Comedy Obscura

Comic Stan Ross.

 

"Oh yeahhhhhh!"

Timmie Rogers (July 4, 1915 – December 17, 2006) was an American comedian, singer-songwriter, bandleader and actor who appeared on many national TV shows in the 1960s and 1970s. Rogers was one of the first Black comedians allowed to directly address a white audience when he worked. Before Rogers, African-American funny men had to either work in pairs or groups, only conversing with each other, and they had to play a character, while popular white comedians, such as Bob Hope and Jack Benny got to play themselves. Rogers worked by himself, always dressed well, often wearing a tuxedo, and never wore blackface.

His humor was clean, topical, and political. Rogers was inducted into the National Comedy Hall of Fame in 1993, and is often called the Jackie Robinson of comedy, because he opened the door for other performers such as Dick Gregory and Bill Cosby.​

 

Jackie Vernon (comedian) - Wikipedia

Jackie Vernon (born Ralph Verrone; March 29, 1924 – November 10, 1987) was an American stand-up comedian, actor and voice actor, who is best known for his role as the voice of Frosty the Snowman in the Rankin/Bass Productions Christmas special Frosty the Snowman and its sequel Frosty's Winter Wonderland.

Vernon was known for his gentle, low-key delivery and self-deprecating humor. He has been hailed as "The King of Deadpan." His signature opening line was, "To look at me now, it's hard to believe I was once considered a dull guy."

One of his early bits was the "Vacation Slide Show." There were no slides visible; they were presumably offscreen as he described them, using a hand-clicker to advance to each "slide":​

 

I've seen Jackie Vernon on TV, I'm thinking it was probably on Hollywood Squares

 

One of the great unsung legends of film comedy.

Clyde Bruckman - Wikipedia

Clyde Bruckman (June 30, 1894 – January 4, 1955) was an American writer and director of comedy films during the late silent era as well as the early sound era of cinema. Bruckman collaborated with such comedians as Buster Keaton, W. C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, The Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, and Harold Lloyd.​

Joe Mitchell, Clyde Bruckman, Buster Keaton, Jean Havez and Eddie Cline (1923)





The Gag Man

If you do any reading about early film comedy, sooner or later you’ll run into Clyde Bruckman. With the exceptions of Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, he worked with all the great early comedians: Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, W.C. Fields, Laurel & Hardy, the Three Stooges, Abbott & Costello. His name shows up in strange places—from X-Files episodes to the credits of Chris O’Donnell vehicles—but it appears most frequently in other people’s biographies, and usually all that’s there is his name. He seems to have only been interviewed about his career in film on one occasion, and only excerpts from that interview were ever published (once again, in someone else’s biography). Wikipedia says he was a failed director, an alcoholic, and a plagiarist, and there’s truth to that, but that account is incomplete and incorrect, starting with his date of birth. Everyone who worked with him is dead, but depending on whom you asked (and what year you asked them), he was either a comedy genius or a marginal figure in everyone’s career. Which is to say that the least charitable interpretation of his life is that he was a marginal figure in everyone’s career. He’s not a lost auteur—the kind of work he did bears little relation to what we now know as screenwriting, and no one’s ever said he was anything more than an adequate director. And he’s not a hero—his life ended in shame, dissolution, and tragedy. But at the height of his powers, Bruckman worked on a series of masterpieces that built film comedy as we know it today.​

 

One who was on his way was-Robin Harris.

 

Jackie Vernon was in an excellent Night Gallery episode, Make Me Laugh--directed by a young whippersnapper named Steven Speilberg.

 

What Price Pants (1931)

The vaudeville comedians Smith and Dale star in a clever satire on Prohibition and all the illegal shenanigans that went on in America during Prohibition just so a man could get a drink. Joe Smith is the greedy owner of a sweatshop pants factory, and Charlie Dale is his underpaid cutter*. A letter arrives for Dale, informing him that he’s about to receive an unexpected inheritance. Smith intercepts the letter, and offers Dale a partnership in the pants factory…​

*I think this is backwards (IMDb also has it this way). I believe Smith is the pants cutter and Dale the shopowner.

Directed by Casey Robinson, who would later co-write (without credit) Casablanca

 

Willie and his brother Eugene in "In Between Acts At The Opera", a vaudeville routine they filmed for Vitaphone in 1926.

 

Charles Bowers - Wikipedia

Charley Bowers (June 7, 1889 – November 26, 1946) was an American cartoonist and slapstick comedian during the silent film and early "talkie" era. He was forgotten for decades and his name was notably absent from most histories of the Silent Era, although his work was enthusiastically reviewed by André Breton and a number of his contemporaries. As his surviving films have an inventiveness and surrealism which give them a freshness appealing to modern audiences, after his rediscovery his work has sometimes been placed in the "top tier" of silent film accomplishments (along with those of, for example, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd). In comic style, he probably modelled himself after both Harry Langdon and Buster Keaton and was known to the French as "Bricolo."

His early career was as a cartoonist on the Mutt and Jeff series of cartoons for the Barré Studio. By the late 20s, he was starring in his own series of slapstick comedies for R-C Pictures and Educational Pictures. His slapstick comedies, a few of which have survived, are an amazing mixture of live action and animation created with the "Bowers Process". Complex Rube Goldberg gadgets also appear in many of his comedies. Two notable films include Now You Tell One with a memorable scene of elephants marching into the U.S. Capitol, and There It Is, a surreal mystery involving the Fuzz-Faced Phantom and MacGregor, a housefly detective.​

 

Fred Allen prepares to wreak havoc on that new home appliance

 

"The Warners gagmen are unquestionably the unsung heroes of animation history." - Leonard Maltin, Of Mice and Magic

Writers Michael Maltese and Tedd Pierce were caricatured in this Bugs Bunny cartoon:



Here they are in reality:



Warren Foster goes over a storyboard:



Story conference at Termite Terrace. Tedd Pierce at the board, with Michael Maltese giving the finger. Also seen are Robert McKimson, Friz Freleng, Warren Foster, and Bob Clampett. This may be the only extant photo of Foster, Pierce, and Maltese together.