By far the funniest thing I’ve seen on television in recent years took place not on the Cosby Show, but during an April,

1985, mission of the space shuttle Discovery. The shuttle crew had deployed a $40 million Leasat communications satellite, which subsequently malfunctioned, its power switch refusing to kick on. Our astronauts were called upon to pull up alongside the satellite and trigger the switch, which would spin past them for a brief moment every 30 seconds as the satellite rotated on its axis. Since maneuvering the astronauts close enough to the satellite to manually manipulate the crucial toggle was deemed too hazardous, the shuttle crew was forced to improvise. A makeshift snare that could be attached to the shuttle’s robot arm was constructed from “found objects.”

Objects found on a space shuttle, that is. “We had bits and pieces of everything out,” recalled mission specialist Rhea Seddon. “We were measuring with tape measures and cutting and pasting and wondering what in the world this thing was going to look like when we finished up.” Their raw materials included plastic covers from flight manuals, several spare plumbing

tubes, and an aluminum frame with a window shade. For tools, they used scissors, a Swiss Army knife, and needle and thread from the spacesuit repair kit.

From the plastic covers they created our first space-age slapstick, the “flyswatter,” so called because that is exactly what it resembled. Three 6” x 4” rectangular holes were cut in the plastic, the idea being to try to snag the switch in one of the holes. The plastic sheet with the holes was taped and sewn to another piece of plastic that had been rolled into the shape of a cone. Inserted into the cone, and taped tight, was an extendable plastic rod dubbed a “swizzle stick.” Especially helpful with the sewing of the plastic covers was United States Senator Jake Garn of Utah, along for the ride on what was no doubt his most productive junket to date.

How can you help but love such a scenario? Taxpayers have been spending over two billion dollars a year for the space shuttle, but look at what you get for your money: The all- purpose Swiss Army knife that you’ve never left home without. The plastic cover (“flexible but durable”) that gave your lame high school term paper a

quick veneer of respectability. The ancient art of jerryrigging so popular a half-hour after the local hardware store closes for the night.

And great farce. Television audiences back on Earth were soon treated to the wonderfully silly spectacle of a game but outmatched astronaut Seddon flailing away with robot arm and flyswatter at the “on” switch — vainly as it turned out — as it whizzed past her twice per minute. The incongruity of the situation seemed lost on most of the news commentators, but as a physical comedy maven my brain was immediately flooded with images of suspiciously similar classic clown routines. Was it mere coincidence, or had NASA blatantly lifted the idea from Buster Keaton’s Cops, where he KO’d passers-by with a boxing glove mounted on the end of one of those extendable, zig-zag hat racks? Or was it pirated from one of Red Skelton’s endless efforts to swat a particularly pesky fly nesting on his nose? Remembering Chaplin’s adage that “in the end everything is a gag,” I could not help but imagine his little tramp in the role (albeit refining the timing, milking the takes, and building the gag to a stronger payoff).

ZEN AND THE HEART OF PHYSICAL COMEDY:

THE REVENGE OF MURPHY’S LAWJOHN TOWSENYale Theater magazine

Summer/Fall 1987

Reminders of our own ineptitude abound in today’s world. Unfortunately, our foul-ups are not always so harmless. Sometimes the stakes are higher. The fatal blow-up of the Challenger space shuttle in January, 1986, was attributed by an investigating panel to pride, self-deception and institutional loyalty. Ooops. The nuclear disaster at Chernobyl three months later — the worst in history, with more fallout than the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined —

was a result of human error. Ooops. And if you thought Dr. Strangelove (1964) was a fantastical film, take note that an average of 5,100 U.S. nuclear weapons handlers are relieved of their positions each year because of drug, alcohol, or psychological problems.

What is amazing is how little impact human error has on society’s collective self-image, how little it does to alter the trust we place in our high-tech present and higher-tech future. According to Murphy’s Law, whatever can go wrong will go wrong. Few people would deny the law’s

validity. Indeed, its faddish popularity is attested to by the successful merchandising of Murphy’s Law posters and datebooks. Yet tens of billions of dollars continue to be spent on the Star Wars defense system, and good old-fashioned human error is rarely factored into public debate on the issue. We as a society don’t care to confront it. Human error is too messy, it’s difficult to measure, and it really is much easier to dismiss it with a dose of good old- fashioned wishful thinking. Accidents, after all, only happen to other people.

Writing from a clown’s perspective, I naturally adopt Murphy’s Law as the ideologically correct starting point for my research. Folk wisdom, after all, is right up the clown’s alley. I soon find myself in conversation with a reference librarian at New York University. “I can’t seem to find any information on Murphy’s Law or Murphy himself in any of the encyclopedias or biographical dictionaries,” I complain. “Murphy’s Law?” he replies. “You’d have to check in the trivia section at a public library.”

“TRIVIA!?” I want to scream. “Don’t you understand how important it is?” As a veteran of clown research, however, I take his astute advice to heart. Ha-ha is rarely taken seriously. In Why Things Go Wrong, for example, Laurence Peter recalls that the original manuscript for his bestselling study of incompetence, The Peter Principle, was rejected time and time again because publishers couldn’t pigeonhole it. “I don’t think it’s satire,” one editor informed him. “I think you are serious.”

Laurel and Hardy in The Second Hundred Years

A closer look at last year’s hit parade of catastrophes offers compelling evidence that clown behavior has infiltrated its way into the highest echelons of society. The meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor is surely an example of Laurel & Hardy at their most mischievous. In an attempt to complete an experiment on the power capability of the reactor’s steam-driven turbines, the plant’s resident clowns cleverly executed a series of maneuvers that in effect dismantled the reactor’s safety features one by one.

This Russian two-reeler is full of laughs as our fiercely determined technicians, Laurelovitch and Hardyofsky, find perfectly good reasons to turn off the emergency cooling system, remove all but a few control rods while leaving the reactor operating, and disengage all safety systems designed to implement automatic shutdown. When Mrs. Hardyofsky — in this version played by a Soviet nuclear expert — returns home, she is shocked beyond belief to learn that the menfolk have deliberately disabled so many safety and warning systems, then run the reactor in a very unstable condition. But they did, and our little tragi-comedy ends with the prospect of millions of people, even the unborn (politely referred to as third- and fourth party victims), paying the price in sequels yet unfilmed.

Another fine mess was created by NASA engineers and administrators who allowed the Challenger space shuttle to be launched although several warnings of potential danger had been sounded. NASA’s need to perpetuate a public image of having effectively vanquished the hazards of space flight — to have rendered

it so routine that they could now rocket a schoolteacher into orbit — guaranteed that their infallibility would be shattered.

This American silent movie classic opens with engineer Laurel frantically gesticulating as he tries to get the attention of his boss, a very busy and self-important Mr. Hardy. The subtitles tell us that Laurel wants to warn Hardy about the weakness of the o-ring seals. But we can see that a vain Mr. Hardy is too busy impressing his big-shot friends to listen. The final image is unforgettable, as the camera dissolves on a whimpering engineer Laurel, stammering through his tears. The subtitle reads, “But Ollie, that’s what I was trying to tell you all along.”

The worst comedy of errors would of course be one that led to nuclear war. For the first time in the world’s history, human error could conceivably result in the extinction of the species. Laurel & Hardy are already working on this one. In a November, 1979 experimental video, we see officer Laurel make a little boo-boo. He inadvertently loads a training tape that simulates a Soviet attack onto a NORAD auxiliary computer. When Brigadier General Hardy sees the NORAD monitors display this massive attack, U.S. forces are immediately placed on early alert. Six minutes later, after much shenanigans, the alarm is judged false due to lack of corroboration and for once our comedy has a happy ending. In real life, the U.S. would have a full eight minutes to respond.

Similar early stage alerts have resulted from malfunctioning silicon computer chips that

cost all of 46 cents. In The Fate of the Earth, Jonathan Schell warns of a plausible doomsday scenario in which Brigadier General Hardy’s mistaken alert provokes his Russian counterpart, Inspector General Hardyovitch, to adopt the same posture, which in turn confirms Hardy’s original fears, and so on, with no way out of the escalation before the clock tolls eight minutes. “That the fruit of four and a half billion years can be undone in a careless moment is a fact against which belief rebels,” laments Schell. And, one might add, it only has to happen once.

Safety engineers in the nuclear and chemical industries are not oblivious to these concerns, and indeed have spawned a new science of risk assessment. A probabilistic risk assessment (PRA), a systematic study of potential dangers in a given enterprise, is becoming standard operating procedure. Engineers now use “fault trees,” “event trees,” and FMEAs (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) to pinpoint potential technical and human failure and its ramifications on the system.

But while mathematicians assess probabilities and, when economically feasible, management may take extra precautions, there will always be a realm of uncertainty, of the unmeasurable, of the unthinkable. Charles Perrow, a Yale sociologist, is a leading advocate of this school of thought.In Normal Accidents: Living With High-Risk Technologies, he argues that the complexity of modern technology has already exceeded our ability to foresee potential defects. Published in 1984 (though now out of print), Normal Accidents predicted the impending meltdown of

a nuclear reactor, a prophesy that came true in the Ukraine within two short years.

“We have produced designs so complicated,” writes Perrow, “that we cannot anticipate all the possible interactions of the inevitable failures. The sources of accidents are infinite.” Human errors and component malfunctions occurring within a “tightly coupled” system such as a nuclear power plant tend to be compounded, during a short but critical period of time, to a point beyond human comprehension.

For Perrow, these inevitable “normal” accidents make some technological enterprises — such as nuclear power, nuclear weapons, Star Wars, and genetic engineering — simply too dangerous. “It’s frightening to think that you might not know something,” comments Amos Tversky, a specialist in the psychology of uncertainty. “But it’s more frightening to think that, by and large, the world is run by people who have faith that they know exactly what’s going on.”

Whatever can go wrong will go wrong in a big way. Who could better tell this simple truth about ourselves than the clown? The clown revels in the mundane, celebrating the ever-recurring awkwardnesses inherent in our daily struggle to maintain equilibrium. The clown’s world of naivete is but a microcosm of our complex universe. Impeccably dressed and well spoken, society’s experts are always there to assure us everything is all right. Ragged and rough around the edges, the clown confronts base realities, admitting the worst but giving us license to laugh.

By nature a physical comedian, the clown catalogs and insists on restaging man’s inevitable mishaps and miscalculations, and then really rubs it in by irreverently depicting the ego’s involvement in the struggle: not just the pride that goeth before destruction and the haughty spirit that precedes a fall that Solomon first warned us about, but also the terrible embarrassment that follows, and the noble attempts at cover-up.

We trip on the sidewalk. In a revealing moment of truth, our eyes blink, our cheeks blush, our breath shortens, our muscles tense, our stomach churns. Furtive sideways glances check the scene for eyewitnesses. We attempt a quick return to normalcy. Denial, denial, denial.

But while we are taught to hide error and above all maintain our cool, the clown is humanity’s lie detector test and safety valve. The clown shows us that precise moment of cover-up, the instant when one’s self-assurance is stripped away. “It really isn’t the trip itself that’s funny,” explains Bill Irwin. “It’s the gestures and motions afterwards, the looking back at the spot, the trying to make an excuse for having tripped.”

In 1948, Henry Miller published a wonderful tale entitled The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder. A hopeless romantic when it came to clowns, Miller conferred upon them many of the same powers and virtues I am so eager to bestow. It was the clown’s special privilege, he wrote, “to reenact the errors, the follies, the stupidities, all the misunderstandings which plague human kind. To be ineptitude itself, that was something even the dullest oaf could grasp. Not to understand, when

all is clear as daylight; not to catch on, though the trick be repeated a thousand times for you; to grope about like a blind man, when all signs point the right direction; to insist on opening the wrong door, though it is marked DANGER!; to walk head on into the mirror, instead of going around it; to look through the wrong end of a rifle, a loaded rifle! — people never tired of these absurdities because for millennia all their seeking and questioning have landed them in a cul-de-sac. The master of ineptitude has all time as his domain. He surrenders only in the face of eternity.”

Physical Comedy: A Rediscovery of StylePut simply, physical comedy is the art of revealing what is vulnerable, imperfect, and laughable about man — not through argument, not through discourse, but through the body, through the picture that is worth a thousand laughs. It may be the image of Don Quixote blindly charging the windmills. It could be the Charlie Chaplin of The Gold Rush, desperately struggling to defy gravity and escape from his Klondike cabin as it teeters at an impossible angle atop the edge of a cliff. Or it might be the bulging eyes and paralyzed limbs of Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden, frozen in a double take, stupefied by yet another unforeseen turn of events.

Physical comedy has unfortunately always been theatre’s poor relation, as easy to dismiss in the arts as human error is in our everyday life. Americans are especially fond of equating

clown and physical comedy with children’s entertainment — especially since children take such delight in watching clowns prove adults make mistakes too. By definition a non-literary form, physical comedy lacks the endorsement of distinguished academicians. An oral tradition, it tends to be imperfectly transmitted, and more often than not surfaces in a bastardized, amateurish, and uninspired form.

Despite its runt-of-the-litter status, physical comedy clearly represents one of the grand traditions of the living theatre, classical in the best sense of the word. From the roving clowns of antiquity to the comedies of Keaton and Chaplin, from the commedia dell’arte to the productions of Mnouchkine and Fo, physical comedy has shown itself to be a vital, three-dimensional style of performance. Like the theatre, physical comedy seems to have the blood of the phoenix coursing through its veins, its latest rebirth evident in the theatre clowning and new-wave vaudeville of the 1980’s.

Its classical heritage and more recent success aside, the discipline as a whole tends to be ghettoized. Literary-minded directors disparage it totally, quickly forgetting that Shakespeare, an actor himself, wrote for specific clowns (Kempe, Cowley, Armin); that Plautus was said to have played the comic roles in Atellan farces; that Moliere received his comic training from commedia troupes; that Feydeau wrote reams of stage directions, plotting the physical action of his precision farce machinery down to the most minute detail.

In some plays the physical comedy element may dominate, determining such early directorial decisions as casting and set design. One need only study such landmark productions as Copeau’s Tricks of Scapin, Meyerhold’s constructivist Magnanimous Cuckold, or Brooks’ more recent staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to see the integration of physical style into all aspects of the mise en scene.

The potential for physical comedy is not always as obvious as it is in your broader farce. Not every play is The Taming of the Shrew. In some plays, even in the most portentous drama, physical comedy elements may appear as a

motif or perhaps just a telling moment. Often it is a matter of a small 20-second bit here, another moment two scenes later, perhaps a running gag or two — what is sometimes classified under the heading of “stage business.” But there is an art — or at least a craft — to that business.

Few actors and even fewer directors have a particularly large physical comedy vocabulary, much less a feel for the style, and therefore little sense for the potential of the material. Unfortunately, as Michel St. Denis points out, there is “no possibility of expressing truth to a

Charlie Chaplin & Mack Swain in The Gold Rush

theatrical style without a strongly developed technique.” So while the performer must possess certain physical skills, the director must know how to motivate these within a dramatic framework.

The choices to be made are rarely as clear-cut as they would be for stage combat or dance choreography. The most obtuse, academic-minded director would have to admit that Hamlet ends in a swordfight. The script says so, and if only for safety’s sake it is nowadays accepted practice to bring in an expert. When a script positively calls out for physical comedy, however, there is still the chance the director will miss the boat entirely, producing a radio version of the play on stage.

When we think of physical comedy, images of slippery banana peels, baggy pants, and air-born custard pies come to mind. Contrary to popular opinion, pratfalls, bespattered faces, and trousers around the ankles are not necessarily amusing in and of themselves. Devoid of character, situation, and acting, physical comedy can be even more excruciatingly unfunny than your typical poorly told joke. As always, it’s not what you do, it’s how you do it.

Start at the beginning. The basic unit of physical comedy is the gag, the physical equivalent of a joke. Only amateurs believe in “sure-fire gags.” Professionals know enough not to isolate the gag from character, situation, and structure. The great gags have a story to tell, and they must tell it well.

I am reminded of an old yarn told about more than one great comedian. The comedian is asked how he would film someone slipping on a banana peel. Would the first shot show the character walking, the second a close-up on the banana peel, and the third the man slipping? Or mightn’t he show the banana peel, then the character’s approach, and then (in long shot) the pratfall itself? The old comedian mulls it over, takes another puff on his stogie, then replies that the first shot should show the character’s approach, the second shot

the banana peel, and the third shot the character stepping over the banana peel, only to disappear down an open manhole.

In comedy, an even older saying goes, the magic number is three and surprise is everything. A generalization, certainly, but a useful one. Watch Bill Irwin’s minimalist version of this in The Regard of Flight. Mr. Irwin is being chased back and forth across the stage. On his first cross, he

Tony Curtis surveys the results of pie-throwing mayhem in The Great Chase

stumbles over an invisible obstacle on the floor. Second time through, same thing. The third time around — now older and wiser — he leaps over his imaginary obstacle. Triumphant, he smirks unashamedly at the audience. Two steps later, he trips on another unseen obstacle and falls flat on his face.

The number three is not so much magic as it is common sense. Two times would be too little

and four or more times too much. The first time of course sets up the situation, but for all the audience knows, this may be an isolated incident. So he tripped... is that supposed to be funny? When more or less the same thing happens the second time around, we detect a pattern. A situation now exists that must be dealt with. A rhythm is established and an expectation created. Will our hero learn his lesson? Surely he isn’t going to trip over that same spot forever?

Magic number three usually ends this type of gag. To repeat the same or similar business would needlessly prolong matters. But the problem must be solved with some sort of surprise, often involving a reversal of logic. There is a finality to it so that we may move on to new business.

Notice what this simple script has done for us. Rather than just watch a funny man trip, we also watch him think. Thwarted twice, he undertakes his own personal probabilistic risk assessment, figures out the problem and solves it, simultaneously showing us his glee. For a brief moment, we too are fooled into thinking that particular drama is over. But just as this conclusion starts to register, there comes the reversal as a second unseen obstacle sends him sprawling.

Surprise being essential to comedy, the smart performer may play with the cadence of the 1-2-3 gag by initiating the third part either sooner or later than the gag’s rhythm would lead us to expect. Most common is the delayed gag. Especially useful in a play or a longer performance piece, it allows a lapse of time between parts two and three. In the interim, the main action of the piece continues. Just when the audience has begun to forget about the gag, the payoff comes, often with doubled effect.

The legendary Swiss clown, Grock, was famous for a heartwarming delayed gag involving his violin bow. After finishing a short flourish on the violin, he tacks on a slight embellishment, flipping the bow up into the air and attempting

George Reeves as Superman leaps tall buildings in a single bound.

to catch it back in his hand — unsuccessfully. Embarrassed, he hides himself behind a screen and practices his bow juggling. We see the bow soar repeatedly above the top of the screen. It is clear he has mastered the technique. But back in front of the audience, he again fails. He holds a second rehearsal behind the screen, but when he returns he is beset by new mishaps and soon forgets about the bow.

It is several minutes and one violin later (the first one having been pulverized beneath a Grock pratfall) and he is finally finishing off his tune on the violin. Now comes the payoff. Without thinking about it, he casually tosses the bow up into the air and catches it. Realizing what has happened, he is eager to duplicate his success. He starts to toss the bow up again, but before he can release it he assesses the probable risk, thinks better of it, and decides to leave well enough alone.

By accomplishing without thinking what had been impossible when he tried so hard, Grock creates a splendid clown moment. The delay has heightened the comedic impact, at the same time enriching Grock’s characterization.

While a four- or five-part gag might prove to be needlessly attenuated, some gags positively thrive on repetition. The famous stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera provides a classic example. Consigned to a closet-sized room aboard ship, Groucho is besieged by visitors. One by one they crowd into the room like sardines without the oil: three stowaway cohorts, the steward, two chambermaids

(immediately molested by Harpo), the ship’s engineer, a manicurist, the engineer’s assistant, a lost passenger, a maid mopping up, and three more stewards with large food trays.

The question is: How far can they go? How far can they push the gag — and the walls of the room? Finally, just as Margaret Dumont arrives for a secret rendezvous with Groucho, the door bursts open like a collapsing dam, and out pour the guests like so many fish.

Spaced out over time, gags of repetition are usually referred to as “running gags.” A single piece of comic business — such as the sardines in Noises Off — can recur throughout a performance. The predictability of the repetition may provoke laughs in and of itself. Four or five times may not be funny, but fifteen could be hysterical.

As a narrative device, running gags can have payoffs in terms of character and plot. In The Gods Must Be Crazy, certainly a well constructed comedy, gags are built on top of gags, all the while contributing to character and plot motifs. For example, two soldiers in a guerilla army are repeatedly wandering off to play cards when they should be fighting. A mildly amusing running gag, it pays off in the movie’s climactic scene when their migratory habits allow them to escape capture and prolong their army’s resistance. What the audience has been trained to see as a joke suddenly takes on unexpected significance.

The best gag is but a building block in the creation of physical comedy style. Physical comedy

choreography is every bit as involved as any other style of stage movement, perhaps more so. It takes the same sense of space, dynamics, and rhythm, the same flair for imagery and timing, all of which must then be interwoven into the fabric of the play itself. As in dance, it begins with a command of the vocabulary, an ability to see patterns, and the artistic sensitivity to yield meaning from those patterns.

The School of Hard KnocksPerformers — not writers, directors, or theoreticians — can take credit for the recent revival of physical comedy. Theatre clowns and new-wave vaudevillians have created their own shows outside the mainstream theatre. It is they who have rediscovered, expanded, and popularized a lost vocabulary. Physical comedy is hard work, but for many performers it’s also fun and creative.

This revival is, if nothing else, a welcome antidote to what I like to refer to as the “white bread syndrome” in physical comedy. Just as modern man has come to accept chemicalized foods, polluted air, talentless superstars, and plasticized politicians, so too have we accepted denatured physical comedy.

Physicality thrives on television and in the movies, but few and far between are the true physical moments, where we see the stunt in its entirety, in a single take. No cutting, no tricky camera angles, no stunt doubles. Watch ten minutes of a television action show (or ten

minutes of The Gods Must Be Crazy, for that matter) and you may find yourself yearning for the virtuosic finesse of a Buster Keaton. Physical comedy has thankfully bred its own counter-culture, performers who think the difference between real physical comedy and the processed variety is, well, not unlike that between Wonderbread and homemade, oven-fresh whole wheat. They act with their whole body, offering a more visceral and vibrant performance precisely because the audience knows they really are doing everything they seem to be doing. “I like long takes, in long shots. I like to work full figure,” explained Buster Keaton. “All comedians want their feet in.”

Keaton himself began his training at the age of three, literally being thrown about in his parents’ vaudeville knockabout act, a school of hard knocks if there ever was one. Chaplin sang for his supper as a child, coming of age in British music hall alongside Stan Laurel. Traditionally, the physical training is a life-long process, transmitted from father to son (less frequently to daughters), and kept alive right up to the vaudeville and silent film eras by circus families, commedia troupes, and English pantomime companies.

The technical training itself can vary vastly. Keaton was a superb tumbler, Grock a contortionist, acrobat, and masterful musician. Bill Irwin is a magnificent eccentric dancer, Avner the Eccentric a talented juggler and magician. What these performers all have in common is their ability to transform these skills.

Comedians cannot settle for the pure world of the gymnast or juggler, but must instead combine them with the everyday, the commonplace. A gymnast spends years perfecting an incredible floor exercise for competition. The physical comedian spends years inventing pratfalls, devising the best way to dive through a window... roll over, around or with a chair... fall down the stairs... Throw a pie or take a slap... the million and one uses of a trap door, a trunk, a revolving door... The finer points of hat juggling, cane twirling, or quick change... and so on, to the outer reaches of one’s imagination.

The physical comedian’s domain is that of the real. Not every technique need be excruciatingly difficult to prove theatrically effective, as Pilobolus has amply demonstrated. Acrobatic tricks that merely say “Look at me! Wasn’t that a great trick?!” clearly belong in the gymnasium and not on stage. Physical comedians use their acrobatic training to relate to everything around them, including fellow performers. Much of the training will revolve around partner work, as they learn how to use their weight, strength and flexibility to lift, mount, flip, or balance and tumble with one another.

In my own work I have found that this brand of technique work usually offers fertile ground for fresh comedic ideas. The partnerings seem to lead naturally to the creation of short scenarios with their own characters and motivations. Likewise, free play with props, furniture and other scenic elements leads to imaginary situations that become more real with every practice session.

Technique and material become entwined.

Physical Comedy as Applied MathThe quantum leap from the pure geometry of gymnastics and other technical disciplines to the applied mathematics of physical comedy can most readily be understood by examining a few of the permutations growing out of your basic forward roll. Even this simplest of all gymnastic moves can be “souped up” to create some interesting theatrical effects.

The forward roll is elementary. The novice tumbler learns it on day one and repeats it ad infinitum, ad nauseam: how to tuck into a tight ball, how to push off evenly with the feet and ease the weight down with the arms, how to avoid the head and roll symmetrically and smoothly down the spine, how to keep the momentum going forward so that you can stand without using the hands.

The next progression in terms of spectacle is to the “dive roll.” The tumbler reaches out further and further until one day he/she is actually diving, that is, the feet leave the ground before the hands hit. Many will fondly remember this from high school gym class, where daredevil tumblers would see how many crouched, terrified classmates they could “tiger leap” over and live to tell about. In the circus, this has traditionally taken the form of the “leaps,” a whole troupe of acrobats springboarding over a row of elephants and horses, often ornamenting the feat with a mid-air somersault.

In the ingenious hands of the physical comedian, the humble forward roll becomes more chameleon-like. It may come in handy at the tail end of a fighting technique, a safe way to deposit the victim on the ground after some spectacular flip, à la Douglas Fairbanks. Or the roll may be put to use over, around, or through costumes, furniture, or scenery, as often as not with a prop in one’s hand.

Four specific techniques follow that give only a small sampling of the different directions you can take this simplest of tricks. Whether it be a dive roll out the window, a pedestrian roll while carrying plates of food, a forward roll with someone on your back, or a double roll holding ankles, I would caution against going home and trying these unless you have tumbling mats, collision insurance, good acrobatic skills, and can call upon the assistance of an experienced spotter.

All drawings by Christopher Agostino.

EpilogueWhat with grabbing ankles and all, we seem to have come a long way from the fate of the Earth. Is any of this really related? In its own way, I imagine physical comedy technique connecting to our real world as significantly as, say, Picasso’s brush technique or Hemingway’s sentence structure did to the Spanish Civil War. Art speaks to us in strange ways and, no matter how idiosyncratic, technique is still technique.

In physical comedy, the starting point is the body: the body as metaphor, the body as our most tangible reality. “We did a piece called Winterbranch some years ago in many different countries,” commented choreographer Merce Cunningham. “In Sweden they said it was about race riots, in Germany they thought of concentration camps, in London they spoke of bombed cities, in Tokyo they said it was the atom bomb. The wife of a sea captain said it looked like a shipwreck to her. Of course it’s about all of those and not about any of them, because I didn’t have any of those experiences, but everybody was drawing on his experiences, whereas I had simply made a piece which was involved with falls, the idea of bodies falling.”

Everything we do, everything we build, from the infant’s first steps to the neutron bomb, grows out of our imperfect body and its imperfect mind. We walk and sometimes we fall. Our reach often exceeds our grasp. We can never be sure anything is perfect because we as a biological species are not perfect.

While Murphy’s Law may be difficult to research, countless new examples of it have surfaced since I began writing this article two months ago. In addition to my own contributions to human error, too numerous to mention here, we have witnessed a tragic “how could this have happened?” head-on collision between Amtrak and Conrail trains in Maryland. Earlier this week, Roger Boisjoly, our “engineer Laurel” who had urged NASA to postpone the Challenger launch, sued the space agency and contractor Morton Thiokol for punitive and compensatory damages for their efforts to demote and discredit him after he testified against them. This morning’s newspaper headline tells of West Germany’s difficulty in disposing of 3,000 tons of radioactive powdered milk contaminated by the fall-out from Chernobyl, milk that Bavarian authorities are still hoping to use in animal feed for export to third-world countries.

Murphy’s Law is indeed very much with us. For the curious, our folk hero turns out to be a Captain Edward A. Murphy, Jr., an Air Force development engineer from Ohio who in 1949 was working on Edwards Air Force Base’s project MX981 — a precursor of today’s space efforts. Frustrated that a component part in a harness he had designed for test pilots was malfunctioning, he discovered that a strain gauge had been incorrectly wired by a technician. “There are only two ways to wire a strain gauge,” said Murphy the maker of laws, “the right way and 90% from the right way. If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it that way.”

The comment was repeated at a news conference several weeks later and spread like wildfire through the press and then into the public’s consciousness, distilled down to “whatever can go wrong will go wrong.” As for Ed Murphy, he received neither fame nor fortune for his contribution to society. Like a clown, anonymous behind bulbous nose and greasepaint, he told what he saw and went his merry way.

©Copyright 1987 by John Towsen

Special thanks to: Susan Avino, Bernie Collins, Hovey Burgess, Arnie Glass, Herb Houser, Dan Kamin, Martie LaBare, Doug Poswencyk, and Sande Zeig