‘Monkey Business’ (1931) is the Marx Brothers third movie and the first not to be an adaptation of a stage play. The movie is a non-stop delight–75 or so minutes of one laugh after another., And yet the last line of the film is famously (amongst Marxists anyway) disappointing. After
I was listening to a Gilbert Gottfiried podcast while driving today in which he and his guests began extolling the remarkably varied talents of Jerry Lewis. Not only was he a comic, a director, a writer, a philanthropist but he was also…an excellent dancer? Well, sort of. It’s true that
Early talking films are invaluable relics of a dead civilization–namely the 1920s. The acting, pacing, diction, style and behavior are as incomprehensible and different from anything we now consider normal as sitting around a cave might be with its cro-magnin inhabitants. The movies aren’t really useful anymore to us in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fn7PKzf5tk Last week I posted various examples of TV episodic comedy show themes. I missed posting something Friday because…well, because I just missed posting something. Things happen, you know. So we’ll wrap up this theme song stuff with a little bit of ‘I Love Lucy’ history which you might or
Our mission this week is to explore the theme songs of old TV comedies which contained lyrics that set-up the backstory of the show. Yesterday we wallowed in ‘The Partridge Family’ theme and frankly I thought the rest of this week would be a breeze. You know, ‘Brady Bunch’, Gilligans
Let us bid this world-wearying week farewell with a superb performance from the great Steven Wright on The Tonight Show in 1982. Thanks to Wright’s Wikipedia entry, I learned a new word–albeit one I’m still not sure how to pronounce or even to use properly in a sentence. According to
Here’s a marvelous compilation of behind-the-scenes miscellany and interviews about and with The Three Stooges, spanning the late 1920s well into the 1970s. We see home movies of them as young chaps goofing around in the water at Coney Island; an odd promotional reel for a home movie camera that
Continuing this weeks uncanny resemblance between Julius ‘Groucho’ Marx’s character Rufus T. Firefly in ‘Duck Soup’ and the current President of the United State, we come to the movie’s brilliant opening song in which Firefly lays out the rules of his administration. Given that our current Presidents early goals included
Continuing our comparison begun yesterday between the current Presidential Administration and Rufus T. Firefly’s rule of Freedonia in ‘Duck Soup’ (1933), here is a rather terrifying example of a ninety year old piece of comedic art predicting the future of American politics all too accurately. Among the many mad appointees
I try to keep this blog as apolitical as possible, steeped as I am in popular culture of another era–which may be seen by some as a method by which I avoid the present day. (By the way, if that’s what somebody thinks, they’re right). But the extraordinarily ugly events