Posts Tagged ‘comedy’
Be deliberate in all things…
Laughing Squid reports:
For ECAL’s “Low-Tech Factory” exhibition, design students Laurent Beirnaert, Pierre Bouvier and Paul Tubiana created Oncle Sam, a popcorn machine that pops just one kernel at a time. At the final stages of the process, this contraption even butters and salts the single piece of popcorn that was produced. Watch this video to see the machine in action.
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As we turn up the heat, we might pause to send amusing birthday greetings to Al Christie; he was born on this date in 1881. An early motion picture director, producer, screenwriter and studio head, Christie ran the first ever movie studio to be built in Hollywood
(Nestor Studios, opened in 1911) and is credited with having produced the first film comedies there. In all, he produced more than 700 films before retiring in 1942.
Beating the rap…
Liz Fosslien “likes to turn numbers into pictures and ideas into charts”– from “Crime Patterns in Chicago” to “How to Get Hired,” she’s created infographics galore. Indeed, one of her visual essays is a quiz, “Name that Song“; two sample questions (answers, below):
Take the test here.
Answers:
# 4- “Sexy and I know” LMFAO
# 8- “No Church in the Wild” Jay-Z and Kanye West
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As we bust our beats, we might send birthday smiles to actor, writer and film director Arthur Stanley “Stan” Jefferson… or as he was better known, Stan Laurel; he was born on this date in 1890. Laurel came to the U.S. from his native England as Charlie Chaplin’s understudy in a touring acting troupe. Laurel stayed behind, first as an actor in two-reel comedies, then as a writer-director for Hal Roach. Laurel intended to remain behind the camera, but stepped under the lights again when an accident left Oliver Hardy without a co-star. The two became friends and went on to make first a series of shorts (one of which, The Music Box, won the Academy Award for Best Short in 1932), then features– over 180 films in all. In 1961, four years after Hardy’s death, Laurel was given a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award for his pioneering work in comedy.
If anyone at my funeral has a long face, I’ll never speak to him again.
Stan Laurel
Just a second…
More of Hudson Hongo’s “One Second Classics” here.
[TotH to Laughing Squid]
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As we put aside our envy of Evelyn Wood, we might send boisterous birthday greetings to comic genius Harold Lloyd; he was born on this date in 1893. While your correspondent marginally prefers the extraordinary Buster Keaton, Lloyd has some real claim to being the finest physical comedian of the silent film era (even as his career extended to talkies and radio). Like Keaton, Lloyd did his own stunts– many of them, breathtakingly dangerous. Indeed, after 1919, he appears wearing a prosthetic glove, masking the loss of a thumb and index finger in a bomb explosion at Roach Studios.
Be your own boss!…
Franchising opportunities, circa 1934… more at Retronaut.
As we clear off the kitchen table, we might recall that it was on this date in 1787 that the first professionally-produced theatrical comedy written by an American was produced in the U.S.: Royall Tyler’s The Contrast premiered in New York. The play satirizes Americans who follow British fashions and indulge in “British vices”… ironic insofar as it was written in the manner of English Restoration comedies of the seventeenth century, and modelled on Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, a British comedy of manners that had revived that tradition in London a decade before.
A dictionary for these turbulent times…
In these times of proliferating online reference resources, what’s a poor scholar to do? Dictionaries can be a particular problem: duelling definitions, eccentric enunciations… all against a backdrop of a language that’s evolving, in both vocabulary and usage, even as we speak…
Enter Wordnik:
Wordnik is a new way to discover meaning… Wordnik shows definitions from multiple sources, so you can see as many different takes on a word’s meaning as possible… We try to show as many real examples as possible for each word. These examples are ranked by how useful we think they are in helping you understand the meaning of a particular word, especially words that may not have traditional dictionary definitions… [Wordnik lists related words.] Our word relationships include synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, words used in the same context, a reverse dictionary, and tags…
All this– plus lists, images illustrating entries, recorded pronunciations, and a word-of-the-day at Wordnik.
As we choose our words both more carefully and more confidently, we might fling a fistful of rice in celebration of the nuptials of Sadye Marks (better known as Mary Livingstone) and Benjamin Kubelsky (or Jack Benny, as audiences knew him); they were married on this date in 1927.
Mary co-starred in Benny’s fabulously-successful radio series, and became famous for her occasional flubbed lines, many ultimately as legendary as the deliberately-crafted “illogical logic” of Gracie Allen or the carefully-scripted malapropisms of Jane Ace and (as Molly in The Goldbergs) Gertrude Berg. (Visit here for downloadable examples.)
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