Classic comedy

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Well, look at my avatar. Any fans of Marx Brothers, Three Stooges, Laurel & Hardy, or others?

I think each is a great example of humor and comedic timing that's hard to duplicate in the present day.

I like

i love the marx brother's, buster keaton, charlie chaplin, and harold lloyd.

... make that three hardboiled eggs.

I loved the Three Stooges when I was a kid. I was recently entertained by my Fluid Dynamics book telling me to take a 30 minute break from a long and arduous derivation by watching the Three Stooges.

On a side note, I remember one Rob Schneider or one of the Wayan's brothers claiming that their movies are of the classic comedy mold. I wanted to reach through the screen and smack them for that.

Charlie Chaplin Is A Legend. lackadder. The Carry On Films. Steptoe And Son.etc

I love Abbott and Costello. "Who's On First" can get a laugh out of me anytime and I have an old vhs with some of their stuff on it. I also love the Three Stooges, I've got a dvd of theirs as well. Haven't watched either in a while though, I used to watch them a lot when I was younger (obviously not the dvd, but they were on tv back then.

YES! The Marx Brothers, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, oh, yes.

I love Buster Keaton's deadpan face.

There's a great Buster Keaton all day retrospective in Sydney later this month. If anyone wants the details, PM me

Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy comedies. They are so choice!

ruveyn

I watched an old parody film, was National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1 I think it was, and it was hilarious! I laughed all the way through it! In contrast, the new parody films like Epic Movie, are complete crap.

Most areas had at least one TV station where you could catch the Stooges or Laurel and Hardy. In Detroit, Sunday was the day where WXYZ would show an Abbott & Costello movie in the morning, and then WXON would air a Blondie movie (based on the comic strip). I wasn't as big a fan of Blondie, but I really enjoyed Bud & Lou.

I've only seen the Marx Brothers movies that included Zeppo, but from what I hear, the ones that came later were similar. And I may be in the minority, but I didn't have a problem at all with Zeppo: you got to have a straight man in there. If anything, I was very annoyed with Harpo. Some of his antics just struck me as mean-spirited. "I got an uncle lives in Taxes...That's-a where he live: Dollars, Taxes!" The writing in those movies was brilliant.

Recently I bought a set of Humphrey Bogart movies, and one of them had a short film that was part of a series I had never heard of before. It starred George O'Hanlon (the voice of George Jetson) as a guy named Joe McDoakes. I guess he was kind of a dreamer, because in this one he imagines himself as a P.I. named Philip Snarlowe. I would like to have seen more of this character.

I don't think you're in the minority having no problem with Zeppo... many fans in fact prefer the four Marx Brothers films. I personally don't care for most anything they did after Zeppo left. I do like Harpo, however. It's hard to take his actions seriously when he's doing what he does to people who are so cartoonish. Harpo is like Mr. Bean... not quite on adult terms. He chases the girls but I heard it said once that you wonder if he'd really know what to do with one if he caught one.

The ones I found mean spirited were Abbott and Costello... I never liked the comic pairings where there was one dumb nice guy and one mean smarter guy who mistreated him all the time (eg. Martin and Lewis, Laurel and Hardy). I'm not a fan of the Three Stooges either... it's similar but has one extra dummy. Well, two... Maybe three. Never mind. I did like the one where Moe was Hitler... whew, that was more like it.

Curly: "Put a little English on it."
Moe: "DON'T SAY 'ENGLISH!'"

Joe Doakes... Y'know, my pop said they had loads of Joe Doakes films. I just saw one in a Mystery Science Theater 3000. Apparently there is a whole bunch, though I wouldn't know where to find them.

Yeah, Zeppo wasn't bad. "You said a lot of things here that I didn't think were important, so I just omitted them."

I haven't seen much Abbot and Costello, but they don't really strike a chord with me. I hear they didn't really get along in real life, maybe that's why. Lou just seems like too much of a jackass, and Bud's too passive. Laurel and Hardy were different - they were pretty much friends til the end, Stan was quiet and goofy but he could stand up for himself, and Ollie always got what was coming to him.

That is true. Most of what I've seen of Laurel and Hardy consists of clips of the fat one yelling and the skinny one crying, but you do see bits of them both catching trouble, whereas all I ever saw of the Abbott and Costello movies involved Abbott actually yelling at Costello and not believing anything he said, even setting him up to take the blame for his own actions. Not really funny.

It's often suggested that a joke isn't funny if you have to explain it... that taking humor apart to see how it works can be disastrous. But I find it fascinating sometimes when I do get insights into why it is that I find things troubling that others find funny, sometimes.

I was thinking of a movie with Jerry Lewis, who could be funny but too often believed himself unsinkable in his ideas of what was funny... or so it seemed from his films. But in one while he was still young and skinny he played a guy who wanted to be a clown. I don't recall all the particulars, but I do remember that he at last got his chance and was a natural at it, balancing the inevitable pain of that kind of comedy with a certain sweetness. He was getting more and more popular because of it and the old headliner, a certified jerk, had taken notice. During one act, when the new guy was getting all the laughs, the old clown decided to put him in his place and started clown-smacking him, but the audience couldn't fail to see that the blows were not as fake as they should have been. Finally when he actually stepped on Jerry with particular force just as he was trying to get up, a kid actually yelled at him to leave the other guy alone. They'd stopped laughing long since.

The thing I like about the Marx Brothers, all of them, was that it was a free-for-all. They did what they did and it wasn't usually personal unless someone had really worked at being a jerk. I don't think they went too far. They didn't base all their humor on repeatedly beating on one guy. I still don't find that sort of thing funny. I don't like sitcoms like that, where every week the star will do some other idiotic thing and get slapped down for daring to try. I don't like it when Spongebob and Patrick torment Squidward without provocation. I don't like Jerry Lewis movies that have him scrambling pathetically to try and do well while people are in a state of trembling rage all around him. Even if it comes out all right in the end and the poor loser makes good, there has to be some relief sprinkled throughout. Otherwise, it's not comedy. It's Cinderella.

Whoa, I didn't expect to get into a speech about the nature of humor. Not funny. I guess it's something I've been wondering about for a long time. When I was a kid, it made me really uncomfortable to see someone sobbing on tv while the audience laughed. The worst episodes of I Love Lucy seemed to be like that. There are good ones, I know. But humiliation, stupidity, and abject sorrow seemed to be as common and I never got what was so funny about a woman wanting a chance to get into her husband's stage show sobbing when her stupid scam failed to get her there. Even if she did suck.

So yeah, I like some classic comedy, anyhow.