What do you think of when you hear Chopin's haunting Etude Op. 10, #3?
Leaves falling on a dreary Autumn day? Past loves and regrets? The impossibility of breaking through the solitude of existence?
When I hear that refrain I think of the Keystone Kops. Of spills out of windows or into ponds of water. Of pastry tossed about with a wild disregard for the laws of physics. Of hats thrown and crushed and battered by disgruntled spouses, rivals, or bosses. Of the tremendous silence that comes after a lifetime of tremendous laughter.
For that lovely bit of Chopin was appropriated in 1957 for the film "The Golden Age of Comedy". A compilation of film clips from the silent movie masters of comedy like Laurel & Hardy, Charlie Chase, and the unhinged Keystone Kops.
I saw that movie at a revival in 1961 at the old Varsity Theater in Dinkytown, next to the University of Minnesota campus in Minneapolis. As it played, I heard for the first time in my life the true belly laugh -- a gasping, wheezing near-death experience where a man or woman drools and snorts in a paroxysm of mirth. There were moments during that screening when the audience's laughter seemed to lift me into a strange new dimension -- one I wanted very much to understand and conquer.
It was a career epiphany for me. I wanted to obtain the same kind of comic influence those herky jerky figures on the screen possessed, that could make a crowd dissolve into helpless delight.
As an eight-year old I had no idea how to achieve such distinction, but I was determined to find out. So I was in every school play; the part didn't matter, for I would wind up tripping over my own shoes and taking spectacular pratfalls that had my teachers terrified I would break my neck. I read the wonderful and abundant clown biographies of the day -- Mr. Laurel & Mr. Hardy, by John McCabe; W.C. Fields; His Follies and Fortunes, by Robert Lewis Taylor; Keaton, by Rudi Blesch; Father Goose, by Gene Fowler; and Notes on a Cowardly Lion, by John Lahr. I haunted the local Film Societies, sitting in the dark and learning from the nimble Old Masters of slapstick.
I even wrote an entire Marx Brothers play, in longhand. And had the effrontery to mail it to Douglas Campbell, the Artistic Director of the renowned Guthrie Theater. He actually responded several weeks later, with a brief note thanking me for my submission and suggesting I have someone type it up so he could actually read it.
To me all this was a deadly serious pursuit. As the years slid past my adolescent passion to make people laugh turned into an obsession.
Walking home from school in the middle of a deep Minnesota winter, I would pry up sheets of ice from sidewalk puddles, then smash them over my head and stagger about like Curly Howard or Chaplin after being hit with a mallet. I carried banana peels with me, the better to impress the girls with my balletic slides and tumbles. (It didn't work.)
The world would never hold any satisfaction for me, unless I could stick my tongue out at it as a paid professional.
What kept my parents from sending me off to a laughing academy was the fortuitous opening of the Ringling Brothers Clown College. The school actively sought amateur clowns of every stripe. As soon as I was out of high school I was on my way to Venice, Florida, to enter the school's unhallowed halls. That’s where I heard the matchless Lou Jacobs say “It’s no good trying to hold onto a laugh -- it just goes rotten quick, like a ripe peach.”
And all because I had once seen Charlie Murray hit Louise Fazenda with a two-by-four on the screen of the Varsity Theater.
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