Calendar: October 12

A Year: Day to Day Men: 12th of October

Ole! Ole!

October 12, 1932 marks the birthdate of comedian an civil rights activist Dick Gregory.

Born in Saint Louis, Missouri, Richard Claxton Gregory, while at Summer High School, earned a track scholarship to Southern Illinois University, where he set records as a half-miler and miler. In 1954 his education was interrupted for two years when he was drafted into the United States Army, It was in the army that Gregory got his start in comedy, entering and winning several talent shows.

Dick Gregory, after his military discharge in 1956, moved to Chicago with the hope of becoming a professional comedian. He opened at the Apex Club nightclub in 1958; however, the club failed. The next year Gregory landed a job as Master of Ceremonies at the Roberts Show Club, becoming one of the first black comedians to gain widespread acclaim while performing for white audiences. In 1961 he was spotted by Hugh Hefner, who hired Gregory to work at the Chicago Playboy Club.

Early in his career, Dick Gregory was offered an engagement on the Tonight Show Starring Jack Parr. Parr’s show was well known for helping entertainers achieve their goals in their careers. Dick Gregory declined several invitations to perform on the show, until producers agreed to allow him to stay after his performance to sit and do an interview with Parr on the air. This was the first time in the show’s history that black comedians were to do that, spurring conversations across America.

Dick Gregory became part of a new generation of black comedians In America that included Nipsey Russell, Bill Cosby and Godfrey Cambridge, all of whom broke with the traditional black minstrel characters. Gregory’s no-hold-barred comedy sets, mocking bigotry and racism created controversy in some circles. In one instance, he was barred from performing at the University of Tennessee until students sued and won the case in court. This led to the university adopting and open-speaker system, and Gregory performed there in April of 1970.

Dick Gregory was at the forefront of political activism in the 1960s, protesting racial injustice, social inequalities, and the Vietnam War. He was arrested multiple times and went on many hunger strikes. Gregory later became a speaker and an author, primarily promoting spirituality and healthy living. A week prior to his death, Dick Gregory was hospitalized in Washington DC with a bacterial infection. He died at the hospital of heart failure on August 19,2017 at the age of 84.

Calendar: August 24

A Year: Day to Day Men: 24th of August

The Lone Butterfly

August 24, 1957 is the birthdate of comedian and actor Stephen John Fry.

Stephen Fry’s television career began with the 1982 broadcast of “The Cellar Tapes”, a revue written by Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, and Tony Slattery. This caught the attention of the ITV Granada television studio which hired Fry, Laurie, and Thompson for the 1982 sketch comedy show, “There is Nothing to Worry About!”. A second series, retitles “Alfresco”, helped establish Fry and Laurie’s reputation as a comedy double act.

The BBC in 1986 commissioned a sketch show that became “A Bit of Fry and Laurie”, which ran for 26 episodes and spanned four successful series between 1986 and 1995. During this time period, Fry starred in “Blackadder II” as Lord Melchett, made a guest appearance in “Blackadder the Third”, and then starred in “Blackadder Goes Forth” as General Melchett again. Between 1990 and 1993, Fry starred as Jeeves, alongside Hugh Laurie’s Bertie Wooster character, in “Jeeves and Wooster”, 23 hour-long adaptions of P. G. Wodehouse’s novels.

Stephen Fry has appeared in a number of BBC adaptions of plays and books. He played the lead role and was the executive producer for the legal drama “Kingdom”, which ran for three series. Fry also took up the recurring role of doctor /chief Gordon Wyatt on the popular televison drama “Bones. The 2011 Monty Python film “Holy Flying Circus” saw Stephen Fry in the role of God.

Starting in 2006, Stephen Fry began appearing in documentaries and other fact-based programs. His first was the Emmy Award-winning 2006 “Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive”. The same year, he appeared on the BBC’s genealogy series “Who Do You Think You Are?”. In 2007, Fry presented a documentary on the subject of HIV and AIDS entitled “HIV and Me”. He followed these up with many nature series, a six-part travel series through each section of the United States, a two-part documentary on people’s attitudes to gay people in different parts of the world, and portrayed Oscar Wilde in the 1997 film “Wilde”, earning a nomination for a Golden Globe Best Actor in a Drama.

Stephen Fry married his partner, comedian Elliott Spencer on January 17, 2015, in the town of Dereham in Norfolk, England. Throughout his life, Fry has been and still is very active in social issues; he was listed number two in 2016 and number twelve in 2017 on the World Pride Power list. In August 2013, Fry published an “Open Letter to David Cameron and the IOC” calling for a boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, due to concerns over the state-sanctioned persecution of LGBT people in Russia. Along with Gina Carter and Sandi Toksvig, he is a co-owner of Sprout Pictures, an independent film and television company which works across all genres.

Calendar: July 8

A Year: Day to Day Men: 8th of July

Red Towel and Mirror

July 8, 1934 was the birthdate of British comedian, comedy writer, and actor, Martin Alan “Marty” Feldman.

Marty Feldman was born in the East End of London, the son of Jewish immigrants from Kiev, Ukraine. He suffered in childhood from thyroid disease and developed Graves’ ophthalmopathy, causing his eyes to protrude and become misaligned. By the age of twenty, he had decided to pursue a career as a comedian.

In 1954, Marty Feldman first met Barry Took, a West End revue performer, forming an enduring writing partnership with him which lasted for twenty years. Together they wrote most of the shows of “Bootsie and Snudge”, a situation comedy for the ITV Network, and the BBC radio show “Round the Home” from 1964 to 1967. Feldman became chief write and script editor for the 1966-67 “The Frost Report”, which introduce John Cleese, Ronnie Barker, and Ronnie Corbett to television.

Marty Feldman’s appearance on the sketch comedy series “At Last the 1948 Show” as the fourth cast member of the group raised his profile on television. His character, frequently a harassing pest, interacted with fellow comedians John Cleese, Tim Brook-Taylor, and Graham Chapman. Thirteen series were made during the ten-month run, of which eleven complete shows survive.

On film, Marty Feldman is best known for his portrayal of Igor (pronounced Eye-Gore) in the now-comedy classic by Mel Brooks “Young Frankenstein”, released in 1974. The screenplay was written by Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder, who had Feldman in mind when he wrote the part. Feldman improvised many of his scenes’ lines during the shooting.

Feldman later in his career, appeared as a guest on “The Dean Martin Show”, ventured into Italian cinema in the sex comedy “Sex with a Smile”, appeared with Gene Wilder in Wilder’s directorial debut “The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother”, played Marty Eggs in Mel Brook’s “Silent Movie”, starred in his own written and directed comedy “The Last Remake of Beau Geste”, and showed up in a cameo role with the Cookie Monster on “The Muppet Show”.

Marty Feldman died from a heart attack in a hotel room in Mexico City on December 2, 1982 at the age of forty-eight, while filming “Yellowbeard”. He is buried in Forest Lawn- Hollywood Cemetery near his idol, Buster Keaton, in the Garden of Heritage.

Calendar: June 8

A Year: Day to Day Men: 8th of June

Decorative Art

June 8, 1933 was the birthdate of American actress and comedian, Joan Rivers.

Joan Rivers was one of America’s first successful female stand-up comics in an aggressive tradition that had been almost exclusively the province of men. She would take the stage in a demure black sheath dress and ladylike pearls, a tiny bouffant blonde with a genteel air of sorority decorum. Then her biting and edgy stream-of-consciousness take on national heroes and sacrosanct cultural idols would begin.

Joan Alexandra Molinsky was born in Brooklyn on June 8, 1933, to immigrants from Russia. Her father, a doctor, did comic impersonations of patients. Her mother insisted on piano lessons and private schools for Joan and her sister, Barbara, who grew up in Brooklyn and Larchmont. Joan attended Adelphi Academy in Brooklyn, Connecticut College for Women and Barnard College. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, she graduated in 1954 with a degree in English.

Joan Rivers struggled for years, taking small parts off Off-Broadway and working in grimy cafes and small clubs. She made her breakthrough as a guest in 1965 on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show”. Over the next two decades she became a regular guest host on the show, a Las Vegas headliner and a television star. In 1986, Rivers hit the big time with a $10 million contract as host of the new Fox network’s weeknight entry, “The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers,” competing directly with Carson, her old benefactor. After less than a year on the air, she was fired by Fox when her ratings slumped.

For years Joan Rivers marketed her lines of jewelry and fashion on shopping channels. In the mid-1990s, she turned up at the Grammys, Golden Globes and Academy Awards, first for E! Entertainment network and then for the TV Guide Channel, poking a microphone into the faces of the stars on red carpets. In 2010 she became star of the E! show “Fashion Police,” where she and a panel gleefully critiqued celebrities’ wardrobes.

Joan Rivers weathered 50 years in show business, appeared in thousands of TV shows, more than a dozen films and many nightclubs; written twelve books; raised millions for causes including AIDS, Guide Dogs for the Blind and cystic fibrosis; and amassed about $290 million. She won a Daytime Emmy for her talk show “The Joan Rivers Show” and was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance in the title role of Lenny Bruce’s mother in “Sally Marr …and Her Escorts”. She died in 2014 at Mount Sinai Hospital after going into cardiac arrest; she was 81.

Calendar: May 23

A Year: Day to Day Men: 23rd of May

The Paper Airplane

May 23, 1975 marks the death of the American standup comedian Loretta Mary Aiken, known by her stage name Jackie “Moms” Mabley.

Loretta Mary Aiken was born in North Carolina, one of sixteen children. Her father worked as a volunteer fireman, dying in 1909, when a fire engine exploded. Loretta was fifteen years old at that time. Her mother ran a general store but was killed after being run over by a truck on her way home from a Christmas day service at the church. After being raped twice, Loretta, at the encouragement of her grandmother, went to Cleveland, Ohio, and joined a traveling vaudeville minstrel show where she sang and entertained.

Loretta Aiken took her stage name, Jackie Mabley, from an early boyfriend, commenting to Ebony Magazine in 1970 “that he had taken so much from her, it was the least she could do to take his name”. Later she became known as “Moms” because she was indeed a “Mom” to many other comedians on the circuit in the 1950s and 1960s. She came out as a lesbian at the age of twenty-seven, becoming one of the first openly gay comedians. During the 1920s and 1930s she recorded several of her early lesbian standup routines.

Moms Mabley was one of the most successful entertainers of the Chitlin’ circuit, another name for the Theater Owners Booking Association, a segregated organization for which Mabley performed until the organization dissolved during the Great Depression. Despite her popularity, wages for black women in show business were meager; however, she persisted for more than sixty years. At the height of her career, she was earning $10,000 dollars a week at Harlem’s Apollo Theater.

Mabley became know to a wider white audience in the 1960s playing Carnegie Hall in 1962, and making mainstream television appearances. She appeared multiple times on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour when that CBS show was ranked number one on television, introducing her to a whole new audience of younger viewers. Mabley was billed as “The Funniest Woman in the World”. She tackled topics too edgy for most mainstream comics of the time, including racism.

Moms Mabley died from heart failure in White Plains, New York on May 23, 1975 at the age of 81. Her life is the subject of “Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley” a documentary film which first aired on HBO on November 18, 2013. This documentary was nominated for two Creative Arts Emmy Awards at the 66th Emmy Awards ceremony in 2014. Jackie Moms Mabley was named by Equality Forum in 2015 as one of their 31 icons of the 2015 LGBT History Month.

Calendar: April 20

A Year: Day to Day Men: 20th of April

The Rising of the Sun

Harold Clayton Lloyd was born on April 20, 1893 in Burchard, Nebraska.

Harold Lloyd was an American actor, comedian, director, producer, screenwriter, and stunt performer who is best known for his silent comedy films. He ranks alongside Chaplin and Keaton as one of the most popular and influential film comedians of the silent film era. Lloyd made nearly 200 comedy films, both silent and sound, between 1914 and 1947.

His films frequently contained “thrill sequences” of extended chase scenes and daredevil physical feats, for which he is best remembered today. Lloyd desperately hanging from the hands of a skyscraper clock high above the street in the 1923 film “Safety Last” is one of the most enduring images in all of cinema. This was achieved through using camera angles and successively taller buildings to create the illusion of distance and perspective, always keeping the street below in full view. Lloyd, however, did many other dangerous stunts in his films himself.

Harold Lloyd moved away from playing tragicomic personas; he started portraying the ‘everyman’ with that character’s unwavering confidence and optimism. The persona Lloyd referred to as his “Glass” character (often named “Harold” in the silent films) was a much more mature comedy character with greater potential for sympathy and emotional depth, and was easy for audiences of the time to identify with. To create his new character Lloyd donned a pair of lensless horn-rimmed eyeglasses but wore normal clothing.

In 1924 Harold Lloyd became the independent producer of his own films. These included his most accomplished mature features “Girl Shy”, “The Freshman” (his highest-grossing silent feature), “The Kid Brother” and “Speedy”, his final silent film. The 1929 film “Welcome Danger” was originally a silent film but Lloyd decided late in the production to remake it with dialogue. All of these films were enormously successful and profitable, and Lloyd would eventually become the highest paid film performer of the 1920s.

In the early 1960s, Lloyd produced two compilation films, featuring scenes from his old comedies, “Harold Lloyd’s World of Comedy” and “The Funny Side of Life”. The first film was premiered at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival, where Lloyd was fêted as a major rediscovery. The renewed interest in Lloyd helped restore his status among film historians. Lloyd was honored in 1960 for his contribution to motion pictures with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame located at 1503 Vine Street.

Calendar: April 16

A Year: Day to Day Men: 16th of April

The Serpent

April 16, 1932 was the release date of the Laurel and Hardy short film “The Music Box”.

“The Music Box” was produced by Hal Roach and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It starred Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy as delivery men attempting to deliver an upright piano up a long flight of outdoor stairs. This film won the first Academy Award for Live Action Short Comedy Film in 1932.

The stairs, which were the focal point of the movie was a steep climb of 133 steps with multiple landings. They still exist in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles, near the now Laurel and Hardy Park. The steps are a public staircase which connects Vendome Street at the base of the hill with Descanso Drive at the top of the hill. In the film, the duo of Laurel and Hardy make four attempts to get the piano to the top of the stairs. Each of the first three attempts the piano winds up rolling down the staircase. On the fourth attempt, they succeed only to find out from the local postman that they could have driven their truck up a road to the front of the house. Dutifully they carry the piano down the stairs, put it in the truck and drive it up to the house.

Hal Roach Studios colorized “The Music Box” in 1986 with a remastered stereo soundtrack featuring the Hal Roach Studios incidental stock music score conducted by Ronnie Hazelhurst. In 1997, this film was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

Note; As a great fan of the old comedy team of Laurel and Hardy, two films stand out in my memory. The second film is “Sons of the Desert” in which the duo, after telling their wives that they are taking a cruise for Oliver’s health, sneak off to attend a fraternal lodge convention. While having a good time, their supposed cruise ship sinks and they are assumed dead. The rainy night scene when they are hiding from their wives in Oliver’s house attic is great. However, the film that I rank at the top of that list is “The Music Box”; its stairway struggle in this film is a comedy classic that has endured for eighty six years. A must see.

Laurel and Hardy: Film History Series

Laurel and Hardy, Computer Graphics, Film Gifs

The humor of Laurel and Hardy was highly visual with slapstick used for emphasis. They often had physical arguments with each other (in character), which were quite complex and involved cartoon violence, and their characters preclude them from making any real progress in the simplest endeavors. Much of their comedy involves milking a joke, where a simple idea provides a basis from which to build multiple gags without following a defined narrative.

Stan Laurel was of average height and weight, but appeared small and slight next to Oliver Hardy, who was 6 ft 1 in (185 cm) tall and weighed about 280 lb (127 kg) in his prime. They used some details to enhance this natural contrast. Laurel kept his hair short on the sides and back, growing it long on top to create a natural “fright wig”. At times of shock, he would simultaneously cry while pulling up his hair. In contrast, Hardy’s thinning hair was pasted on his forehead in spit curls and he sported a toothbrush mustache.

To achieve a flat-footed walk, Laurel removed the heels from his shoes. Both wore bowler hats, with Laurel’s being narrower than Hardy’s, and with a flattened brim. The characters’ normal attire called for wing collar shirts, with Hardy wearing a neck tie which he would twiddle and Laurel a bow tie. Hardy’s sports jacket was a tad small and done up with one straining button, whereas Laurel’s double breasted jacket was loose fitting.

A great comedy team; to me, they were the best. The movie, The Music Box, 1932, which had them trying to deliver a piano to a house by pushing it up hundreds of concrete steps is indelibly etched in my mind. A comedic Sisyphean classic.