Oh, the Georges. Each dynasty has its own internal familial dynamic – think of the Stuarts, of when brothers Charles II and James II would get up early to race their yachts against each other. Or the Tudors, pacing about each other like starved and slightly mad cats… and then there’s the Hanoverian Georges, who are more akin to an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond than anything else. The fathers all but peeing on their hapless sons – the sons running into the arms of the nearest revolutionaries to get back at their fathers, and somewhere in the midst of it all, if there was time, the government of England happened somehow. George I, who could have given two poos for England, drove his son George II to Parliament and opposition, and that Parliament then cashed in by rendering the son a somewhat charming and ineffectual non-entity as a king. George III was pretty sure he learned the lesson from all of that and instituted massive plans of organized monarchical bribery to get Parliament in line, all while moaning in despair over the antics of arch-fop George IV who responded by inevitably joining the Parliamentary opposition which would, in turn, basically run the country while he spent his time on the throne designing fancy fancy shoe buckles and being generally awful. George III might have turned out the best of the lot, had he lived in less complicated times. If you could swap George III into George IV’s reign, and then sub II into III’s, and then IV into II’s, and somehow blow I out the nearest airlock… why, that might have been a thing.
Which begs the question – is there such a thing as a fantasy monarch league? And if not, can we start one now?
– Count Dolby von Luckner
Before talking about the great and glorious silent age, I first have to pass on to you all my latest obsession in the realm of historical sketch comedy, as you and I are probably of one heart in believing that it is, in general, A Fine Thing. Netflix recently told me that I had to watch That Mitchell and Webb Look, and it was entirely right. They don’t JUST do historical sketches, but when they do, they are generally awesome – great core ideas executed and paced brilliantly. Here are six favorites to get you started – make sure the kids are out of the room though:
Queen Victoria and the Linden Trees
The SS and Tailoring
Jehovah and Abraham
Numberwang
Mr. Darcy and the Dance
The Clergy Returns
They also have some devastatingly wonderful comedy albums available off the iTunes once you’ve burned through the episodes which I am equally ecstatic about. So, duck in!
One of the interesting book genres you see from time to time are silent actor guidebooks from the teens and twenties, illustrated How-To Books for the proper way to convey surprise, anger, love, and so forth, with a single glance and gesture pairing. They could get rather specific : #145: Disconsolate After a Rejected Proposal, and so forth, for those actors faced with particularly unique situations.
Theda Bara has often been accused of being one of these paint-by-numbers emoters, but that’s not entirely fair. Even in situations that seem to scream for a Standard Emote, she manages to always recast it, skew it a little Sinister or Unhinged, in ways it’s still interesting to watch.
That said, she’s not my favorite silent film actress. I’m not sure if the topic is ever going to come up again, so I have to get my plug in now for Miriam Cooper. She is BRILLIANT. She is almost forgotten now (her imdb profile doesn’t even have a PICTURE, for crying out loud), mainly because the movies that were her big opportunities were also those that featured Lillian Gish, who was one of the towering superstars of the age. Her portrayal of The Friendless One in D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance is absolutely entrancing – there’s no other word for it. She stopped making films altogether in 1926, and lived on another fifty years, dying in 1976 after a bit of a well-deserved rediscovery.
– Count Dolby von Luckner
Before talking about Jolson and Cantor, I want to direct your attention to a great and wonderful site that has just posted up a bit of a review of our own humble comic. Art Patient approaches webcomics with a thirst for Discovering New Things that is infectious. Delos produces the very best sort of review – one in which he shares what he has taken away from a comic, and his own suggestions about things that that comic might start paying closer attention to in order to make itself as good as it can possibly be. This strikes me as entirely rare and rather fabulous – here is a fellow who has, by constant and applied study, picked up so much pure craft knowledge, and who DOESN’T use it to poo on others via the internet, but rather offers helpful advice to those who would have it, giving his time and expertise freely to make everybody around him a bit wiser and better off. So do drop by and have a look, and then check out the rest of the site as well!
Now, Jolson. Fun Frederick Fact: Jolson was slated to be a black hat in several of the first story arcs, but was supplanted by first Salvador Dali and then The Thoremerson. Extra points if you’ve actually been with us since that Dali arc first launched. In any case, let’s talk about the song My Mammy. It is a great shame that it is now known mainly as That Song He Did In Blackface In The Jazz Singer. The reason that Jolson chose to perform it is actually really tragic, and is contained in the anguished spoken portion of the song. The lines go, roughly,
Mammy, I’m comin,
Oh Lord, I hope I’m not late…
Mammy, don’t you know me,
I’m your little baby!
Which sounds very sort of racist and terrible until you know that this is a section that Jolson added, not describing an African American nanny to whom some southern slave-owner’s son is returning, as everybody more or less assumes from the context of the blackface the song was first performed in, but rather is Jolson’s telling of the death of his own mother while he was just eight years old – him rushing to her, standing next to her, and her unable to recognize him. The shock of the event sent Jolson into a state of collapse for months. To him, the song was not about a Plantation Mammy, but rather about his own mother, taken from him early, and the feeling of running and running to reach her and say something final to her and Not Making It.
This does not, of course, make blackface performance A Good Thing. It was part of a demeaning structure that tried to use popular culture to belittle and disenfranchise when the law no longer could (even though, of course, the law did, and for longer than the era of the minstrels). Jolson himself abandoned it eventually, and the recordings that he made in later life are still very much worth the hearing as a transport to another time entirely, and have nothing whatsoever to do with plantation culture or the aesthetics of cultural devaluation. Here are some:
Sonny Boy: A really beautiful song – this time focused on the death of a son, rather than of a parent.
A Quarter to Nine: A song not about death at all!
– Count Dolby von Luckner