Step by step, inch by inch...it almost sounds like the "Slowly I turned" skit from "The Three Stooges" -- or Abbot and Costello or God knows who actually first came up with it. The best version I've ever seen is this one, off "I Love Lucy."
What's even more hysterical is, later in the show she actually does the whole routine in pantomime as Ricky is leading his band in the song, "Martha." Watch the video; imagine the hysteria.
Thinking about it, Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett can make me roll on the floor with laughter, over and over. The closest male who's done that to me is Donald O'Connor, and that was during his "Make 'Em Laugh" bit in "Singin' In The Rain". It seems female comedians are funnier than male ones. I wonder why? Is it because we expect men to be idiots while women are the prim and proper ones or just scatterbrains? Then Carol Burnett appears at the top of the stairs in a green velvet dress while doing a send-up of "Gone With the Wind" and has a curtain rod atop her shoulders, and you nearly die laughing.
I think the funniest skit I ever saw was when Carol Burnett was playing an escape artist for whom nothing ever went right. The set-up was that a trunk she's supposed to escape from while underwater collapses the moment she sits on it, showing how flimsy it is, and her handcuffs won't stay closed. But apparently the producers got the idea of fixing it so the trunk did NOT collapse like it's supposed to and the cuffs stayed locked. Jesus, her reactions as she tried to get everything to work like it did during rehearsal...I was choking and barely able to breathe, I was laughing so hard.
Damn, I wish I could add something like that to my writing...but I think comedy like this works because of the performance. I mean, I DID do something like it in a goofy little script called "The Lavender Curse" -- where a butch cop's mind winds up in his less-than-beloved mother-in-law's body, and vise versa, just as he's about to make a huge arrest and she's about to be in a senior lady beauty pageant. The comments back were -- "Needs to be funnier." So tell me -- what's funnier than having the mother-in-law's estranged husband show up in her bedroom and rather obnoxiously wanting to get amorous with his wife while the cop's mind is in her body?
I'm sounding like a pissed-off writer, again. Gotta quit that habit.
More done on LD in steps and stages, as well. I redid chapter 7 because the timing was wrong for about 20% of the interaction between Daniel, Ace and Van. It worked...it just didn't work completely. Now it's a lot happier...and the book is now up to 300 pages. Seems that I AM channeling Tolstoy. Or Dickens.
What's even more hysterical is, later in the show she actually does the whole routine in pantomime as Ricky is leading his band in the song, "Martha." Watch the video; imagine the hysteria.
Thinking about it, Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett can make me roll on the floor with laughter, over and over. The closest male who's done that to me is Donald O'Connor, and that was during his "Make 'Em Laugh" bit in "Singin' In The Rain". It seems female comedians are funnier than male ones. I wonder why? Is it because we expect men to be idiots while women are the prim and proper ones or just scatterbrains? Then Carol Burnett appears at the top of the stairs in a green velvet dress while doing a send-up of "Gone With the Wind" and has a curtain rod atop her shoulders, and you nearly die laughing.
I think the funniest skit I ever saw was when Carol Burnett was playing an escape artist for whom nothing ever went right. The set-up was that a trunk she's supposed to escape from while underwater collapses the moment she sits on it, showing how flimsy it is, and her handcuffs won't stay closed. But apparently the producers got the idea of fixing it so the trunk did NOT collapse like it's supposed to and the cuffs stayed locked. Jesus, her reactions as she tried to get everything to work like it did during rehearsal...I was choking and barely able to breathe, I was laughing so hard.
Damn, I wish I could add something like that to my writing...but I think comedy like this works because of the performance. I mean, I DID do something like it in a goofy little script called "The Lavender Curse" -- where a butch cop's mind winds up in his less-than-beloved mother-in-law's body, and vise versa, just as he's about to make a huge arrest and she's about to be in a senior lady beauty pageant. The comments back were -- "Needs to be funnier." So tell me -- what's funnier than having the mother-in-law's estranged husband show up in her bedroom and rather obnoxiously wanting to get amorous with his wife while the cop's mind is in her body?
I'm sounding like a pissed-off writer, again. Gotta quit that habit.
More done on LD in steps and stages, as well. I redid chapter 7 because the timing was wrong for about 20% of the interaction between Daniel, Ace and Van. It worked...it just didn't work completely. Now it's a lot happier...and the book is now up to 300 pages. Seems that I AM channeling Tolstoy. Or Dickens.
No comments:
Post a Comment