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.

MORE GILRAY

Gilray (above) wasn't just the funniest cartoonist of the early Nineteenth Century, he was one of the funniest cartoonists ever. I'm glad to see that nowadays he's getting the critical recognition he deserves.

He's most famous for the etchings he did during the Napoleonic Era (above). They're terrific, but my personal favorites are the caricatures of fashion (at the top) that he did in his later style.

I think this one's called "The Prince." 

Haw! This picture (above) leaves no doubt that if Gilray had been born later, he would have done full justice to the baggy/skateboarder fashions that began in the 1990s.

Man, seeing this (above) makes me want to draw. That's the highest compliment one cartoonist can give another. 

Apparently some people (above) in Gilray's time payed so much attention to their wigs that they neglected certain other things.

Here (above) Gilray celebrates the opening to the public of an art exhibit at one of the downtown museums. Apparently public exhibitions like this were a novelty in Gilray's time.

Interesting, huh?


Hey, why did my sidebar shrink?

GEORGE CRUIKSHANK 1792-1878

I'm glad the Gillray post was so well-received. That emboldened me to talk about my other favorite cartoonist of that era, George Cruikshank. That's a Cruikshank drawing above, possibly influenced by Gillray.

Cruikshank and Gillray were contemporaries, though Cruikshank was the younger man, and was more likely to go after (in the words of one critic) the "low" kinds of gags (above).

Cruikshank was really funny but his early work shows him struggling with draughtsmanship. He had a mannered, off-kilter way of drawing (above) which he never fully shook off. Amazingly he was able to make it work for him in later years, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Here's (above) a Cruikshank comet. Like so many cartoonists of yesteryear he thought nothing of tackling immense crowd scenes.

Here's (above) Cruikshank in his first mature style. Very funny. You can see the influence of Hogarth and Gillray, but it's still unmistakably "Cruick." Click to enlarge.


Cruikshank lived a lot longer than Gillray, and he experimented with a lot of styles (above).

He became a terrific pen and ink draughtsman. Sketches like these from 1839 were a big influence on the stable of artists working for Punch magazine.

Book illustration became a big deal in this period and Cruikshank morphed once more to adapt to it.

Along with Thackerey (yes, Thackerey the novelist) Cruikshank illustrated a number of Charles Dickens' novels. I don't know if he made much money on it since Dickens was famous for putting his illustrators through Hell.

The illustration above isn't from a Dickens story, but the style is the same. Some of Cruikshank's illustrations from this period look like they were lifted from "Humbug" magazine. The influence of Cruikshank on Kurtzman and Elder is unmistakable.

Remember I said that that Cruikshank had a mannered style when he was young? He eventually shed some of it and became a skilled classical draughtsman, except that he became appalled at how tame his drawings were getting so he re-introduced his youthful, off-kilter style back into his mature work. The blend was incredibly successful...sort of surreal and realistic at the same time... and influenced many other artists, in fact it's still used by illustrators today. If there's a lesson in that, it's "Keep your old drawings, even if they seem primitive; you may need them someday."

Cruikshank had an enormous influence on his field but others benefited from it more than he did. He died in near poverty.

Next post on Monday night.

JAMES GILLRAY: FATHER OF THE EDITORIAL CARTOON

British artist James Gillray is considered by many to be the father of the editorial cartoon.

Gillray worked in the late 18th and early 19th century, the age of Napoleon. He attacked the French relentlessly, and went at his own countrymen with equal ferocity.

My favorite Gillrays are his fashion parodies (above). Even men went for the wasp waist look, and everybody wanted to appear taller than they were.

Geez, I wish these pictures were bigger. The picture above won't enlarge, but about half of the others will, so give them a try.

He was a terrific caricaturist (above). and you know he would have been a good animator because he loved to caricature walks as well as faces.

It would have been fun to go with Gillray on his sketching tours of the parks (above). His focus was always on the people who visited the park, and not on the trees.

There must have been a lot of fat rich women (above) in Gillray's time.

Fat men, too.

Gillray wasn't the only British cartoonist of his day. Cruikshank and Heath (that's a Heath above) were contemporaries. You can see the influence that Heath had on Edward Lear, who came later.

This (above) is a beautiful picture when you see it large. It's full of movement and nice line. Gillray was an expert at etching, so he didn't have to pass his drawings on to an engraver the way some other artists did.

Haw!

He could be downright hilarious (above) when he wanted to be.

The Prince of Wales is said to have disliked this picture (above) so much that he paid to have the plates destroyed. It's beautifully composed.



More fashion caricatures (above). Is this picture by Cruikshank or Gillray? The two did park pictures that are almost interchangeable.

Anyway, catch the padded jacket and knee-high boots on the guy on the right. Wouldn't you like to see him do an animated walk?

Boy, Gillray caught that gloomy look that some Englishmen have. The pants of that day framed the crotch like a puppet theater and he caught that, too. But what's with the dainty little shoes?

Here he depicts a wealthy mother (above) who takes two minutes out of her busy schedule to breast feed her child.

Unbelievable (above)! This guy is SO funny!

Poor Gillray. for years he lived happily and prosperously with the woman who published his pictures... then his eyesight began to fail. When he found he couldn't work any more he made a botched suicide attempt which left him with injuries which may have driven him insane.