris, it's from the 2011 Tony Awards celebrating Broadway Theatre. As I said when introducing the Gene Nelson post, musical comedy as a genre is usually too corny for my tastes, but I can still enjoy its many displays of robust physical comedy. I'll be dipping into this well more in future posts, but meanwhile take it away, Mr. Harris!

 

Credit Where Credit is Due
Writers: David Javerbaum and Adam Schlesinger.
Director: Glenn Weiss.
Choreographer: Warren Carlyle.

Physical Comedy is Everywhere! Exhibit A: Stephen Colbert

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As a physical comedy aficionado, the question I get asked the most is:  “What is physical comedy exactly?” Usually I stammer and say something like, "well, you know, comedy that’s, uh,  physical."

Blank stares. 

So I try to come up with recognizable examples. Buster Keaton? Charlie Chaplin? You might be surprised how many people are not familiar with their work, even young clowns. But if they represent the heyday of physical comedy, does that mean it’s a relic of the past? After all, that was a full century ago! 

There must be some more recent examples... 

Jim Carrey? Yeah, that kinda works, though the work he’s best known for was 20–30 years ago.

Rowan Atkinson? Who? You know, Mr. Bean… That gets some recognition, but doesn't exactly close the deal.

How about today’s clowns, the ones we people in the field think of as being famous? Bill Irwin, Avner Eisenberg, James Thiérrée? Only Bill has penetrated into mass culture, but again probably less than you would think. Plenty of people have seen him acting in movies without making the connection.

All of this leads me to a new recurring blog feature: Physical Comedy is Everywhere!, in which on a semi-regular basis I will draw attention to physical comedy work being seen by millions even if they don’t recognize it as such. While many of the clown greats were Mr. or Ms. Non-Stop Physical Comedy, my examples use it as just one weapon in their arsenal. This will make sense as these posts slowly accumulate, but today let’s start with Stephen Colbert…

Even if you didn’t know Stephen Colbert, you probably do now, thanks to Trump conniving to get his show terminated as of this coming June. Colbert is a sharp and very political stand-up comedian, who since 2015 has hosted The Late Show on CBS, a talk show featuring his opening monolog, celebrity guests, music, and occasional sketches. But especially his opening monolog. Colbert is playing himself, but from 2005-2014 he hosted The Colbert Report (both t’s silent, as if he were French), in which he played a fictitious character —a right-wing talk-show pundit who, in Colbert’s words, was "a well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot."

Most talk-show hosts sit at their desk, but Colbert rarely leaves his feet. His background is in theatre games, improv, and sketch comedy, and Del Close and Second City (Chicago) gave him his formative training. He was never a serious student of mime, but managed to develop some basic mime chops and a mime imagination doing all those theatre games and improv exercises, where props get invented literally out of thin air to fit the situation at hand.

Our first example of Colbert adding physical comedy to his stand-up is Stephen Colbert, Mime Extraordinaire, a collection of clips put together  by Third Beat Productions, a website inactive since 2015, which lists Sharilyn Johnson as its editor. Thank you Sharilyn, or whoever did this! It's the kind of painstaking archival research you can expect to find on this blog, so long as I'm not the one who has to do it.

That was put together eight years ago. The next clip, The Invisible Props Department, is from seven years ago. Funny enough but longer than it needs to be, it shows to what degree mime has been considered to be an integral component of Colbert comedy.

 One more mime clip, this one sparked by Trump's hatred of windmills:

In the next clip, the well-known actor Henry Winkler gives Stephen a lesson in physical acting.

Okay, enough mime and object manipulation, real or imaginary. Time for some (silly) song and dance.

Colbert also makes imaginative use of space to create some unexpected visual comedy. One of his gags is to have people under his desk while he is ostensibly conducting a normal talk show from above.

Another frequent device is to freeze the camera frame, Colbert moving in and out of it, leaving it oddly depopulated in his absence. There is always some comic reason for doing this, and I've seen a couple of dozen examples, but I never made actual notes on them because nobody told me I would be doing this post. And since I do want to get this post out, I will stop here. If I find any in the future, I will add them, or if any kind reader can point me in that direction I would be happy to share them and grateful for your help. And there's a free subscription to the blog in it for you. Yeah, I am aware that the blog is free, but it's the thought that counts.

That should be enough Colbert physicality for you to make my point. Just because physical comedy is not a performer's entire m.o. does not mean that it's not a key part of their act. And you will see in future posts that I have dozens of examples of physical comedy being everywhere.

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• If you're keeping score as to what percentage of comedians had sad childhoods, add Colbert to the list. When he was ten, his father and two of his brothers died in an airplane crash.
• The Wikipedia bio of Colbert is quite thorough.
• One of Colbert's greatest and most controversial moments was as keynote speaker at the 2006 Washington, D.C. Correspondents' Dinner, where he brutally satirized not only the entire press corps, but also President Bush, who was sitting at the speakers table, all of two seats away. You can see it here.

Gene Nelson: (Almost) The Next Gene Kelly

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Most Hollywood musical comedies are too schmaltzy for my tastes, so until recently I didn't even know who Gene Nelson was. But many of these movie musical comedy performers from the 40s and 50s were wonderfully skilled and talented, and a great example is Gene Nelson, a highly athletic dancer and, later on, a highly successful TV and film director. Nelson was an engaging and charismatic performer, but what I especially like when I think of him in terms of physical comedy is the way he incorporated our physical world into so much of his choreography—furniture, props, pianos, walls, stairs —pretty much everything that surrounds him, whether nailed down or not. It was all an excuse for improbable dancing, leaping, bouncing, and swinging.

Originally, this post was supposed to feature a single video and take me less than an hour to put together, but instead I had a hard time narrowing it down to only these six clips. And that's just to get you started! He did A LOT, and between 1950 and 1953 was in ten movies! So yeah, there's more on YouTube, including one with Ronald Reagan (before he was president).

The first clip is his brilliant stair dance from Tea for Two (1950), starring Doris Day and Gordon MacRae. (No, I haven't seen the movie.)

Most song & dance performers had a few hat moves and cane manipulations in their repertoire; it went with the territory. But once again, Nelson excelled. This clip is from The West Point Story, also from 1950.

Also from 1950 from the movie The Daughter of Rosie O'Grady we get this eccentric dance with June Haver, choreographed to George Botsford's 1910 Chatterbox Rag. Years earlier, when Haver was already a known quantity and Nelson a minor player, she had helped him gain more recognition in Hollywood, introducing him to her agent, who was also the agent for none other than Gene Kelly.

Mention should also be made of his great leaping ability. He loved to jump onto grand pianos, as in this clip from a 1954 appearance on Colgate Comedy Hour.

Our fifth clip is an amazingly singing acrobatic dance sequence from She's Working Her Way Through College. (1952) This is said to have been in rehearsal for three months and taken four days to shoot. 

I thought I had never seen Nelson before, but that was only because I didn't realize he was Will Parker in the 1955 movie version of the classic musical, Oklahoma! The choreography for the show was by Agnes DeMille, and was considered to be groundbreaking because of her ability to tie in the dance with characters, emotion, and plot. Here's Nelson singing the quite funny song, Everything's Up to Date in Kansas City. Singing AND dancing AND rope spinning.

Although touted by many as the next Kelly (or the next Astaire), Nelson never rose to that level of stardom. Serious injuries in the mid-50s curtailed his dance career, but it was also a period when musical comedy became less a staple in Hollywood. Times were changing. And despite his amazing talent and finely honed skill, he was not as funny as Gene Kelly (who was not as funny as Donald O'Connor). He was perfect for light comedy —adjectives such as charming and delightful spring to mind— but maybe too much so. Did he lack gravitas, or was it just because that was how he was cast? Ultimately he was more leading man material than comedian... but then nobody's perfect.

Here are some quick bio factoids gleaned from Miller Daurey's excellent Hey, Dancer! podcast. (see notes below)
👉🏻 Nelson's father was a ballroom dancer, a roller skater, and an acrobat.
👉🏻 When he was twelve and living in Santa Monica, Nelson saw Fred Astaire in Flying Down to Rio and got hooked on dance.
👉🏻 During high school, he enrolled in the Marco School of Dance in Hollywood, where Judy Garland, Anne Miller, and Rita Hayworth had studied.
👉🏻 He also got hooked on skating and got so good that he was hired for the Sonia Henie Hollywood Ice Revue. He was the first person to ever do 13 Arabian cartwheels on ice.
👉🏻 In World War II he joined the army and was in an all-soldier revue show when Irving Berlin was in the audience. (You can't make this stuff up.) This led to Berlin casting him in his show This is the Army, touring for over two years and appearing in the film as well.
👉🏻 Movie acting gigs led to him almost being cast for the lead in Easter Parade, but Fred Astaire came out of retirement and the rest is history.
👉🏻 But the movie roles gradually got bigger and bigger, leading up to Tea for Two.

👉🏻 Before shooting Oklahoma!, he took a bad fall and suffered a herniated disc. He taped up his back and kept going on. A few years later, he fell from a horse and crushed his pelvis, which curtailed his dance career, though he did make a successful comeback at the age of 51 in Follies on Broadway.

👉🏻 Meanwhile he carved out a long and highly successful career as a television director, including directing 21 episodes of The Donna Reed Show, 18 episodes of The Mod Squad, and eight episodes of The Rifleman.

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• You can view Miller Daurey's bio video of Nelson here. Very well done and entertaining. And I highly recommend his Hey, Dancer podcast, which you can find here.  As of this writing, there are 71 episodes, including documentaries on such significant dancers as Ben Vereen, Gregory Hines, Ann Reinking, the Nicholas Brothers, and Irene & Vernon Castle. 

S.Z. "Cuddles" Sakall

• The actor S.Z. ("Cuddles") Sakall, who you see in the Tea for Two clip, may be familiar to you as the waiter in Casablanca (1942); see a clip of that here. Sakall and Nelson were part of Warner Bros. "repertory" company and also appeared together in Lullaby of Broadway and The Daughter of Rosie O’Grady. The Hungarian actor was well-known in Europe and in his younger days had written a lot of comedy, including music hall sketches. He fled Hitler and made a career in Hollywood, often playing befuddled or eccentric types. IMDB has a good bio of him.

• Though hardly a great movie, This is the Army is free if you have Amazon Prime.
• Nelson got the full bio treatment just a couple of years ago from Scott O'Brien in his book Gene Nelson— Lights! Camera! Dance! (No, I haven't read it.) Coincidentally, O'Brien was a student at San Francisco State University in the 60s, I turned down a full-time teaching job there in 1987, and a year or two later Gene Nelson joined their faculty.
• Since I posted this, my friend Hank Smith added a comment which I am copying here so more people see it:
I got to meet Miriam Nelson, Gene Nelson’s wife, a number of years ago when she was honored by a tap organization. I often did presentations for whoever they honored, and did one on her, using clips of her that she provided because she was a dancer, actress and choreographer. She was very nice. This is an example of her dancing. 

The Evolution of the Tablecloth Pull from ?? to WES-P to Pope Francis

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First a little history:

You all know Ye Olde Tablecloth Pull, yanking a tablecloth off a table without disturbing the dishes on top of it. It's a neat effect that became what the Victorians labeled a parlor trick, because this was what passed for convivial amusement in their gentlemanly hangout caves, a fine prelude to the next game of cribbage, a glass of sherry in one hand and a cigar in the other. (The spectators, not the gentleman showing off.)

As with most tricks, it's impossible to know for sure who originated this one, but we do know that restaurant physical comedy acts, a heady mixture of acrobatics and juggling, date back to at least Grimaldi's Harlequin and Mother Goose (1806) and served as a climax to the Hanlon-Lees Voyage en Suisse (1870). This sort of thing became the basis for several 19th-century comedy juggling acts, most prominently Les 7 Perezoff and The Rambler Troupe. 

Did any of these acts include a tablecloth pull? Maybe, but I haven't found any description or poster that would prove it. Other than our cat above, pictured at the banquet table of King Louis XIV, the first human use of it in an act that juggling historian David Cain could pinpoint was by the "gentleman juggler" Kara (1867–1939). Gentleman jugglers were so called because they dressed in formal attire and juggled objects that might be found in an (upscale) home; W.C. Fields did some of this in his early juggling days. My magician friend Ben Robinson informs me that a version of the trick was also in the act of the magician Chung Ling Soo (real name: William Robinson). He was born six years before Kara, so who knows which of these two came first. And I suppose it doesn't matter all that much since, no doubt, some lesser-known performer —or perhaps some flamboyant waiter— did it before them.

Kara

Juggler H. M. Lorette took notes on Kara's act, which included "Pulled
table cloth from under large amount of crockery and spun the cloth on the end of a billiard cue." Other props mentioned are: pool ball rack, chalk, bottle, and a cue, coin, shoe, monocle, candlestick, candle, glass of wine, three straws, tray, bottle, matchbox, cigar, knife, fork, orange, plate, napkin, bowl, ladle, hat rack, and three high hats. Oh yeah, and five juggling balls. But as far as I can tell, it's mostly been presented as a stand-alone trick, independent of any comedic situation.

And a bit of science:
It's relatively simple to do, and probably most of you have already mastered it. But just in case, let's start with the basics. There are several videos on YouTube that show how it works and explain the science of it. This one by Louis Bloomfield, whose How Things Work series is now on YouTube, is my favorite.

When Clowns (pretend to) Do It
Here are the Rastellis mining one of the oldest clown formulas in the book:

Note that there's more trickery here than a typical audience member might suspect. Yes, the plates are attached, though loosely enough so they move a couple of inches. But how then does the tablecloth pass underneath the wires? Very likely just some slits in the cloth that no one would notice during the setup.

Too Easy... so let's make it harder
Of course, humans are only human and performers are perfomative, so new wrinkles have been introduced into that cloth to make it more astounding to the audience. You won't get much mileage out of a trick anyone can do. Adding more objects is the usual route taken, but I think my favorite is the reverse pull by juggler and comedian Mat Ricardo:

Mat also does the classic pull while spinning a diablo, and does another version with a very long table, and has an excellent how-to video on the basic tablecloth pull that you can find here. Note that he advises pulling the cloth straight back, not down, as others advise. This makes sense to me because I would think that pulling downward would create more friction with the table edge.

But speaking of more objects, I am also fond of yanking the cloth when someone is sitting on a chair on the tabletop. I saw this done in the Big Apple Circus, I think sometime in the 80s, and have tried it successfully. Each leg of the chair is placed on a plate —and you probably don't want to choose the heaviest volunteer available to sit in that chair. Other than that, it's the same. The only video I currently have of it is me showing it in a physical comedy workshop in Toronto in I think 1991. (I see that I did have hair so it was a long time ago.) My yank was more up than back, so it didn't totally work, but you get the idea. I will try to remember to shoot a clean version of it sometime soon and then erase this incriminating evidence of my fallibility from these pages!

Somewhat related is this impressive magic trick by Doc Murdock that Ben Robinson sent me, in which Murdock makes the tablecloth and all the objects appear out of nowhere.

But who needs science, who needs skilled performers, when you have CGI?
More elaborate versions have shown up on television and in the movies, but we always have to ask if it's real or if it's CGI. (I was going to write "Is it real or is it Memorex?" but was afraid that would be lost on you youngins out there.) Let's go back to our old friend Mat Ricardo to expose some of the dastardly deception being practiced by our digital overlords:

And who needs CGI when you have AI?
Even Pope Francis got into the act!

Obviously, a fake video, but I was faking you out by calling it AI. It predates this particular AI capacity so it's just very good CGI. In other words, the creators had to spend hours and hours on it, not a minute or two.

But finally to our headliner, WES-P
I promised you evolution, and just like Darwin I have kept my word. All eyes please on the star of the moment, WES-P (Kazuhisa Uekusa) a Japanese comedian whose fame came via Twitter and TikTok and led to his appearance on several different "(Our Nation's) Got Talent" shows. And his signature trick, what first catapulted him to fame, was nothing other than the tablecloth pull. Or rather, multiple insane variations. WES-P is technically brilliant and makes wildly imaginative use of all kinds of everyday objects. He takes tricks that "normal people" do and shows how a pro does it.

But his main comedy angle centers around his baring 95% of his decidedly pudgy body and threatening to reveal the final 5% should his trick go haywire. Yes, I am talking about his naughty parts. We are light-years from that very proper Victorian parlor!

And in case you're thinking that these are somehow faked, or that he shot it a hundred times before getting it to work, here's one of his many live performances.

OK, it's funny and it's physical, so is it physical comedy? 

Yes and no. I'm guessing WES-P made you laugh. I at least chuckled, and I was amazed. ("I thought I'd seen it all.") But is it funny because it's weird cool? Funny because of his appearance? Funny because penises are funny? Maybe all of the above, but if so, it is still a different kind of funny. There's no gag, no story, no delicious "clown moments" where we see a character caught in a predicament of their own making. It's an amazing novelty act, I admire it, wish I could do it, but it's a specific kind of funny.

Let me contrast it, not with the Rastelli's formulaic clown gag, but with the Pope Francis sketch. The richest physical comedy grows out of a specific character and situation, and this one sure does. (Let's put aside the CGI for a moment.)  The dignity of the pope, which is amplified by the setting and the table setting, is a perfect setup for the inappropriate silliness. Who's doing the trick? The pope! We knew he was the coolest pope ever, but really?? But what truly sells it is the startled reaction of the bishop, a subtle 2-second take that makes all the difference.

Let's let Steve Kaplan explain why.

In his book The Hidden Tools of Comedy, Kaplan writes that"the real dynamic is of watcher and watched... Think of Kramer in Seinfeld. The comedy isn't just in watching Kramer behave in his typically outrageous fashion, the comedy requires Jerry or George or Elaine to watch it in bemused or bewildered amazement." Yep, and I would add that this was why George Burns was such a great straightman for Gracie Allen. Or if you're familiar with When Harry Met Sally, think of the famous "I'll have what she's having" scene.

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 "When I started, I used to think that comedy was watching someone do something silly. We later came to realize that comedy was watching someone watch someone doing something silly." –John Cleese

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This is how I tend to think too, that there is a difference between "funny" and "comedy," which I guess may be why I don't spend much time on Instagram, but that's for a longer discussion and another blog post...

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• Check out Mat Ricardo, quite an interesting guy. He and American writer Bill Barol have a podcast about creativity entitled Imagination & Junk, from the Thomas Edison quote, "To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk." Ricardo is also the author of The Magic in You. and he has a video lecture called "It's Not the What, It's the Who," which I imagine would fit in perfectly with this post. You can see Mat at the Irish National Circus Festival in Tralee, hosting and performing in the gala show on November 8th (2025)

• If you're hungry for a little more Asian tablecloth action, you'll probably enjoy a taste of this Ramen Tablecloth Pull.

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—cartoon by Marty Bucella

—cartoon by John McPherson

"A lighthearted yet high-minded exploration of failure's ability to serve as a gateway to grace. Readers will find this a balm."--Publishers Weekly