Make 'Em Laugh, page 4
What’s-a matter for you? Playing a version of himself onstage in The Man Who Came to Dinner; with Chico and Louis Calhern in Duck Soup (1933).
The total control that Harpo exercised over his surreal world becomes most apparent when one compares two versions of essentially the same bit: the mirror sequence, first performed by Harpo and Groucho (and a bit of Chico) in 1933’s Duck Soup, and a reinterpretation by Harpo with Lucille Ball as his foil on a 1955 episode of I Love Lucy. Groucho and Harpo rarely had scenes with just the two of them in the movies because, as Bill Marx said, “Groucho doesn’t have any idea what’s going on with my dad—he can’t figure him out at all.” But in Duck Soup, both Harpo and Chico decide to impersonate Groucho in order to purloin some documents. With identical nightcaps, nightgowns, mustaches, and cigars, all three brothers look astonishingly alike (although Chico is a bit smaller). Harpo manages to get the documents, but Groucho is in hot pursuit; when Harpo breaks a full-length mirror in his getaway, he is immediately confronted by Groucho and his only salvation is to convince his brother that he is looking at his own reflection (somehow all the broken glass is magically swept away—who knows). Whatever trick Groucho employs to trip up his “reflection,” Harpo manages to parry—he can mimic Groucho’s funny dances, hat business, whatever. It’s only when Chico bumbles into the scene—Harpo vainly tries to shoo him away—that the illusion, like the mirror, is shattered.
Twenty-two years later, Harpo returns to the bit, reuniting with Ball, with whom he made Room Service in 1938: “With Lucy, he felt a kindred spirit there and wanted to do something absolutely ridiculous, and what could be more ridiculous than the mirror sequence?” said his son. But like a master painter, Harpo returns to the same subject years later from a different perspective; critics have often written that he reprises the routine, but other than the basic “Is that another person or is it me?” conceit, nothing is the same. Here, Lucy—dressed like Harpo to fool a nearsighted chum—is the impostor. When Harpo tries to catch her out, Lucy proves extremely adept at countering his challenges, but whereas Groucho merely wondered what was going on, Harpo begins to question his own existence, pinching his cheeks, and so on. He tries out his own signature cross-eyed expression, which he called the “Gookie”—but Lucy can even reproduce that. Convinced that no one can take his identity away from him, Harpo rigs a string inside a dropped hat, pulls it back up, and foils Lucy. An excellent clown, Lucille Ball—but she forgot that Harpo is the master of time, space, gravity, and logic.
Harpo kept up his comic identity for more than half a century. Although age didn’t necessarily improve his cherubic features, he seemed inexhaustible, performing well into his seventies (he had just recovered from a heart attack while filming Lucy and suffered another one soon after filming). He refused many lucrative offers to break his vow of silence on camera (although he played a stage version of his real-life self in Kaufman and Hart’s The Man Who Came to Dinner in summer stock). In 1964, he performed on a bill with Allan Sherman, the parodist and a great friend, at the Pasadena Civic Center. During intermission, Harpo informed Sherman that it was going to be his final performance. Sherman, overcome with emotion, announced Harpo’s retirement to the audience and brought him onstage to the microphone. No one in the audience—no one in the world—had ever seen or heard anything like it. “Now, as I was about to say in 1907 …” he began in his pleasant urban-sounding baritone, and the crowd went mad. Recounted Bill Marx, he gave a long speech and then finished, “And, in conclusion, I am so honored to know that you folks have the keenness and the perspicacity for recognizing monumental genius. I thank you.” Harpo walked off and the audience gave him a three-minute ovation.
Party of the Life: Harpo meets Satchmo; a tall drink (Horse Feathers, 1932); Dionysian cover boy, 1937.
The rest, as Shakespeare said, is silence.
Cartoons
Windsor McCay was one of the most successful and technically brilliant newspaper cartoonists of the early twentieth century. His baroque, inventive Little Nemo in Slumberland series galvanized readers across the country as the title hero’s adventures sprawled over an entire page in the Sunday morning funnies. Influenced by his son’s “flip book,” McCay tried his hand at animating Little Nemo for a brief cartoon—it took him four years of painstaking work. After a second attempt, he decided to create a character specifically for the movie screen, a gentle giant named Gertie the Dinosaur, whom McCay unveiled in 1914. It took 10,000 separate drawings, each hand-drawn by McCay on onionskin, to bring Gertie to life in a one-reeler. Audiences didn’t know what hit them, but clearly the animated short was going to be an essential part of film vocabulary.
The early days of silent cartoons are filled with as many different experiments as their live-action counterparts. Animators had to find ways to get beyond the sheer novelty of the process and create something amusing and fluid, a particularly difficult chore considering the huge manpower required to churn out cartoons at a time when all the technology was done by hand. Transparent celluloid, or “cels,” allowed for a more efficient way of reproducing each frame, and pioneer animators Max and Dave Fleischer invented a process called the Rotoscope in 1916, which projected live-action clowning directly onto a drawing board. Their Koko the Clown character was initially created by having one of the Fleischer brothers act out Koko’s antics, while the other rendered the action frame by frame. Many early characters were simply transfers from newspaper strips—Krazy Kat, Mutt and Jeff—but in 1919, an original character appeared, a cat who was easy to draw because he was all black. His name was Felix, and his plucky resourcefulness led critics to compare him with Chaplin (who briefly appeared as an animated character himself in the 1910s). In 1923’s Felix in Hollywood, our hero actually unscrews his own tail and uses it as a cane for a Chaplin imitation. Felix was also the first animated character to be licensed for commercial products.
According to animation historian Leonard Maltin, as the 1920s ended, “more and more artists and cartoonists got the hang of animation and began to explore more and more with each passing year how you could do things in animation you couldn’t do in a live action film. They created a whole new language for the animated cartoon which gave those characters abilities even beyond Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton—and that’s really saying something.” But cartoon animation might have been stopped in its tracks without the invention of sound synchronization in the mid-1920s. There had been some crude “follow-the-bouncing-ball” shorts, which used music, but the industry was revolutionized in 1928 when producer Walt Disney reintroduced a character named Mickey Mouse in a short called Steamboat Willie. Mickey’s previous two silent adventures had not even been picked up for distribution, but his new short subject had a synchronized sound score (and was delightfully illustrated by Ub Iwerks). Audiences loved it, and Disney built his empire on the little mouse—to whom he always gave credit.
Exaggerated sound fit exaggerated motion to a tee—and it was just the element that cartoons needed to lift off the ground. Sound also accelerated the need for tempo; now it was even more crucial for a successful cartoon to have the right timing; it was a difficult trick to master. Pioneer animator Chuck Jones said that “animation is the art of timing … the difference between a huge laugh and a flop can be one frame.” With the success of Walt Disney’s short subjects (Silly Symphonies), movie studios in Hollywood set up full-time animation divisions (Disney’s short cartoons were distributed by RKO); as every feature presentation at the time included several short subjects and cartoons, animation units became crucial moneymakers for the studios. Also, as with the creation of real live movie stars, studios needed to create characters with whom the audience could identify and would welcome back week after week. The creators of cartoons now had to expand their canvas dramatically—and that meant becoming part of the world of drama. As another pioneer, Walter Lantz (Woody Woodpecker) put it:
An animator is like an actor before the camera, only he has to act out his feelings and interpret that scene with his pencil; he also has to know how to space characters because the spacing of their movements determines the tempo; he must know expression; he must know feeling; he has to know the character and make him walk with a funny action.
Life as an animator for a studio division was chaotic, intense, frustrating, and often a heck of a lot of fun. Executives—other than Disney—rarely knew how to handle these strange men who drew cartoons, and animators, frequently fed up with one slight or another, shuttled among the various studios with an alarming frequency; even the most ardent animation fan would have trouble keeping the scorecard straight. Warner Bros. started its own division in 1930 by animating songs from their vast musical catalog with the rip-off title Looney Tunes and soon added another series of one-offs called Merrie Melodies. But these were initially conceived without successful characters; other studios were having better luck drawing their own stable of stars. Fleischer created Betty Boop in 1930 and brought the comic strip hero Popeye to the screen in 1931. Disney added Donald Duck to Mickey’s menagerie in 1934, and the cantankerous waterfowl soon outstripped his friend’s popularity. Disney outpaced all of his rivals during the Depression years, adding professional voice talent and Technicolor to his cartoons. In 1937, he offered his competitors the greatest challenge of all: a feature-length adaptation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which used 750 artists who created a quarter of a million drawings at the cost of $1.5 million. It earned six times that amount in its initial release.
Drawn and quartered: The Genie in Aladdin; Gertie the Dinosaur; Tex Avery’s Wolf; Mr. Duck and Mr. Bunny.
Yet for many aficionados, the most exciting animation of the period (and into the 1950s) was to be found at Warner Bros. In the years 1936 to 1937, the studio (which stuck their animators in a remote bungalow they dubbed “Termite Terrace”) assembled the all-star team of cartoonists: directors Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, and Frank Tashlin, as well as voice professional extraordinaire Mel Blanc and musical director Carl Stalling. Working in deranged concert with each other, they demonstrated that classic comedy animation was a rare combination of design, voice, effect, character, timing, and point of view. Any combination of those would be amusing; to have all six at once, as Warner Bros. often did, was exhilarating. Their stable of two-dimensional celebrities was impressive: Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, and, joining them after World War II, Sylvester and Tweety, Yosemite Sam, Pepé Le Pew, and Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. What the animators did with them was even better.
Each director had his own take on the material, and although the differences might be subtle for the average viewer, they were clear to the animators. Tex Avery is widely credited for taking a stock character, Bugs Bunny, and investing him with a definitive character for A Wild Hare in 1940. According to his biographer Joe Adamson, “Avery said, ‘How about a character who just isn’t fazed by anything? He comes up out of his rabbit hole, and he’s got a gun in his face, and he just chews his carrot and says, “What’s up, Doc?”’” Avery was known as a keen gagman who wanted his cartoons to be louder, faster, funnier, and he was the first animator to have his characters talk to the audience.
Cel research: Donald Duck does his part; Mr. Magoo as Cyrano de Bergerac; Fred Flintstone; Shrek.
Chuck Jones, on the other hand, was interested in subtlety and the release of a quiet moment or humorous aside. He saw Bugs Bunny as a cool cookie, a character who only reacted when provoked. The creator of Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, Jones was a comedy purist and the Stanislavksy of animation, for whom motivation was key: “Daffy has the courage that most of us don’t have. He will continue to try and try again where we would have given up, because failure is unknown to him. When Daffy pleaded with the studio head to put him in a serious part, to play the Scarlet Pumpernickel, he actually believed he could play it; it never occurred to him he couldn’t. Daffy was one of the great comedians and I was lucky to be associated with him.” Tashlin experimented with camera angles, blackouts, pace, and absurdity and went on to become a highly valued live-action comedy director, working with stars like Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis. When, on his first nonanimated assignment, he created some dueling gags for a Bob Hope period comedy, Tashlin recalled that “It was full of cartoon jokes. I remember Bob saying—they must have told him I came from the cartoon business—things like, ‘Jesus Christ, now I’m a rabbit!’”
However innovative the gang at Warner Bros. was, the fact remains that as the 1950s began, short cartoons for the movies were on the wane. The studio system had broken down and executives could no longer insist that exhibitors take two or three cartoons as part of the presentation package. Animation, which was always labor intensive, became more and more expensive to produce; even Disney was cutting back. New animation units were sprouting up, looking for new ways to do things. UPA was created in 1944 and cut costs by simplifying the visual depth of their characters and abstracting backgrounds. They called the process “limited animation,” and their new characters were Gerald McBoing-Boing and Mr. Magoo.
Television soon opened up a whole new market for cartoons; the Faustian bargain was a huge drop in quality and detail. It did little good for animators to wring their hands over the decline of artistry—the small black-and-white rectangular screen mercilessly dictated what looked good and what didn’t. William Hanna and Joseph Barbera had burnished their reputation with the Academy Award-winning Tom and Jerry series at MGM; when they bailed out of movies to work in television, they were shocked by the meager budgets offered by the networks. To make the numbers work, they created an even more limited animation style, often pixilating only the moving elements of a character: the mouth, the hands (or paws). Beginning in 1958, Hanna-Barbera introduced new characters directly to television, such as Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, and in 1960, created the first half-hour animated comedy series, The Flintstones, which was a huge ratings hit.
If you grew up in the 1960s, you had a nearly unlimited supply of cartoons available to you; every weekday afternoon, some local affiliate was repackaging old Bugs Bunny or Popeye cartoons, and every Saturday morning, there were nearly three hours of animated programming on each of the three major networks. Not to mention an entire menagerie of tigers, tunas, and toucans pitching products during the commercials. The quality of these candy-colored entertainments varied enormously, both as art and as literature, but they were omnipresent. Some shows broke out of the pack, such as Jay Ward’s various Rocky and Bullwinkle incarnations, which were absurdist, witty indictments of Cold War pieties (although Chuck Jones dismissed their visual crudity as “illustrated radio”).
While television often lacked the virtuosity to create first-rate animated comic characters, the medium borrowed an astonishing amount of real-life comedy to prime the pump. The Flintstones were Stone Age versions of The Honeymooners, and another Hanna-Barbera prime-time show, Top Cat, was a feline adaptation of The Phil Silvers Show. The creators of Amos ’n’ Andy resurfaced after a decadelong absence to create an animated rip-off called Calvin and the Colonel. Bargain-basement animated versions of Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Laverne and Shirley, Jerry Lewis, the Fonz, the Mask, and the Three Stooges (once as human beings, the second time as robots) made the Saturday morning rounds, but even the best cartoons borrowed from their three-dimensional progenitors—who doesn’t recognize a shot of W. C. Fields in Mr. Magoo, a hint of Groucho in Bugs Bunny, a slather of Senator Claghorn in Foghorn Leghorn?
A combination of boredom with the limitations of television animation, computer technology, the freedom of cable networks, and some bright entrepreneurial thinking all helped to, well, reanimate the field at the beginning of the 1990s. Disney found a way to recapture its old feature-length magic by tapping into Broadway-style musicals with The Little Mermaid and The Lion King, two major blockbusters that spawned countless imitations both at Disney and other, often brand-new, studios. Cartoon Network was added to the cable system in 1992, eventually acquiring the Hanna-Barbera and Warner Bros. catalogs while developing some immensely creative cartoons, such as Dexter’s Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls. MTV took their freedom in another direction, using crudely conceived animation to deliver such counterculture slackers as Beavis and Butthead and Daria directly to the Generation X audience. First-rate comic talent was no longer reduced to Saturday morning purgatory; comedians such as Nathan Lane, Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy, Ellen DeGeneres, Billy Crystal, Woody Allen, Tim Allen, Mike Myers, Roseanne Barr, and Jerry Seinfeld gleefully leaped on the voice-over bandwagon, providing signature personalities of such dimension in animated cartoons that they were often billed above the title for a film in which they never actually appeared. In 1997, The Simpsons beat The Flintstones’ record for most consecutive prime-time cartoon episodes, and they keep on ticking. …
In the twenty-first century, animation has transformed, as Aladdin’s cartoon couple would put it, into a whole new world. Cartoons are more popular than ever, and they reach Americans in more ways, in more forms, with more resonance than ever before. It’s a medium that achieves hair-raising technical brilliance on one level—say, Shrek—while making countless viewers giggle uncontrollably with products that could be just as easily created with construction paper and school paste—say, South Park. Cartoons now exist in a wide, tense universe bracketed by alpha and omega, and it makes some purists wistful for the glory days. As Leonard Maltin put it, “Television has reinvigorated animation, has created a new audience for animation, but sadly, has forgotten the history of animation. Modern cartoons couldn’t exist without those [classic] cartoons, and yet they don’t have the heart or originality or the organic humor of those cartoons.” Cartoons remain a comic medium; no matter how detailed a computer can pixilate the green fuzz on an ogre’s nose, it all begins with an artist brandishing a sharp gag and a sharp pencil.
