Why My Low Regard for Lou Costello is Not Just “My Opinion”

On the other hand, my high regard for the skill of Bud Abbott is a matter of record.

Having re-posted last year’s piece about “When Classic Comedy Died” yesterday and having gotten some of the usual expected chagrined replies, I offer this long-germinating blanket rebuttal.

What you get a lot when you write criticism is the age-old retort that “opinions are subjective” and “that it’s all just a matter of taste.” That is certainly a partial truth, and you’ll find my own defenses of that point of view in numerous writings of mine, including this one on Ed Wood and this one on John Waters. I don’t expect everyone to love these highly idiosyncratic film-makers as I do. I simply champion them and share my enjoyment with others. That said, I’ll also express what has come to be something of a heresy in America: all opinions are not equal. For someone who dares to call himself a professional critic, the weight of his opinion is partly a matter of instinct but also a matter of cultivation.

What does cultivation consist of? It consists of education. I don’t mean a university degree (I don’t possess one, although I did study criticism at the college level). I mean exposure — to as much relevant human culture as possible over as long a time as possible. In the case of comedy film that refers to the work of particular comedians (in their entirety), the work of particular directors and producers and writers and studios (in their entirety), the entire history of comedy film, the entire history of cinema…and THEN everything that’s relevant to THAT: the entire history of theatre, of visual art, of literature, of dance, of music…and THEN, because cinema is a form of cultural expression, everything that’s relevant to that, which essentially means a solid grounding in world history.  And, then, because you are writing as a critic, it also means reading widely the work of the greatest past critics in every artistic field. And, then, if you want to be a truly great critic of comedy, it doesn’t hurt to be an actual PRACTITIONER of comedy, to study and perform it and write it and make it, and to live and work among other professionals within its myriad forms, whether it’s stand-up, or clowning, or acting in Noel Coward. Beyond that, it is helpful to have had the experience of doing all these things over several decades.

To have to done all that is to have the ability to look at something and know –with great assurance — what is possible. I have a better than sketchy awareness of what has been accomplished over the past two millennia in western culture, so I can easily imagine what CAN be done. And thus I have an opinion about what OUGHT to be done. The usual response is a sort of chagrined, infantile, sputtering “How can you say that? How dare you say that?”  My answer is: Well, because I have seen this, this , this, and this. The feeble thing you champion is very sparing in virtues I know to exist and are fully within the ability of an artist to concoct, execute and share. You come to me with the scribblings and caterwauling of toddlers, the makework of yawning time-servers, and you say it is a classic and it is “great” and I tell you it’s not. What do I care what someone who knows less than me thinks? The Village Idiot may laugh at a dog on fire in the middle of the street; does that mean I have to be impressed and respect that opinion? I have been to the Himalayas, trekked through the Sahara, Sailed the Seven Seas. Those who haven’t can call a foothill “Everest”, but I won’t be fooled.

Some people who don’t read very well claimed that my take-down of Lou Costello in my book Chain of Fools was not supported. NOPE. The entire book draws a very careful picture of my idea of what an excellent comedian is and does, what the challenges are, what the criteria for excellence are. And then I go on to point out that Costello does not learn from the wisdom of the artists who had solved the same comedy problems 30 years earlier and does NOT follow in their footsteps. I don’t know that Costello even grappled with the problems, he just blew them off, probably wasn’t even aware that they existed. But they do. Expertise IS A THING. Knowledge and skill EXIST. We now live in a society where those attributes are so disrespected and shunted aside that a man (and I use the term loosely) with neither expertise or knowledge or any other virtue has assumed THE HIGHEST OFFICE IN THE LAND. In the ideal world, pretenders aren’t even worth talking about. In the real world, they attain places of prominence and power and popularity all the time, and so they must be pointed out, exposed, confronted, ridiculed, and whatever else it takes to crack open whatever mass delusion has allowed them to pollute human culture.

I don’t care if you – or billions of people — “like Lou Costello” or “find him funny”. I’ve never said I don’t laugh at him, by the way, or that I didn’t “like” portions of the boring, ill-made movies he co-starred in. As I say in Chain of Fools, we all laugh at the contortions of idiots all the time in our lives. I am going to ride the subway later today. Inevitably, some real life characters out there are going to make me privately smile. But there are standards in any field. Having watched thousands of movies, read and seen hundreds of plays and novels, and performed myself for decades, my standards for comedy are extremely high. These include:

1. Physical skill. Chaplin or Keaton or any of the great physical comedians of the silent era could take a pratfall (for example) with laser accurate precision. “You want me to fall? Where should I land? How should I land? You need a backflip? A nip-up? I can land with my ass in this bucket if you want.”  The level of skill is important because it allows us to draw a line between the artist’s intention and the execution. Did he do what he set out to do? This is fundamental for all criticism, and we are talking about criticism, are we not?  Costello has zero chops in this area. In this regard, he never deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with the great physical comedians. He is a great mass of imprecision. He simply lets fly and gravity does the rest. Costello is just randomly fooling around, like a dog or a chimp does onstage when it stops listening to its trainer. But he’s worse than that, because unlike the dog or the monkey, HE DOESN’T KNOW ANY TRICKS. Buster Keaton or Lupino Lane or Al St. John can do a no-hands somersault. What can Costello do? Don’t call him a “slapstick master” if he hasn’t mastered any slapstick!
2. Acting ability. This is just as crucial in comedy as in drama, at least in any comedy with a plot. This isn’t necessarily an argument for verisimilitude or truth or believability, although in the best comedians even that can be quite funny. But a comedian’s performance, unless he intends to purposely be subversive, is ideally to serve the narrative by responding to plot developments as the character in the story would. As a clown, the responses can and should be exaggerated. But they must purposeful, not RANDOM. Costello’s reactions very rarely match what is called for in the script. Some can, and probably will, argue that he is being subversive. My question would be, to what end? OF COURSE, a case can be made for doing the wrong things the wrong way for the sake of comedy. Harry Langdon, the Marx Brothers? But I KNOW what they’re doing, I know HOW they are being subversive and defying our expectations. Costello makes faces, squirms, flinches, falls down, but not in ways that serve the story, not in ways that mirror human behavior or human experience, but simply as a selfish, scene stealing plea for attention — so it’s neither art, nor craft nor even a good show. He short circuits whatever’s going on, stops the movie cold, shuts out all his scene partners, and makes a direct demand to the audience that they laugh at his funny faces for the sake alone of THAT. By his actions he is telling us not to care about the story, nor even to care about the character he is playing. The only thing that matters, he tells us with his actions, is the gratification, of him, Lou Costello. He acts out like a kindergartner with A.D.D., with neither logic nor coherence NOR intentional illogic or incoherence. He’s just an idiot. Not a comedian PLAYING an idiot. I mean documentary footage of an ACTUAL idiot, fucking around. It’s about as rewarding as laughing at the Titticut Follies. It may be temporarily amusing, but I don’t see where I’m obligated to RESPECT that, let alone EXPRESS respect for that.

Attached to these evaluationary measurements, my reactions to Costello’s comedy are much less like “mere opinions” and much more like objectivity. I am literally MEASURING his films against those of much more skilled comedians (there are many of them). If you like him uncritically, I consider it much more likely that YOUR’S is a “mere opinion” — an unexamined reflex action, an outgrowth of an impression you first formed when you were about four years old. Naturally we love things we first encountered when we were young. Here is a list of mine. I don’t argue that they are all brilliant or classics or that they need to mean anything to anyone else. Some are quite bad; I just happen to love them. So let it be, for God’s Sake, with Lou Costello.

Right?  So this isn’t about “I don’t like Lou Costello.” There are very definite reasons why Lou Costello fails to fulfill his function as a movie comedian on just about every single level. People always come back with “Well, he makes me laugh”. Well he occasionally makes me laugh too, but so can a Youtube video of a pig splashing around in its own shit. That doesn’t cause me to respect him, or call him “one of the greats”, or call his fuckin’ terrible assembly line movies “classics”! Give me a fuckin’ break here!   It depends what you want out of a movie I guess. I don’t want to spend two hours watching a film that’s 70% filler, punctuated with sporadic comedy routines starring a comedian who can neither act nor take a decent pratfall nor even hit his mark. But hey if that’s good enough for you, be my guest! By this measure, I guess Johnny Knoxville is Grimaldi. 

Of Curly Joe and the Three Stooges’ Final Phase

Let this be a law of criticism: context is key to appreciation. When you don’t have enough information to make a proper evaluation, your ability to judge is incomplete. And yet in our arrogance, most humans by default will assume they have sufficient knowledge to be the arbiters of all that goes on around them. In a certain sense, they have to; it is the only way to navigate the world we live in. But it is also true that most of us, were we to take the attitude of Socrates, might admit that we could know more — that we don’t know enough. America has become a kind of nightmare scenario in that regard. Awash in the information revolution, we are surrounded by armchair experts on science, politics, religion and culture. But few, maybe none, know as much as they think they do. Far from owning up to their own ignorance, most will contend that they know everything. I am no better or worse than the people around me in that regard.

And, so — ha ha ha! — I have been slow in developing an appreciation for Joe “Curly Joe” DeRita (Joseph Wardell, 1909-1993). DeRita, of course, was the “Sixth Stooge”, or put another way, the Fourth “Third Stooge”, the last man to join Moe Howard and Larry Fine in the long-running comedy team known as the Three Stooges. DeRita, to put it mildly, gets little respect, insofar as anyone thinks of him at all. When I was a kid, I’m sure I had the prevailing opinion on the team. The golden line-up was the version that included Curly Howard as the third member, an iteration that encompassed the team’s first dozen years making shorts for Columbia, 1934-46. When their shorts turned up on television from the later years, ones that featured Shemp Howard or Joe Besser in the third spot, we howled in horror and disappointment, as though it were a betrayal or swindle of some sort. It was because we loved Curly so much — and because we didn’t know enough. As an adult I learned a lot more about both Shemp and Besser, I saw them in other movies (and in Besser’s case, tv shows), and I read about them, and I learned to appreciate their own qualities and could see what they were bringing, or attempting to bring, to the work. And now I see the people who dismiss Shemp or Besser as newbies, dilettantes in the realm of Stoogedom.

See? They’re ARTISTS!

But I never bothered to make that effort with Joe DeRita. Why? I dunno. As with the other two, I guess I assumed that I knew everything. I had seen all the late career Three Stooges features on tv as a kid, so I knew his work, and found it bland and unamusing by contrast with his predecessors. And there was a palpable lameness about calling him “Curly Joe”. It just made him seem like a stand-in, one who wasn’t bringing much to the table. But having spent some time reacquainting myself with his work, and learning some new things about him, I’ll never dismiss him out of hand again. I simply didn’t have the tools to see him properly before.

Interestingly, like Abbott and Costello, DeRita came out of burlesque. This gave him a different, but similar background to his fellow Stooges. What truly opened my eyes (and I’m sure this is true of others) is the fact that DeRita had made four starring solo shorts for Columbia in 1946 and 1947, The Good Bad Egg, Wedlock Deadlock, Slappily Married, and Jitter Bughouse. These are not masterpieces, in fact they are all remakes of previous Columbia shorts, and so steeped in the trademark Jules White style that the experience is very much like watching a Three Stooges short. In fact the supporting players are often the same people (Vernon Dent, Emil Sitka, Christine McIntyre). But what makes the films valuable is you can see what DeRita was really like when not shoe-horned into the team. He has his own style, a bit more Lou Costello than Stooges-like. He’s a snazzy dresser, and he has a slick mane of hair, greased up in the 40s style. Sometimes he even wears a derby like Costello. And you get to see a bunch of his skills, which include dancing and some acrobatic slapstick. His character is somewhat ill-defined. Pushy? Mild-mannered? He seems to see-saw between both. They couldn’t figure out to do with him and so he was released after only four shorts. But DeRita was skilled enough that he was approached in 1946 to be the replacement for Curly. He demurred because he wanted to do his own thing.

By the late ’50s things changed. The burlesque circuits were dead, and the Three Stooges were hot again due to their exposure on television. When DeRita was approached this time to replace the departing Joe Besser, it was a no-brainer: he’d take it, no matter what the compromises were. And they were pretty substantial. He ended up shaving off all his hair, and had to change his name to Curly Joe. Basically, he was being made over into another performer, but in sort of a half-assed way. No one could actually replace Curly Howard, or even satisfactorily imitate him. So a sort of third way was pursued, one that only had to be sophisticated enough to satisfy children, for that was to be the team’s new audience.

So now they do fairy tales yet

 

Granted, kids (and child-like adults) had always been the Three Stooges core audience. But by the late 1950s, movie studios were becoming scientific about these things, with (I think) unfortunate results. They began to bear down and target specific markets. Another good example of this is Walt Disney. If you watch his cartoons from the 30s and 40s, most of them are laugh-out-loud funny, just like those of Warner Brothers or other studios. They were for general audiences. In the 50s, he and his company decided to target children and families, and all the teeth and sophistication were ironed out of the Disney product. This identical thing happened with the Stooges. It is also interesting to observe the fact that this new incarnation of the Stooges was born just as Abbott and Costello, who had also evolved into a kiddie act, had left the scene. Originally from burlesque, Abbott aand Costello had started out making comedies for general audiences, but the product devolved into B movie product strictly for kid’s matinees. The last Abbott and Costello comedy had been made in 1956. Costello made one solo comedy in 1959 before being felled by a heart attack. So now there was a market void, and the Three Stooges jumped in to fill it. The strategizing couldn’t have been any better if it were conscious and it probably was. I’d be hard put to believe a great deal of thought wasn’t put into the conception of the vehicles. After all, Have Rocket, Will Travel (1959) and The Three Stooges in Orbit (1962) do seem an awful like Abbott and Costello go to Mars (1953), and Snow White and The Three Stooges (1961) isn’t VERY far away from Abbott and Costello’s Jack and the Beanstalk (1952). One MIGHT say that The Outlaws is Coming borrows from Abbott and Costello’s comedy westerns — except for the fact that the Stooges had already made countless comedy westerns of their own as shorts. The Three Stooges Meet Hercules (1962) seems to hearken further back for something to rip off: the concept bears more than a passing resemblance to Eddie Cantor’s Roman Scandals. Which leaves The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze (1963), an obvious parody of Mike Todd’s 1956 movie of the Jules Verne classic.

Like I said, I watched all these movies on tv as a kid, but really hadn’t looked at them in many decades, because why wouldja? But they played Have Rocket, Will Travel on TCM a few months back and out of curiosity (and because I’m supposed to know about these things) I watched it and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it (or that I enjoyed it at all). “Less violence”, I found, didn’t translate into NO violence. There are still some of the trademark face slaps and eye gouges in the equation. A new element is the boring romantic sub-plots, also borrowed from Abbott and Costello comedies, but you have to suffer through that in a lot of movies. There are still plenty of laughs and weirdness to be had.

I also watched some of The New Three Stooges cartoons (1965-66) in recent years and found them diverting in a campy sort of way, though the animation couldn’t be cruder. Their 1970 tv pilot Kook’s Tour was a sad ending to a long career though.

Ironically if DeRita had joined the team in 1946 when Jules White first asked him, he might have been seen in another light today, much as we now see Shemp or Besser, for his own shorts were as gritty and lowdown as the Stooges product of the ’40s, and DeRita wouldn’t have had to become the huggable stuffed animal he is made to be in the features of the 1960s.  But now at least we can see that.

For more on the origins of the Three Stooges go here.

For more on slapstick comedy film history, including the work of The Three Stooges, don’t miss my book Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, available from amazon.com etc etc etc

 

 

A Century Ago This Month: Stan Laurel’s First Film

We’ll be blogging (and hopefully lecturing) shortly on why 1917 was the most fortuitous year in silent comedy. Among many other things, it was Keaton’s first year before the cameras, the year Harold Lloyd introduced his glasses character, and the year Larry Semon began starring in his own comedies. And there are several other notable developments of a similar nature. It also happens to be the year that Stan Laurel made his first film.

Stan’s early, pre-Hardy career is not widely known nowadays, to put it mildly. Many folks aren’t even aware that the boys started in silents — let alone that Laurel was a SOLO star of silents for a decade before being officially teamed with Hardy (and Hardy had been in films several years prior to Laurel). But it is so. Laurel had first come to America as a member of Karno’s Speechless Comedians, where he understudied  for Charlie Chaplin. Like Chaplin before him, Laurel left the company during a vaudeville tour of the states. He toured American vaudeville with a wide variety of comedy partners for the next few years, sometimes as a Charlie Chaplin impersonator, (see my extensive post on him and those events here) until he was seen and discovered while performing an act with his wife Mae Dahlberg at the Hippodrome Theatre in Los Angeles in May 1917. Isadore Bernstein, former general manager at Universal, was the man who put Laurel in his first picture, the two reeler Nuts in May. 

Now IMDB and most books may give different accounts, but I’m going to go with author Rob Stone’s, which seems the most authoritative. The info comes from his book Laurel or Hardy: The Solo Films of Stan Laurel and Oliver “Babe” Hardy. He says Nuts in May was filmed in late June 1917, and released in early July (actual date unknown). “Released” is a stretch, at all events. The outfit that made it got out of the comedy business directly after it was made, but it was given at least one high profile industry screening attended by both Charlie Chaplin and Universal’s Carl Laemmle. Chaplin, while encouraging, proved evasive, so it was Universal that ended up picking up Stan for his first movie contract (he was to have several at many different studios during his bumpy solo career).

And what about the film? Stan played a patient in a mental asylum who goes around wearing a Napoleon costume, and is attended by an orderly who humors him by wearing a French soldier’s outfit. Then Stan escapes, and there is all sorts of nonsense with a steam roller. The only reason we know all this is that some of the film was later acquired by another studio, and portions were cut into another Laurel comedy called Mixed Nuts (1925.) There is reportedly about a minute’s worth of Nuts in May footage extant; whether this is also the same footage that was used in Mixed Nuts. A blurry, mislabeled print of what purports to be the latter is currently to be found here on Youtube.

For more on early silent and slapstick film comedy, including Stan Laurel, consult Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube,  released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc. 

The Hall of Plus-Sized Comedians

May 6 is apparently something called “No Diet Day”, which must mean, to my alarm and astonishment, that every other day is one on which we were supposed to have been dieting? I guess I blew that! At any rate, it seems a propitious time to celebrate the long line of plus-sized cinematic comedians. I have long observed that filmdom has always had at least one at any given time, as though we NEED the type somehow, our cinematic pantheon is somehow incomplete without at least one. This post takes the uncharacteristic (for me) form of a listicle, and please note that it is pretty narrowly focused on slapstick film (as opposed to other styles and media). Just click on the link at the comedian’s name below for more complete essays on each one:

John Bunny (years active: 1909-1915)

Not just America’s first large comedy star, but also by many measures our first comedy star period. Heart-breakingly few samples of his work survive — just enough to make us crazy and want more. I’ve never encountered anybody who’s seen Bunny’s handful of surviving films and didn’t love him to pieces. His personality transcends time and the distancing elements of silence and BxW. Like W.C. Fields, whom he is sometimes compared to, he was an older man, sort of Falstaffian, and that’s what made him lovable. He was like a naughty English uncle. (We’re leaving Fields off this list, btw. He was indeed a stout man, but his size was several notches down the list of attributes that defined him. That is far less the case with other folks on this list. For similar reasons we also omit Curly Howard — a big guy, but that’s hardly his primary attribute as a comedian by any stretch of the imagination.)

Hughie Mack (years active 1915-1927)

A non-actor hired to replace Bunny as Vitagraph’s funny fat man, with the assistance of Larry Semon who began his career directing Mack’s comedies. But as we say Mack wasn’t really a professional comedian, so he never made the sort of mark in the world as did this man:

Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle (years active as screen comedian: 1909-1921; 1933)

I will be a happy scribe (and Arbuckle a happy ghost) when the world stops talking about him in terms of the friggin’ scandal that halted his career. He was one of our great screen comedians, and a top comedy director, for decades. And he remains one of the best remembered and loved — and accessible — silent screen comedians to this day. Much is made of the fact that he didn’t like to be called “Fatty”. I always use it despite the fact that many of my colleagues don’t. I do so for the simple fact that that’s the name audiences and readers have always known him by. If Arbuckle were, say, my personal friend and alive I might respect his wish. Since he is not, I see no sensible reason to.

Tons of Fun (years active: 1925-1927)

And besides, if you think it is disrespectful to call Roscoe Arbuckle “Fatty”, you ain’t seen nothing yet. For the most part, oddly enough, the concept of the “funny fat man” in movies isn’t done in a hurtful spirit. The operative word, foremost, is funny, even before fat. These are simply great comedians. They incorporate their body into their art, often in a brave way, but they are also sympathetic. We love them; we don’t laugh at them. One of the rare examples of that line being crossed, and where the size of the comedians was use exploitively was the comedy team called Tons of Fun (Frank “Fatty” Alexander, Hilliard “Fat” Karr, and Kewpie Ross). The whole concept of this short-lived team was that three fat men were three times as funny, especially when they did things like break the floor with their combined weight. Of the three, Alexander had the most substantial career. You see him in many comedy films (particularly those of Larry Semon) between 1915 and 1933.

Oliver Hardy (years active: 1914-1951)

I almost hesitate to list Hardy here. Though he did have close to a decade and a half as a screen heavy without Stan Laurel as his partner, I most often think about his size in relation to Laurel’s skinniness (which was actually an illusion). It’s a bit different from being a solo bull-in-a-china-closet. But we couldn’t very well leave him off this list, could we?

Lou Costello (years active: 1940-1959)

Costello is more “dumpy” or “pudgy” than rotund, but, as with Hardy, people usually think of him in terms of his body type. “Child like” would be the first word that springs to my mind in describing him. He has “baby fat” and cheeks you wanna pinch.

Jackie Gleason (years active: 1941-1987)

The Great One definitely sets the longevity record for plus sized screen comedian and this despite the smoking, drinking, rich food, late hours and dying at the age of only 71. Usually thought of as a tv comedian, he was actually the American comedy cinema’s reigning large man during the 1960s.

John Belushi (years active: 1975-1982)

We now enter this heart breaking stretch where we were given three young Comedy Gods who were big guys, all of whom died way too young. Belushi wasn’t so large that you thought of him as a “fat man”. It was more like he was tubby and heedlessly unhealthy — part of the very reason he was a hero! But it was that very attribute that took him from us.

John Candy (years active: 1973-1994)

Candy was the first true heir to Arbuckle to come along in half a century, because he was a true Everyman. You could cast him as any kind of character; he was an actor as much as a comedian. It was a sad day for comedy when he was felled by a heart attack at such a young age. There would have been roles for him as long as he wanted them.

Chris Farley (years active: 1990-1997)

I am overdue to write a tribute to wild man Chris Farley. I wasn’t crazy about him at first, but as he grew comfortable then bold then kamikazi in his performing I became an enthusiastic convert. Something about him was very much in tune with his times

Melissa McCarthy (ca. 2000 – present)

I am also overdue to write more about this lady! But it will have to be more than a single tribute. She is my favorite contemporary screen comedian. I love everything about her. She is groundbreaking in being the first female comedian to bring this kind of violent abandon to comedy performance and she possesses the lack of vanity you have to have to be this kind of comedian. She’s not just funny, she can act, she can write, she’s an improviser of genius. (It’s true that Roseanne Barr paved the way somewhat as a plus-sized comedienne lacking vanity…but again this is a post about slapstick on the big screen.) But, as I say, much more on her to come.

For much more on slapstick comedy please see my book Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

Walter Forde: The “British Harold Lloyd”

April 21 is the natal day of British actor/ comedian/ director Walter Forde (Thomas Seymour Woolford, 1898-1984). Forde was the son of music hall comedian Tom Seymour, joining his father onstage as a child, where he learned to be an actor and physical comedian. In 1920, he wrote and starred in a series of British silent comedy two-reelers, playing a bungling character named “Walter”. The films were created in collaboration with his father, and Walter’s character often wore a straw boater and shared certain similarities in personality with Harold Lloyd. In 1923, Forde and his father tried their luck at Universal in the U.S. Forde only stayed a short time; Seymour remained in Hollywood. Forde went back to London and resumed the Walter series, directing several of them, and achieved even greater success in his home country. In 1928 he began directing features and phased out the Walter character by 1930.

Forde’s career as a director in the sound era is interesting, for it suggests a different path somebody like Lloyd might have gone down had they been so declined. Lloyd had co-directed many of his films; after retiring as an actor he produced a couple, but after that he pretty much left the business. What if he’d tried his hand at directing?  Among the slapstick comedy men, Forde’s post-silent career trajectory seems closest to somebody like George Stevens, who’d begun as cinematographer on Laurel and Hardy pictures, moved up to directing shorts for Hal Roach, and then moved up to feature film directing in all genres, not just comedy. Forde was a very different kind of director from Stevens, but like him, he was by no means restricted to screwball comedy; he also did work in other genres, especially mysteries, crime dramas, thrillers, etc. Two of his better known films today are The Ghost Train (1931 and later remade again by Forde in 1941) and Rome Express (1932). Much like Alfred Hitchcock, he worked in close collaboration with his wife Culley, a former continuity girl. In the post-war era he had difficulty getting films made; his last was Cardboard Cavalier (1949). He retired to Los Angeles for his net three and a half decades.

Many of his films, including some Walter comedies are available on Youtube; you should check ’em out!

For more on slapstick comedy don’t miss my book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc. For more on show biz history, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

Slapstick Comedies of World War One

Today marks the 100th Anniversary of America’s entry into World War One. In honor of the day, we look at several WWI films from the era of classic comedy:

The Bond (1918)

September 29, 1918 was the release date for Charlie Chaplin’s World War One propaganda film The Bond. The shabby way this country treated Chaplin in the late 1940s and early 1950s can be seen as especially unjust in light of the fact that Chaplin raised millions of dollars to fund the First World War, by making a publicity tour, along with releasing this interesting little gem. It’s easily Chaplin’s most experimental film, employing straight-up didactic allegory in pantomime to teach us that there are  “many kinds of bonds”….bond of friendship, bond of love, the marriage bond…Most important is the LIBERTY Bond—Charlie hits the Kaiser (Syd Chaplin) on the head with a sledgehammer marked “Liberty Bonds”. The simple painted studio sets are unlike anything else in the Chaplin canon. The film seems to point the way both towards the self-consciousness of Sunnyside (1919), and his exhortations at the end of The Great Dictator (1940) and Monsieur Verdoux (1947) — calls to action. Also in the film are Edna Purviance and Albert Austin, with the entire cast uncredited.

Shoulder Arms (1918)

Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms (initially called Camouflage), was first planned to come in at five reels, about fifty minutes, which was no shorter than many features in those days.  As originally conceived, the film would have had an opening act showing the Little Fellow’s home life with his wife and kids. Then it would take him into the process of being inducted into the army. It would then have had a closing act wherein the Little Fellow is celebrated as a war hero, before inevitably being awakened from a dream. Chaplin eventually decided to cut it to just the middle – the Little Fellow’s service in the war.

As comic subject matter this film was unprecedentedly dark, not just for Chaplin, but for the movies. No one had ever done a comedy that included trench warfare, gas masks, bullets, barbed wire, and No Man’s Land. Not only was Shoulder Arms the first war comedy, it was also the first black comedy, introducing a side of Chaplin that would come to full flowering in The Great Dictator and Monsieur Verdoux. It’s hard to imagine much of Stanley Kubrick’s work, for example, in particular Paths of Glory (1957) and Dr. Strangelove (1964) without the precedent of Shoulder Arms. Fortunately, Chaplin had already inoculated himself against charges of being unpatriotic or unserious about the war by participating in a nationwide bond drive and making the propaganda film The Bond. And the fact that Shoulder Arms was funny covered all manner of sins. Memorable takeaways included scenes where Charlie made his way through enemy territory disguised as a tree, tried to sleep in an underground barracks neck deep in water, and used his gas mask as protection against limburger cheese.

Huns and Hyphens (1918)

Larry Semon’s war comedy is set on the home front, with Larry as a waiter at a restaurant run by German spies. He is also masquerading as a wealthy suitor to a young lady who has invented a gas mask. The plot is not unlike many Chaplin “masquerade” comedies, with Semon’s patented extravagant gags and hair-raising chase finish. Also in the cast are a pre-Hardy Stan Laurel and his wife Mae, and Frank “Fatty” Alexander. 

A Yankee Doodle in Berlin (1919)

This WWI-era patriotic comedy is doubly interesting to us: 1) because it stars so many greats from the Sennett stock company: Ford Sterling (as the Kaiser!), Ben Turpin, Mal St. Clair, Marie Prevost, Charlie Murray, both Chester and Heinie Conklin, and the Bathing Beauties; and 2) the star of the picture is Bothwell Browne, a vaudeville drag performer whose only starring film this is. (For more on Browne go here). This was Sennett’s most ambitious film up to that time, and only his third feature. Unfortunately he gambled on the war lasting longer than it did; it was already over by the time the film was in theatres. The plot is just what you think it would be. Browne is an army captain who goes undercover in the Kaiser’s Germany, disguised as a woman. As long as Sterling or Turpin makes a pass at him, that’s all I ask!

The Better ‘ole (1926)

This World War One comedy has a long pedigree. First it was a cartoon drawn by English humorist Bruce Bairnsfather. In 1917 it opened as a West End musical comedy running for 811 performances starring Arthur Bouchier as the main character “Old Bill”. The following year a Broadway version opened, starring Charles Coburn. 

With his years of music hall experience, Syd Chaplin was perfect for the comical part of Old Bill, a 30 year regular army vet who knows how to look out for his creature comforts. With his walrus mustache, and omnipresent pipe, the character has the kind of broad visual outline that any self-respecting Chaplin would know just what to do with. Jack Ackroyd plays his sidekick, “Little Alf”.  Edgar Kennedy plays the tough sergeant who constantly bedevils him.

There are some sight gags and funny pantomime business, but the film leans heavily on comical cockney intertitles. Bill is always napping, goofing off, getting into trouble. In one routine worthy of the younger Chaplin brother, Bill is playing with his dog, and accidentally drills an entire company of soldiers who overhear his instructions to the pooch and follow them. He spends a lot of time on trash detail.  The story starts to take off when he is putting on a camp show dressed in a horse costume, then gets stuck behind German lines still wearing the disguise. He steals some German uniforms and winds up having to serve a German general breakfast though he doesn’t understand the language. He knocks out a guard and meets fellow Brit who warns him of an immanent attack. He must warn the English army. He races in stolen car, then crashes it. Then he gets a motorcycle and plunges into a river. He is rescued and brought to a place where a detonation plunger is located. He knocks his captors out and saves and entire town. Then he is caught by Brits who think he is a spy out to sabotage his own army. He is bout to be executed but is saved at the last minute and made sergeant. He uses the opportunity to finally deck his nemesis Edgar Kennedy.

 

Soldier Man (1926)

Soldier Man was Harry Langdon‘s last short before leaving Mack Sennett to do features. It’s one of his most creative and elaborate ones, containing enough for two separate shorts (since it has two completely different parts, each with a separate premise.)

In the first half he’s a soldier who doesn’t realize World War One has ended, so he is still roaming around having misadventures in German territory.  He escaped from a prison camp just when the German troops were celebrating the end of the war but he didn’t understand. Now he is wandering around a country at peace in constant fear for his life. Coming upon an area where a farmer is using dynamite to blow up tree stumps, he thinks he’s being shelled. He, winds up accidentally dragging some dynamite with him. Sees it, throws it, tries to shoo a cow out of the way. When the cow does run by Harry has his eyes closed. Dynamite lands in smokehouse, sending pieces of meat flying over to Harry. He thinks it was the cow.

In the second half.  In the little country of Bomania…there is a king who looks exactly like Harry (How many movies have we seen with that premise?). The king is is drunken and dissolute, always insults his wife. The people are on the verge of revolution. A minister spies Harry and hires him to be a double for the king. It winds up with the King’s wife trying to kiss Harry so she can plunge a knife into his back. Harry wakes up in his bed with his wife shaking him. It’s the present day, it was all a dream.

A Soldier’s Plaything (1930)

Harry Langdon co-stars with Ben Lyon in this World War One service comedy (with serious overtones — and a few songs, although most were cut prior to American release when musicals went out of favor. It’s a fairly routine service comedy, but it has its share of laughs – including several pre-code mounds of horse manure. Furthermore, Harry is playing a character not too removed from his silent one. The difference? He’s in the hands of a real director. Michael Curtiz keeps the reins tight on Harry here. He’s plausible comic relief in this major motion picture. It’s a rare chance to see Langdon starring in a major motion picture during the talking era.

Doughboys (1930)

Doughboys, directed by Eddie Sedgwick, is Buster Keaton ’s Shoulder Arms. It’s probably his best talkie feature, certainly his best one for MGM. Buster plays a millionaire who accidentally enlists in the army during World War I. The movie was co-written by legendary comedy scribe Al Boasberg and co-stars Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards (whose most famous role is Jiminy Cricket in Pinnochio). Because Keaton’s character is more like a human being in this one, and the story hangs together better, it is closer in spirit to his silents even if there are still very few gags. Keaton has a funny musical duet with Cliff Edwards and a funny dance number in the army talent show. There are also a couple of Keatonesque gags. One of them–very grim—has Keaton propped up in a trench looking like a corpse and suddenly popping up awake. The whole movie is almost ruined by an extremely annoying drill sergeant who keeps yelling. What movie executive thought this kind of thing was funny, I’ll never know, but there sure is a lot of it in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Still, it’s a movie worth seeing.

Half Shot at Sunrise (1930)

In this one, Wheeler and Woolsey are a couple of dough boys AWOL in Paris during World War One. They spend all their time sweet talking the ladies. Wheeler (as always) falls for Dorothy Lee, whose father just happens to be the colonel who’s been pursuing them. And Woolsey romances the colonel’s mistress (Leni Stengel), who has a bad habit of sending love letters to the colonel, a device which later allows the boys to blackmail themselves out of their difficulties. There are some battle scenes in the trenches, and a funny scene in which the boys are waiters, waiting on the colonel and his wife in a restaurant.  The colonel’s wife is of course played by the inevitable Edna May Oliver. Interestingly, one of the screenwriters (among five) was Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.

Pack Up Your Troubles (1932)

Laurel and Hardy’s second feature for Hal Roach, is as close as the team came to organically being Chaplinesque, with the film mixing elements of Shoulder Arms and The Kid. In the first act of the film, they are drafted as soldiers — their drill sergeant is of course Jimmy Finlayson, with predictable results. They next go over to France to fight in The Great War, befriending a fellow soldier who happens to have a baby (a rather grown-up problem.) When Eddie is killed in action, the boys feel obligated to bring the infant back to the States to find the child’s grandparents (the baby’s mother too having been killed). This being a Laurel and Hardy comedy their actual attempts to achieve their mission will be pitifully fruitless; only coincidence will win the day.

Blockheads (1938)

Originally intended to be Laurel and Hardy‘s last Hal Roach film (and it was their last Roach film for MGM though they made a couple more with Roach for other distributors) there would have been a nice symmetry to their career at Roach if it had been so, as Blockheads is essentially a remake of their first Roach talkie Unaccustomed as We Are (grafted onto We Faw Down). Like all of their features, it’s essentially the content of a short, stretched to go just over an hour. But this one works for me — it’s densely packed with comic material with little filler to speak of.

The pair are army buddies in WWI. Unfortunately Stan never gets the memo about the Armistice and winds up standing guard in a trench for 20 years. Returned to a convalescent home, he is taken in by Ollie — much to the perturbation of Mrs. Hardy (Minna Gombell). Left to fend for themselves, they find themselves entangled with the hotsy-totsy neighbor lady (Patricia Ellis), which gets them in Dutch with her shotgun wielding husband (Billy Gilbert). But just as life is all about the journey, comedy is all about the gags, and the pleasure of this movie is in just letting them wash over you, one after the other.

The Great Dictator (1940)

While Chaplin’s The Great Dictator is the World War TWO comedy par excellence , it does begin with an extended World War One section, a sort of prologue in which the Little Barber grapples with a ridiculous cannon named Big Bertha and flies upside down in a bi-plane with Reginald Gardiner. Chaplin’s injured character will spend several years in a sanitarium, emerging to find that his country has gone insane. More about the film here. 

To learn more about comedy film history please check out my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

The Great Comedians and Their Studios

After years of navigating this treacherous terrain myself, today I felt it was high time to share this little road map of the great comedians of the studio era, and the factories in which they primarily toiled. Our principal field of concentration is the so-called classic era (roughly 1920s through 1950s), although some of them have roots extending back much further, when the landscape was very different. Thus while we mention important companies like Keystone and Roach and other early ones, our main focus is on those that would become the major studios of the sound era.

Fields and Costello, two top Universal ccomedy stars of the 1940s

Universal 

Universal played a major role in two different phases of classic comedy, at the beginning and at the end. If you were to graph it, it would resemble a bar-bell. During neither phase were they known for developing their own comedians, but for plundering those brought along by other studios for the most part.

The company was formed in 1912 by the acquisition and consolidation of some of filmdom’s earliest studios, one of which was Nestor, which came with future comedy auteur Al Christie. Universal also came up with several comedy brands of their own (such as “Joker”), which would wind up competing directly with Mack Sennett’s Keystone. They stole Augustus Carney from Essanay, changing him from “Alkali Ike” to “Universal Ike”.  They poached Ford Sterling and Henry Lehrman from Keystone and gave them their own production units.  Important comedians at Universal’s various brands included Max Asher, Billy Franey, Gale Henry, Louise Fazenda, Harry McCoy, Billie Ritchie, Alice Howell, Eddie Lyons, Lee Moran and others (again, many of them former Keystone people).

Then comes the skinny period at the studio for comedy. By the late ’20s and early 30s Universal had discovered a cash cow in the form of horror. They made some talkie shorts with Slim Summerville and others, but relatively few compared with other studios. And unfortunately — unthinkably — Universal destroyed most of its silent film cache in 1948 to save money, so we can’t see most of the films from the early silent period to evaluate.

But the second phase of Universal comedy is well known, easily as well known as Paramount’s great comedy period or that of the Columbia Shorts Department.  It happened late in the game, just around the time some of the studios seemed to be be making less of an effort on the comedy front, allowing Universal to pick up a lot of great comedians at what amounted to a fire sale. They picked up the Dead End Kids from Warner Brothers in 1938, W.C. Fields from Paramount in 1939, the Ritz Brothers from Fox in 1940, and Olsen and Johnson (formerly with Warner Brothers) in 1941. But they did create their own mega-comedy stars in the form of  Abbott and Costello (1940-1956), the team for which they remain best known today. They also developed the popular late comedy series Ma and Pa Kettle which ran 1947-1957.

A quarter century separates Universal’s early and late periods. And, given that the later period includes many comedy classics (including some of W.C. Fields’ most enduring films, the screen version of Olsen and Johnson’s Hellzapoppin and any number of Abbott and Costello favorites) one can’t help but wonder how the earlier period would measure up. They had some great talent in the bullpen.

(20th Century) Fox

Fox launched their own comedy units in 1916,  including one under the direction of Charles Parrott (later known as Charley Chase), another under Henry Lehrman after he departed Universal. Like Universal, Fox offered many separate brands to exhibitors, such as Foxfilm, Sunshine, and Imperial, and they had great comedy stars like Hank Mann, Billie Ritchie, Dot Farley, Heinie Conklin, Clyde Cook, and Al St. John. As with Universal, many of these were plundered from Keystone and Sennett.

Fox also distributed the product of Educational Pictures which, starting in the mid, 1920s included comedies by the likes of Lupino Lane, and Lloyd Hamilton and later (in the talkie period) Andy Clyde, Harry Langdon, and Buster Keaton (Educational is essential the most obvious linking element between the silent period and the talking period at Fox.  Clark and McCullough started their movie career at Fox in 1928. Fox stopped carrying shorts in 1937, around the time they merged with the 20th Century Film Corporation to form 20th Century Fox.

Major Fox comedy stars of the 1930s included Will Rogers; Shirley Temple (who’d come to the studio via Educational’s Baby Burlesks and Frolics of Youth); and The Ritz Brothers (who’d also come via Educational).  In their declining years (early 1940s) Laurel and Hardy made some of their worst comedies for the studio.

Sadly, most of Fox’s silent product (and thus also much of Educational’s) was lost in a fire in the 1930s. It’s a great loss for many reasons. One would be interested in comparing the early silent Fox comedies with those of their competitors. But it also would be interesting to measure them against the studio’s comedy product of the ’30s, which was on the weak side to put it mildly. There may have been some redemption and more vigor in the comedies of the teens — like Keystone product, but slicker. I think it’s likely that there was.

Paramount 

Of all the major studios, Paramount may have the longest and best known association with comedy. It begins with Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle who launched his own independent production company Comique in 1917, releasing the films through Paramount. In 1920, Arbuckle bequeathed Comique to Buster Keaton and went to work as a star for Paramount directly, until the scandal of 1921 derailed his career. Mack Sennett also cut a deal to release his comedies through the studio starting in 1917, an arrangement that lasted until 1923, and was resumed 1932-1934.  Others who made silent comedy features at Paramount included Raymond Griffith (1924-1927), and W.C. Fields (1925-1928). Harold Lloyd’s independently produced features were distributed by Paramount from the mid 20s through 1936, and he starred in the Paramount comedy Professor Beware in 1938.  The Marx Brothers made their best movies for the studio from 1929 through 1933. Mack Sennett released comedies through Paramount from 1932 to 1933, which led to W.C. Fields getting picked up by the studio again for a second stretch (1932-1938). Burn and Allen worked for the studio from 1930 through 1939, first in their own series of comedy shorts, then usually integrated into feature comedies with ensemble casts, e.g., the Big Broadcast series. Mae West made her classic films for Paramount from 1932 through 1937. In the ’30s both Bob Hope and Bing Crosby came to the studio, occasionally teamed in their own “Road” comedies. And the line stretches all the way to Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis (1949-1956), then Lewis’s solo comedies through the mid 1960s. That’s a good half century of solid, reputable comedy output. And, while we’re not not focusing on directors in this post, we’d be remiss in not mentioning that the great Preston Sturges made his masterpeices of the 1940s for Paramount as well. Does Paramount win? One is tempted to assert so — until we recall the minor fact that they also fired Arbuckle, the Marx Brothers, West and Fields. Get your head out of your ass, Paramount!

Columbia

Like the studio itself, Columbia’s comedies have been dissed over the years, but are nowadays garnering well deserved respect. The Cohn Brothers and Joe Brandt began as CBC Film Sales, producing the Hall Room Boys, based on a comic strip (1918-1923), and distributing the Mickey McGuire comedies (1927-1934), starring a very young Mickey Rooney. Frank Capra, the studio’s principle earner, arrived in 1928 to keep the studio solvent. And while Capra essentially invented the screwball comedy with It Happened One Night (1934) and can be called one of America’s greatest comedy directors (You Can’t Take It With You, Arsenic and Old Lace, not to mention his early pre-Columbia work with Our Gang and Harry Langdon) his labors were entirely separate from the low comedy happening at the legendary Columbia shorts department (1933-1958). Jules White was the main man there and he created the shop’s signature style, which was fast-paced, violent, and full of cartoon sound effects. The main stars of their stable were The Three Stooges, and for most part the remainder were refugees from the ruins of Roach and Educational, like Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon, Charley Chase etc etc. When the shorts department closed in 1958, the Stooges continued to make features for the studio through 1965. Another notable Columbia comedy product was the Blondie series (1938-1950), adapted from the comic strip and starring Penny Singleton and Arthur Lake (himself a veteran of comedy shorts at the various studios since the earliest days of talkies.)

Red Skelton, “A Southern Yankee”

MGM

Considered by many to be the greatest of the classic era Hollywood studios overall, MGM was easily the worst studio for comedy, apart from the films they merely distributed. Throughout the 1920s MGM and Metro (one of the companies that was merged to create it) distributed Buster Keaton‘s features, which are comedy masterpieces. And from 1927 through 1938 they distributed Hal Roach films, including the very best output of Laurel and Hardy , and the comedies of Our Gang, Charley Chase, and many others. This adds up to some of the best comic product in the business, and you can see how proud they are of these associations in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, a showcase film in which we have the rare spectacle of seeing Laurel and Hardy and Buster Keaton in the same movie.

But MGM’s merciless machine was a comedy killer. It seems like whenever their management got their hands on comedians, they succeeded in killing what was excellent about them. Keaton became a contract player in 1929. By 1933, after 4 years of terrible films, he vamoosed, returning later only as a gag man. The Marx Brothers arrived in 1935; by 1941 they were so disgusted with their MGM experience they retired. When MGM took over direct production of Our Gang in 1938, they killed the essential spirit of the franchise. And when Laurel and Hardy escaped from Fox briefly in the ’40s to see if MGM could do any better for them, they were sorely disappointed.

The only comedy star that can truly be called MGM’s creation is Red Skelton, who made his comedies there from 1941 through 1954. Red had starred in some shorts prior to this, but it was MGM that made him a star (with guys like Buster Keaton in the wings to spruce up the gags). Nearly all of the films are excrutiatingly dull — the prevailing MGM comedy aesthetic. The same can be said of the Maisie series (1939-1947), starring the otherwise winning Ann Sothern. The credits promise racy comedy; but the actual product is fairly barren of laughs. You need freedom and independence to make comedy, and you don’t have those when you’re a cog in a machine.

RKO

On the other hand, the most under-rated and unsung studio for comedy from the classic era has got to be RKO. After Paramount, Universal and Columbia, I would have to place RKO in the comedy studio rankings. This despite the fact that the studio had a short life compared to the rest of them — less than 30 years. RKO was founded in 1928, in a move that included a merger of the Keith-Orpheum vaudeville circuit and Film Booking Offices, which had earlier absorbed the Mutual Film Corporation, which had earlier swallowed up Keystone, Lone Star, Majestic, Reliance-Majestic and others, brands associated with major comedy founding names Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin and others. Their product included the features of Wheeler and Woolsey (1929-1938); the shorts of Edgar Kennedy (1930-1947), Clark and McCullough (1930-1935), and Leon Errol (1934-1951), the Mexican Spitfire series starring Lupe Velez (1939-1943); Hal Peary’s Gildersleeve comedies (1942-1944); and the brief teaming of Alan Carney and Wally Brown (1943-1945). But there are many amazing things to remember RKO for, including the musicals of Fred and Ginger, the spectacle of King Kong, and the masterpiece that was Citizen Kane. We can perhaps be forgiven of not thinking of their comedians first, but they had great ones.

Warner Brothers

Similarly we have other reasons to think of Warner Brothers before comedy: gangster pictures, swashbucklers, and Depression Era tap musicals.  But there’s a comedy legacy here as well. In 1924 the Warner Brothers acquired the old Vitagraph studios (where Larry Semon was the big comedy star). This is why their famous sound process would be called Vitaphone when it premiered a couple of years later. In 1928, they merged with First National, which had released many of the masterpieces of Charlie Chaplin and Harry Langdon in earlier years.

Most of the early Vitaphones were more like documentary recordings of vaudeville acts than comedy shorts. They might star comedians like Burns and Allen but in a film like Lambchops they’re just doing their stage act. But some of the Vitaphones of the late ’20s and early ’30ss are proper, plotted comedy shorts, featuring comedians like Shemp Howard, Jack Haley and Lionel Stander. Best of all are a half dozen made by Fatty Arbuckle just as he was returning to pictures to make his comeback in 1932. Olsen and Johnson made three features at Warner Brothers in 1930 and 1931. Not surprisingly a half dozen of the Dead End Kids pictures were made there in the late ’30s with stars like Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney. These tend to be more gritty than funny, as they later grew to be.

But the greatest of all Warner Brothers classic comedy stars was Joe E. Brown, who made features at the studio from the late ’20s through the late ’30s. If you’re only going to have one comedy star, that’s a good one to have. Brown was so popular a star in the early ’30s it was as good as having a whole stable of comedians. Warner Brothers did end up making a major mark in the comedy business in the end — in the form of animated shorts, but that’s a topic for a different time.

Odds and Ends

Charlie Chaplin was one of the founders of United Artists. UA released all his movies from A Woman of Paris (1923) on. They also distributed all of Eddie Cantor’s comedies of the 1930s, which were produced by Sam Goldwyn.

Starting in 1940 the former Dead End Kids became the East Side Kids and Bowery Boys at low-budget Monogram (through 1958).

For more  on silent and slapstick film don’t miss my book Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc To find out more about show biz history consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.