Musical Comedy

            On Monday after midnight I lint rolled the top of my bed but only caught one bedbug probably because I vacuumed on Sunday. I added some more carpet tape to the edge of the head of my bed. I went to bed at around 1:30 and slept fairly well until the alarm went off at 5:00. After yoga I killed a few bedbugs that were stuck to the carpet tape on my bed and on the floor. I killed one that was wandering free on the floor at the foot of my bed. 

            I uploaded “Jules Bonnot c'était pas n'importe qui” (Jules Bonnot Was Not Just Anyone) by Boris Vian to my Christian’s Translations blog and began preparing it for publication. 

            I almost memorized the last verse of “Les filles c'est un flipper” (Girls Are a Pinball Game) by Serge Gainsbourg. I should have it nailed down on Tuesday. 

            I weighed 91.05 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Martin during song practice for the first of four sessions and it went out of tune all the time. It’s usually just the high E, the B, and sometimes the G string that are slightly off. It doesn’t take long to get them back in tune but it’s annoying because if the guitar is properly set up it’ll stay in tune for almost the whole session. 

            I weighed 92.7 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. I saw a plain clothes cop giving somebody a ticket. He was wearing a backwards baseball cap but also a vest on top of his civilian clothes saying “Police”. 

            I weighed 91.65 kilos at 17:50. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 18:32. 

            I digitized an interview with me on CIUT radio about the launch of my first chapbook, Vomit of the Star Eater. I performed the title poem, then “The Princess and the Pea Happy Song” and “Sleep in the Snow”. Tomorrow I’ll digitize the other side, which has home recordings of rehearsals with Brian Haddon and Donna Bartkiw.

            I worked on digitally enhancing one of my old photos. 

            I had a potato with gravy and a heated up T-bone steak while watching two more videos about The Carol Burnett Show. One was a tribute to the writers and the other was about the mini musicals.

            Ken Solms and Gail Parent were signed as the first writers on the show fresh out of college. Tim Conway says nobody is funnier than Kenny Solms and Tim doesn’t know why he doesn’t perform.

            There were usually around 9 writers at a time. 

            Carl Reiner says when there’s a flame like Carol Burnett the moths gather. The same thing happened with Sid Caesar. Every good writer wanted to work on the Sid Caesar show and it was the same with Carol Burnett. 

            Carol says sometimes Laugh-In writers would get tired of quick jokes and wanted to write longer ones so they came to her show while some of her writers would go to Laugh-In. 

            Ken Solms says they got away with murder on The Carol Burnett Show because The Smothers Brothers down the hall were distracting the censors. 

            Carol says every Wednesday the writers would get together for lunch and they would show old kinescopes of variety shows like Jackie Gleason. Carol would usually come in at that time to talk to the head writer Arnie Rosen about script changes. One week she came in and they were watching a porno film. They’d set her up, knowing she’d be dropping by. Carol had never seen porn before and exclaimed, “That’s awful!” Arnie told her, “He’s doing the best he can.” 

            Ken and Mitzi Welch invented the mini musical. 

            Carol says Harvey had a good voice and Vicki adds, “Once he got the note”. 

            Kyra Thompson says they did what Broadway couldn’t do. They put together a Broadway musical comedy review in five days when on Broadway you’d rehearse that for six weeks. 

            Bob Mackie says a lot of Carol’s writers were Broadway calibre but they wanted to live in LA and have a weekly paycheque, and a nice home. 

            Ken Berry says Carol could fill a house with that voice. “It just sails!” 

            Musical Comedy can be traced back to ancient Greece as is evidenced by 6th Century pottery that depicts actors dressed as horses, satyrs, and dancers in exaggerated costumes. 

            In the 16th Century there were parody masses such as by Josquin des Prez and Palestrina, which were banned by the church. Comic opera developed in 17th Century Italy. 

           It spread to France where it became opera comique, then in the 19th Century French operetta, the master of which was Jacques Offenbach. 

           Victorian Burlesque came out of English Pantomime, which came out of Commedia dell’arte which has its roots in Greek Theatre. 

            Pantomime was musical theatre that depicted fairy and folk tales with cross dressing actors. Victorian Burlesque would turn popular operas into broad comic plays. The first was Olympic Revels by J.R. Planché in 1831. Music Halls started in England in the 18th Century. Again, these spread to France in the 19th Century and developed into the Folies Bergere and then The Moulin Rouge. 

            In North America the English Music Hall became the Concert Saloon. A North American form of Burlesque developed into Vaudeville.