Finding Your Funny Bone - 9781575254494

Introduction The first time I heard the phrase, “How to Find Your Stupid and Stay in It,” was at the International Clown Congress in Philadelphia. Pierre Byland said it as he was giving a workshop in clowning. It stuck to me like glue. What a perfect description of clowning and comedy! Let's face it. No one wants to be considered stupid by others. It brings up painful ridicule and embarrassing moments filled with total frustration and illogical logic. It brings that voice in your head screaming into consciousness HOW STUPID CAN YOU GET! HOW COULD YOU DO SUCH A THING? YOU ARE SOOOOOO STUPID! But when you think of comedy, that is exactly what happens. The comedian or clown has to find his or her stupid and stay in it for the audience to be reminded of their humanity. And it takes a great deal of courage, intelligence, and grace to stay stupid.The following is a guide to finding your personal stupid and a how to approach for staying in it. This is geared for the performer, actor, speaker, and student of virtually anything. Stupid knows no bounds, and comedy is the sweet smile that makes your life more enjoyable.This guide has taken years to realize. All the parts were floating around, but recently they landed in a fashion I could verbalize and communicate. Developing your Eye for how and what creates a certain affect and effect is all part of it. Develop your Eye—not only focus but also to see the world in a new way. See what works and how things can be more exciting. It's all right in front of your eyes. You just need to Look and See—fine-tune the tube or set the tracking or find the right website. There is all that beautiful information and clear pictures staring you right in the face.Some people are naturals—they have the gift. Others need a little guidance. But either way, these games, exercises, improvisations, and entrées will enrich you on both the professional performance level and within yourself. So enjoy, whether you are 5 years old or 50 or have decided to team up with Jack Benny and remain 39 forever.I love comedy. I remember watching those live television shows when I was very little. Danny Kaye and Carol Burnett would have their variety shows. I used to wait for those moments when something went wrong. A line was dropped or a door got stuck or they lost it and cracked up. Those wrong moments were the best right moments of the shows. I loved to listen to the stand-up routines. How did they get those laughs? They just knew how to say their lines, tell their jokes, and quickly respond to whatever happened onstage and on-camera. There was no laugh track. It was real. There was an edge to it, because you couldn't yell cut—millions of viewers were watching. It was dangerous and delightful.I wanted to be a comedian. I so admired stand-up comedy. But I personally did not possess the hard edge that stand-up requires. But the comic monologue or skit was right up my alley. What better thing to do than find that part of myself that was really other folks and copy or satirize them? Oh, the Marx Brothers and Bob Hope and Carol Burnett and Robin Williams and a long list of others charged me up. But how did they do it? They had the gift.What was that magic they all had? And more important, how could I get some? So I took theater classes. I thought I needed to learn the Art of Acting. But I had difficulty with the Method. Just thinking and remembering things did not do it for me. I needed a more physical approach. I was playing the part of a young Indian girl. I had to be in pain because I was hungry and exhausted. As much as I thought about being hungry and exhausted, my life at that point had not paralleled my character's, and I couldn't muster up sufficient hunger and exhaustion. My director came over and squeezed my stomach 'til it hurt. From that moment, I had a physical memory to go on, and I didn't have to think about being hungry, I thought about my stomach getting squeezed. I think that was the first time I used an abstract approach to get a concrete result.And that is what this guide will do for you. It will give you an abstract approach to achieving very specific concrete results. Basically, if you want to jump high, don't think about jumping or trying to get your body off the ground. Let go of the control and allow the string that grows at the top of your head pull you up and get pulled down into the center of the earth at the same time, and you'll be springing off the floor before you know it. Spontaneity can actually take a lot of technique to achieve. Some times you are conscious of it, and other times you just do it. For those times when you are conscious, here are some ways to just do it. I wanted to do that. Make people laugh. Ever since I was seven. I thought it was stand-up comedy—but actually it was comedy in all its forms. I began with physical comedy. I saw the Art of Mime in High School. Claude Kipnis did a lecture demonstration, and I thought I'd fallen off a cliff. It was magical and funny and powerful and required only you and the air around you. There was a world out there where anything could happen. The only boundaries were what my body could do and what my imagination would think of. Mime was so magnificent. It was so independent. You didn't need anything—you had it All. All you needed was your Body and the Air around you! That air defined Space. That air was Space. What you needed was SPACE. Oh the joys of manipulating space. The Power of making something out of nothing. I was a magician, and I didn't know a thing about magic. I could make people gasp and laugh and feel and change.Yeah, I needed to make them FEEL. Hmmm, here was a tricky thing. You see as a mime I was a master of illusion, imitation, re-creation. I could create the look of a feeling, but to create or actually experience a REAL feeling, well, that required REAL ACTING techniques. And now I was back to remembering my feelings, curing myself of the experience, and starting all over again with a fresh powerful memory. This went on for a while until I decided to focus on my mime career, because like a dancer, I figured I had only X amount of time, and then the body would not be as supple, and when that happened, I could focus on the acting. Acting you could do any time, but Mime, well, that had a limited shelf life.So I asked my mentor, Claude Kipnis, what I should do, and he suggested I go to Jacques LeCoq in Paris. He taught more than manipulation. He taught theater. So I went. Here is where I encountered Mime that was not the illusion type. Manipulation was broken down into sequences. Each movement could be divided into many movements, and depending on how you did them, slow, fast, big, small, you got a different effect. Then I met Masks—all kinds of masks—neutral, character, utilitarian. WOW. Each movement was powerful, and the more focused you could get the better. Doing nothing was the most powerful thing you could do. Kipnis had everyone start in zero position—which basically was aligning your body in a straight line. The neutral mask only worked if you were in zero position, but it required ultimate focus, no judgment, and filling your space with energy. Add to this elements—Water, Wind, Fire, and Tree. Mix and match the elements on a bench, add degrees of each element, and voilá! You have a plethora of characters and relationships. Then broaden your horizons and make anything an element, and once again the world of performing was infinite. Add color as emotions and color intensity as emotional expression from light pink to deep red, and you have a magnificent palate of feeling to pull from. No more guesswork. No more drudging and redrudging that illusive feeling: think of your element and color and your body knows. It goes to places your conscious mind would never dream of. Whew! But something was still missing. I might be feeling and moving and picking symbols that my audience could relate to, but did my audience feel it? And I had to find out how I could adjust this enormously expressive face to fit in that little camera. I EXPLODED on film. Other performers moved great and created brilliant stories. What did those magical variety artists like Bob Berky and Michael Moschen have that left their audiences standing on their feet? What did they possess that touched you deeply? What does Cirque du Soleil have, and Chagall and Van Gogh and Rodin? And then I met Leonard Pitt. He had just got back from Bali where he studied mask theater. He did this little exercise he called Ghee Dong. BAM WHAM SLAM—YEAH!!! It was a very simple game of tossing ENERGY around like a laser beam. OHHH, it was fun. You could hit body parts, and it was like a cartoon. It looked great. It felt great to do. Felt in your whole body great . . . In fact, ENERGY was the key. This was science and art coming together. This was metaphysical meets Stanislavski. This was connecting the universe to your performance. Why stop at the world when you have unlimited energy available to use? Don Richardson, who was a television director and acting teacher, talked about how all emotions were actually created physiologically the same way in your body, and how you could walk looking down at tiles and counting them, and people would interpret your feeling in their perceived response to the action of the scene. All of art—no matter what kind it is—is an exchange of ENERGY between the audience and the artwork or performer, between the performers on the stage and between you as the performer and the character.Eureka!!! Oh my God, there is a method to this madness. And then came Madness to make the Method—in meeting and studying with Ctibor Turba. I first saw Turba in Paris. Not him personally, but his work. The giant rolls of Paper. The spontaneous stupidity, the illogical logic. I fell in love with his work. And then he came to America, and I got to study with the Paperman himself. Priceless information on the clown. And on being so in control out of co9780975931486\\Maine is the unmistakable setting for most of the work—