SOME THOUGHTS ON ICE SKATING

I'm not normally a fan of ice skating, but when the Winter Olympics is on TV the event I watch with most interest is figure skating. You don't see much comedy skating in those events, though, and I miss it. I guess that's because the scoring is always based on acrobatics that require long, graceful glides.

Maybe the Olympics is the wrong venue for comedy. Wether it wins medals or not, what I want to see on ice is comedy sketches.  Maybe some fat skaters once in a while.

Serious skating obviously favors the thin but funny skating often favors the fat, especially in sketches with characters the audience can relate to, as in the story of a likable overweight novice who's only doing it to impress his girl. Everybody likes to root for the underdog. Think of Jackie Gleason's skating sketch in The Honeymooners.

To make that kind of sketch work, a fat male skater requires a skinny, long legged, Shelly Duval/Olive Oyl-type girlfriend...

...yeah, someone who looks like this....

...and a smug, male super skater who competes for the girl's attention,
someone with a personality like Kenneth Mars (above)...

Or Carl Reiner (above, left).

Funny props and costumes are acceptable...

...but they can't be much fun to wear, especially if the head is covered.

If you were a skater wouldn't you love to choreograph a comedy routine for the ice? Maybe something like a girl vocalist (above) surrounded by her skater sidemen.

You'd think hip hop would be a natural fit for ice skating but a few YouTube videos I saw convinced me that it's hard to do that kind of thing on skates. The dancers would appear slow.  Even so, somebody must have tried it. It would be fun to see "Gangnum Style" or "You Can't Touch This" moves on ice...even if they're just punctuation  between the big acts.

 Don't underestimate punctuation. Some of the funniest stuff comes in short doses. In the example above creative executives periodically dance in and try try to modify or censor the dances.

A flock of tall, thin, frenetic Gilray dandies would work great on ice...maybe in a takeoff of ballroom dancing.

Monty Python-type battling housewife skaters?

I like Keaton's image of dozens of would-be brides chasing a rich bachelor. Would that work?

Would some version of Keaton's boulder sketch work on ice? With fake boulders, I mean.

Of course, any ice show would have to include drama as well. I once heard that skaters don't like to skate on ground covered by fake mist. Would it work better if the mist was over their heads like menacing clouds? Hmmm...maybe that's not practical.

If overhead mist was possible, imagine the the effects you could achieve! Lightning, ghosts, long undulating Chinese dragons...anything could be made to appear from the clouds.

Most skating comedy would work best in small theaters (above) where the audience could see the faces of the skaters. Theater of any sort usually doesn't come off well in giant stadium theaters.