A GREAT vaudeville act. If you thought SNL invented the zany, loose style of comedy, think again. My fellow performers and all comedy fans NEED to watch this incredible act. Vaudeville folks did the same act over and over from city to city, perfecting their timing. Note how loose this is — yet smooth, perfectly timed. MUST VIEWING (before my time so this is NOT nostalgia but part of a study of comedy):
FOOTNOTE: This and many other comedy revelations can be found on the DVD below, the Vitaphone Project. People dedicated to making old Vitaphone films come alive painstakingly searched and found the old in many cases missing disks. They digitally worked to enhance the sound and the photo. I have yet to review this on TMV but — trust me — there are many acts on the DVD that will amaze you.
Too often people think of vaudeville in terms of how the media portrayed it. But all of the acts weren’t corney or tired. In fact, many of them stack up very well when compared to SNL or comedy club comedians you see today. This DVD brings them alive — and you can see why vaudeville thrived as you see these performers who honed their acts so they were perflectly timed and executed. Their often-quirky personalities come out at you on the screen, making many of the acts timeless and increasingly endearing.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.