Shoulder Arms

I've often said, with just a modicum of exaggeration, that Charlie Chaplin is the only performer who can move me without words. There are very few silent comedians who really do it for me (Harpo Marx is different, because although he never spoke, his comedy often still came from words), and very few artists who are not comedians have moved me at all. But Charlie Chaplin can do it without uttering a syllable. His films, today, are not as freshly funny as those of the Marx Brothers or W.C. Fields; rarely does Chaplin reduce us to hysterics. But he can still reduce us to tears. It is often through the prism of those tears that he finally makes us laugh.

Shoulder Arms, from 1918, is my favorite among the eight classic films Chaplin made for First National. These films comprise the transitional period between the comedy two-reelers Chaplin made for the Mutual Film Corporation (Easy Street, The Immigrant, The Pawnshop), and the richly-layered feature-length films he would make at United Artists (The Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times). Shoulder Arms, in particular, finds Chaplin in transition, and growing pains are evident. In the film, the Little Tramp is a World War I private, serving in France in the "Awkward Squad," and the film itself is endearingly awkward. It's a war comedy played mostly for laughs, but here and there we find a touch of satire, a hint of the political commentary which will permeate The Great Dictator (1940), Chaplin's infinitely more complex take on World War II. (The Great Dictator is generally considered one of Chaplin's misfires, but I've always loved it.) Even the running time of Shoulder Arms is awkward: It's a four-reeler, longer than a short but not as long as a feature.

Like most great comedians, Chaplin was an also an accomplished musical artist, and Shoulder Arms contains one of the best film scores he ever composed. It contains one of the better performances by Edna Purviance (Chaplin's constant leading lady for eight years and thirty films), and an enjoyable turn by Chaplin's brother Sydney, as the Kaiser. Above all, Shoulder Arms is a remarkable chapter in the development of the Little Tramp -- truly the original Modern Comic Hero. Like all great comic heroes, the Tramp envisions himself as simply a hero. And then...

Jack Benny Meets Groucho Marx

It's our Saturday special here at the Comedy Palace: Two legends for the price of one. The following clip from The Jack Benny Program, originally broadcast on April 3, 1955, is one of the few perfect things you will ever encounter in this world. Jack -- disguised as a mustachioed character named Ronald Forsythe -- appears as a contestant on Groucho's quiz show You Bet Your Life. This is two masterful artists at their best.

Modern Comic Heroes don't come any better than Groucho Marx and Jack Benny, and their contrasting styles are striking. Both of them spent their entire careers doing outstanding character work with a single character. Groucho -- arch, verbose, and literary -- was all about the words. His physical choices served as punctuation marks, embroidering material that was always crafted and quotable, even when it was completely spontaneous. Benny, on the other hand, was about the pauses between words. In order to really enjoy Benny, you had to know his character. But his character was so sharply conceived that you only had to see him once to know who he was. 

It's not that his material was negligible. On the contrary, Benny had some of the best comedy writers in history (including the legendary Al Boasberg, who'd written some of the best stuff in the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera), and one of Benny's recurring jokes was that he was lost without them. During one improvisational insult duel with his supposed rival Fred Allen, he shouted, "You wouldn't dare say that to me if my writers were here!" Benny's writers, like practically everyone in the country, knew exactly who this Jack Benny character was, and they knew what would be funny on him, even though it rarely could have been funny on paper. In the PBS documentary Make 'Em Laugh, Kaye Ballard perfectly describes how Benny's comedy worked: "You laughed at what he was thinking, never what he said."

Almost two decades later, when the elderly Groucho gave his bittersweet Carnegie Hall concert, he started the show by saying, "I understand that many years ago, Jack Benny played the violin here at Carnegie Hall." Holding up a violin: "So I thought it would be a good idea to break this over my knee...and then jump on it." This he did, to deafening applause. "I've had quite enough of Jack Benny," Groucho said, "and so has the violin."

The Vessel with the Pestle

Danny Kaye is often wrongfully excluded from lists of the great comic artists. Some remember him more as a singer. It doesn't help that his weakest work -- in bland films like Hans Christian Andersen and White Christmas -- is now more widely seen than his best work. Kaye fits into that category of comedians who never made a film quite worthy of their talent; it was in live performance that his brilliance really came through. His early MGM films -- Up in Arms, The Kid From Brooklyn, Wonder Man, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty -- contain flashes of dazzling genius, but in between those flashes are some pretty conventional Forties comedies. 

Kaye's wife, Sylvia Fine, was also his writer; together Kaye and Fine practiced a symbiosis comparable to that of Lily Tomlin and her partner/writer Jane Wagner. Kaye's musical comedy "specialties," as written and composed by Fine, were unlike any comedian's material before or since -- they were compact mini-musicals in which Kaye often played multiple characters, and showed off his prodigious gifts of mimicry, scat singing, and doubletalk. In these areas and others, there are clear parallels between Kaye and Sid Caesar -- another comic who emerged from the Borscht Belt and practiced a form of comedy easy to laugh at and difficult to quote. 

In the Sixties, when Kaye gave in to television, The Danny Kaye Show owed a great deal to Your Show of Shows, even inheriting some of its key creative staff. The greatest virtue of the TV show was that it preserved for all time some of the great Kaye/Fine routines which never made it into movies. But by that time, Kaye had outgrown his manic style; his later career had less to do with comedic virtuosity and more to do with an array of obsessions in other areas. He became an accomplished pilot, a Chinese chef, and the first UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. My generation remembers him best (if at all) for priceless appearances on The Muppet Show (as the Swedish Chef's uncle) and The Cosby Show (his final performance, as a zany dentist).

On film, Danny Kaye did make one unqualified classic. The Court Jester (1955), one of the best American film comedies of all time, just works. It works as a showcase for Kaye's talents, and unlike the early MGM Kaye vehicles, it also works as a delightful comedy adventure film, satirizing the Robin Hood and King Arthur spectacles of the Thirties. The writing/producing/directing team of Norman Panama and Mel Frank backed up their star with a pitch-perfect ensemble cast, including Glynis Johns, Cecil Parker, Basil Rathbone, and a very young Angela Lansbury. The Court Jester contains one of the greatest Sylvia Fine routines, "The Maladjusted Jester." It also contains the celebrated "Vessel with the pestle" sequence, in which a nervous Kaye prepares to joust to the death with "the grim, grisly, and gruesome Griswold" (Robert Middleton). The old witch (Mildred Natwick) offers him a way out, if only he can remember which drink is poisoned, and infectious wordplay ensues.

The 2000 Year Old Man

Few comic achievements stand taller than The 2000 Year Old Man, Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner's inspired, infinitely durable double act from the fifties and sixties. Modelled on the "Professor" sketches Reiner did with Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows, the act had the simplest possible format: An intrepid reporter interviews the oldest man in the world. What made it brilliant was Brooks' manic flair for highwire improvisational schtick. The concept would be workable in almost any form (Aaron Sorkin described it as the ideal comedy sketch), but Brooks' stroke of genius was playing the 2000 Year Old Man as a seventy-year-old man, unmistakably Jewish and New York.

Kenneth Tynan, in his landmark 1978 New Yorker profile of Brooks, remembered seeing the act for the first time in 1959, at a star-studded birthday party for Moss Hart at Mamma Leone's.

When they stopped, after about a quarter of an hour, the cabaret ended, and that was just as well, for nobody could have followed them . . . Moss Hart was heard to say that the act was the funniest fourteen minutes he could remember. The room buzzed with comment, yet hardly anyone seemed to know who the little maestro was. Diligent quizzing revealed that he was a thirty-three-year-old television writer, that he had spent most of the preceding ten years turning out sketches for Sid Caesar, and that his name was Mel Brooks . . . All I knew...was that [this] stubby, pseudo-Freudian [Brooks] was the most original comic improviser I had ever seen.

Originally, it was a party act -- performed strictly in private, among friends, two comedy writers having fun working off the radar. Carl Reiner remembered:

During the fifties, we spent our days inventing characters for Caesar, but Mel was really using Caesar as a vehicle. What he secretly wanted was to perform himself. So in the evening we'd go to a party and I'd pick a character for him to play. I never told him what it was going to be, but I always tried for something that would force him to go into panic, because a brilliant mind in panic is a wonderful thing to see.

One evening, Reiner turned to Brooks and said, out of the blue, "We are fortunate to have with us tonight a man who was present at the crucifixion of Jesus Christ." Brooks, his brilliant mind in panic, responded as the character he would eventually play on five comedy albums, and in countless stage and television appearances. Long before the mercurial career which begins with The Producers (1968) and continues at least through The Producers (2001), Mel Brooks became a household name on the basis of these recordings. In Carl Reiner, he had one of the best straightmen comedy has ever known. Reiner brought more to the routines than just his amiable journalist character and impeccable comic timing. He also, in effect, wrote the act, or at least guided it, by asking questions that he knew would make Mel panic. Listening to the albums today, you realize that Reiner the performer is simply fulfilling the assignment of Reiner the character: He's just interviewing this guy.

Here, in two parts, is the original, twelve-minute 1961 recording, which comprised the first side of the album 2000 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. (Audio only.)

While we're on the subject, if you're looking for a fantastically funny read: Courtesy of the fan site Brookslyn comes a transcript of Brooks' famous 1975 Playboy interview, another vibrant example of his improvisational gifts. Tynan says it ought to be included in any anthology of modern American humor.

Strange Interlude

Today's clip comes right from the top. Modern American comedy begins with the Marx Brothers, who in my opinion are the greatest artists the world has ever known, in any medium. Their later films proved that all they really had to do was show up, but their early films -- from number two (Animal Crackers, 1930) through number five (Duck Soup, 1933) still comprise the rock on which virtually all great comedy is built.

This clip from Animal Crackers (book by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind) features Groucho in his most celebrated role, Captain Geoffrey T. Spaulding (the T stands for Edgar). Here, he proposes matrimony to Margaret Dumont (the Brothers' perfect foil in seven films, and, according to Groucho, "practically the fifth Marx Brother") and Margaret Irving. The scene works on many levels. It's a self-contained comedy sketch, which can be enjoyed joke by joke, as well as a scene from the larger comedy banquet that is Animal Crackers. It's also a deft parody of Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude (which appeared on Broadway during the same season as the stage version of Animal Crackers), though its humor doesn't rely on familiarity with the O'Neill play.

This is Your Story

In addition to scintillating commentary on the art and craft of comedy, Noah's Comedy Palace shall offer lovingly selected clips of the greatest comedians of all time. There's no better place to start than Your Show of Shows (later Caesar's Hour), the seminal live television schtickfest which launched not only Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner, Imogene Coca, Howard Morris, and Nanette Fabray, but (around the writers' table) Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Danny Simon, Mel Tolkin, Larry Gelbart, and Woody Allen. Sketch comedy as we know it comes from Your Show of Shows, and in more than fifty years the form has still never been practiced more effectively.

The sketch "This is Your Story," which originally aired in 1953, is a parody of This is Your Life. It's not quite the most brilliant thing Caesar and company ever did, but Caesar's vigorous emoting in this sketch sums up his personal, inexplicable funniness better than any other single performance.

I Must Be Going

New York magazine's cover story "Twilight of the Tummlers" focuses on Woody Allen's upcoming Whatever Works (opening June 19), which has ignited sparks of excitement in people who haven't felt excited about a Woody Allen movie in a long time. New York's Mark Harris uses the casting of Larry David, and Allen's return to both New York and comedy, to make interesting points about how both have changed.

Whatever Works, as we have known for some time, is a refreshed version of a screenplay Allen wrote in the Seventies, with Zero Mostel in mind for the lead. Harris notes that Mostel died in 1977, the year of Annie Hall, and identifies Whatever Works as "in essence, the missing movie from that period." When I saw the trailer, in which an irritated Larry David limps down a Manhattan street, kvetching directly to the camera, I did have the feeling that a cherished ghost was being summoned.

Our desire to see Woody Allen make one more classic New York comedy has, in recent years, been challenged by Woody Allen's apparent decision to quit acting. In 2006 he told Eric Lax that Scoop was probably going to be his last performance in a film, and as nice as it was to see him, Scoop didn't convey the promise of great comedies ahead. One thing he's never quite done is come up with a Modern Comic Hero as effective as himself. Roles we would normally associate with the Woody Allen character have been played with varying degrees of success by other actors -- John Cusack did it best, in Bullets Over Broadway -- but part of what made his greatest comedies succeed was the actual voice and presence of the great comedian. Kenneth Branagh hit his marks admirably in Celebrity, but Kenneth Branagh is not the spiritual descendant of Groucho Marx.

Larry David -- of whom, on Curb Your Enthusiasm, it can be said, a little goes a long way -- does seem a more credible surrogate than anyone who's yet attempted it. Larry David is a Modern Comic Hero, and he's one of the few active comic performers whose rhythms recall the Borscht Belt. But there's more to it than just style. David isn't really an actor, but he is a comic genius in his own right, whose greatest contribution -- Seinfeld -- built on the achievements of Woody Allen and Mel Brooks the same way Allen and Brooks built on Chaplin and the Marx Brothers. Larry David has earned the rank. He has comedic gravitas.

Early reviews of Whatever Works have been mixed, but that's nothing new. The question is whether this is that one last great Woody Allen New York comedy we've dreamed of; we know lots of people will hate it even if that's what it is. And it does sound promising. Mark Harris writes:

This movie is literally vintage Woody Allen. In fact, it calls to mind a brand of Jewish humor that has, in recent years, been all but scrubbed out—neurotic, depressive, abrasive, excluded. And to serve as its embodiment, he drafted Larry David, the guy who, through six seasons of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, has done more than anyone—even Allen—to keep that sensibility alive for a generation to whom it’s now almost completely foreign.

Larry David is not exactly a young arriviste; Seinfeld belongs to another era, just like Annie Hall and Manhattan. So Whatever Works isn't the passing of a torch. Harris paints it as the recognition of a kindred spirit across an increasingly empty room. That room used to be full of my biggest heroes, and I'm glad Harris has prepared me for what is certain to be a goosebump experience -- and I'm just talking about the opening credits.

Whatever Works, Woody Allen’s 40th movie as writer and director, begins with a ghostly visitation from the distant past of Jewish-American comedy, so distant it predates not only Allen’s career but also his birth, in 1935. The lights dim, we see the familiar white-on-black credits unspool in the same font we've been looking at for nearly four decades (it’s Windsor Light Condensed, by the way) … and then we hear the voice of Groucho Marx, Allen’s anarchic spiritual grandfather, singing lyrics he first performed in Animal Crackers in the infancy of sound cinema.

Hello, I must be going
I cannot stay, I came to say
I must be going
I’m glad I came but just the same
I must be going
La la.

I still haven't gotten around to watching Cassandra's Dream or Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but when Whatever Works opens I may have to do what I haven't done since Deconstructing Harry and see it on opening night with the die-hards. Between this and the upcoming Seinfeld reunion arc on Curb Your Enthusiasm, 2009 could be a triumphant year for Modern Comic Heroism. Proving Harris's point that things have changed, it's also the year that Mel Brooks' triumphant musical version of The Producers opened to ecstatic notices -- in Germany.