Jonathan Lyons

Spike Milligan

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I seem to have a great gaping hole in my knowledge of comedy history. I had heard the name Spike Milligan, but never followed up on it to learn more. Of course, a quick visit to wikipedia to get started:

Terence Alan Patrick Seán “Spike” Milligan KBE (16 April 1918 – 27 February 2002) was a comedian, writer, musician, poet, playwright, soldier and actor. Milligan’s early life was spent in India, where he was born, but the majority of his working life was spent in the United Kingdom. He became an Irish citizen in 1962 after the British government declared him stateless.[1] He was the co-creator, main writer and a principal cast member of The Goon Show, performing a range of roles including the popular Eccles.

Milligan wrote and edited many books, including Puckoon and his seven-volume autobiographical account of his time serving during the Second World War, beginning with Adolf Hitler: My part in his downfall. He is also noted as a popular writer of comical verse; much of his poetry was written for children, including Silly Verse for Kids (1959). After success with the ground-breaking British radio programme, The Goon Show, Milligan translated this success to television with Q5, a surreal sketch show which is credited as a major influence on the members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

There is a wealth of material available on youtube, and I chose this because it’s done in silent movie style.

And this one is also silent:

And a musical number:

Buster Keaton – One Week

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I have been re-reading Robert Knopf’s excellent book, The Theater and Cinema of Buster Keaton. It may be the best book on Buster’s film making style. He considers three different approaches, or “lenses”, to looking at Buster’s films. One is through classical Hollywood story telling, the second is considering Buster’s vaudeville experience, an the third is through the surrealist perspective.

I ran across the Keaton short “One Week” on youtube and recalled that Knopf used this film as an example of work influenced by vaudeville. A vaudeville show was a series of individual acts, and each act worked to create a rising curve of energy until finally presenting a “topper” that would leave the audience thrilled. The theater manager then tried to arrange the acts in a series so that each successive act increased in quality, culminating in the biggest and best act, creating a “topper” for the evening.

The story takes place over one week, seven days. That is the length of time Buster takes to build a pre-fab house he and his bride recieved as a wedding gift. A jealous friend has changed the numbers on the boxes to confuse them, so the house they build is comically misshapen. Each day in the film is the equivalent of an act in a vaudeville show. The scale of the gags grow with each day, until the final day when… well you can watch it now, in just 2 parts:


Variety Radio – Spencer Norwich

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Spencer Norwich is the young man dancing to cartoony sound effects.  He saw my post and sent me a link to a better quality video.  

Spencer is interested in possibly getting into motion capture.  This is exactly the kind of person who should doing mocap.

The Party

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Blake Edwards was one of the greatest directors of slapstick comedy in the sound era. He may be best known for The Pink Panther movies, where he worked with Peter Sellers, an actor of seemingly limitless talent.  For me, their greatest collaboration was in “The Party” (1968).   Sellers plays Hrundi V. Bakshi, an actor from India, who gets fired from the American movie production for a horrendous screw-up.  He then accidentally gets invited to a celebrity party at the home of a studio executive.  Most of the film is about his misadventures in the elaborate, high tech home where he continually tries to fit in, but constantly messes things up.  It is essentially a one man show, equal to any of the greats of the silent era.

Here is a sample video I found on youtube.  There are many more laughs to be found in the rest of the movie.

The ending of the movie involves hordes of party crashers running amok, and it feels unnatural and forced.  But that is my only complaint about this unforgettable comedy.