Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Bid It, Danno!

Your chance to own a true artifact of The Lord.

• Posted at 11:25 AM · LINK

Another Nice Website

In the last years of his life, Stan Laurel spent a lot of his time answering fan mail. This website is attempting to collect them all so that they can be shared with the world. Fascinating stuff.

• Posted at 10:59 AM · LINK

Jay Kennedy, R.I.P.

Tom Spurgeon has a long, probably definitive obit up for Jay Kennedy, who died last Thursday on a vacation accident. Jay was a historian of underground comics and, more lucratively, an editor of newspaper comic strips for King Features Syndicate. I never met the man but he was well-respected by everyone who knew him and a lot of good people are still stunned at the loss.

• Posted at 10:00 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Sit back, click and enjoy a great old vaudeville/burlesque sketch. Years ago, I met a professor-type who was trying to research the origin of this one. What he found was about nineteen different comedians had nineteen different stories about how they wrote it and how everyone stole it from them. At some point though, it became part of the more-or-less public domain repertoire that comedians working in revues then drew from. There were a lot of comics doing this material, often in their own, personalized versions — some of which they copyrighted — on stages the world over. Later on film and television, Abbott and Costello had their interpretation and the Three Stooges had theirs, and there were a couple of other folks who did it now and then, sometimes changing the "trigger word."

You'll understand what I mean when you see it...and you'll probably remember the bit. Here are the Stooges doing what they did best: Beating the crap out of one of their own...

• Posted at 12:36 AM · LINK