What's funny

 According to WC Fields

....wolfhound. i stopped. They walked from one wing to the other. 

‘My,’ I said, ‘what a beautiful camel.’ That got a laugh, and the act was a success. 

The golf act was introduced in the Follies of 1918, though it was clearly extant in 1915, as the vanished second Gaumont film attests. In gnother magazine article, for The American, in 1934, Fields told the sale a little differently. The article, ‘Anything For a Laugh’, opens a window into the comedian’s trial and error, the painstaking process of finding out which gag and what line works best. At first, he says about the incident with Ziegfeld, he tried using the word ‘horse’: ‘I experimented night after night to find out what animal was the funniest. I finally settled upon “That’s a very beautiful camel.”’ Fields continued: 

The funniest thing about comedy is that you never know why people laugh. I know what makes them laugh, but trying to get your hands on the why of it is like trying to pick an eel out of a tub of water... 

You usually can’t get a laugh out of damaging anything valuable. When you kick a silk hat, it must be dilapidated; when you wreck a car, bang it up a little before you bring it on the scene. 

It is funnier to bend things than to break them — bend the fenders on a car in a comedy wreck, don’t break them off. In my golf game, which I have been doing for years, at first I swung at the ball and broke the club. Now I bend it at a right angle. If one comedian hits another over the head with a crowbar, the crowbar should bend, not break. In legitimate drama, the hero breaks his sword, and it is dramatic. In comedy, the sword bends, and Stays bent... 

I know we laugh at the troubles of others, provided these troubles are Not too serious. Out of that observation I have reached a conclusion which may be of some comfort to those accused of ‘having no sense of humor.’ These folks are charming, lovable, philanthropic people, and invariably I like them — as long as they keep out of the theatres where I am playing, which they usually do. If they get in by mistake, they leave early. 

The reason they don’t laugh at most gags is that their first emotional reaction is to feel sorry for people instead of to laugh at them. 

I like, in an audience, the fellow who roars continuously at the troubles of the character I am portraying on the stage, but he probably has a mean streak in him, and, if I needed ten dollars, he’d be the last person I'd call upon. I’d go first to the old lady and old gentleman back in Row S$ who keep wondering what there is to laugh at. 

Of course, many comedians did get laughs out of breaking, rather than bending things, for example, Laurel and Hardy. But Fields always had strained relations with objects that got out of shape, or appeared on the scene misshapen from the source. The very building blocks of his reality were skewed. Thus, as J.B. Priestley observed, even when he stopped juggling as an act, he still had to juggle with life itself, with every small thing, at every corner. 

As the Follies liberated him from the juggler’s routine, he began devising his own scenarios. It was long since he had confessed to O. K. Sato his clumsiness at the typewriter and the recalcitrant pages. We don’t know when Fields began writing his ‘vaudeville scripts’, some of which may have predated the Follies. But it was during the Follies that he sat down, in his hotel apartment, and began methodically churning them out. 

Where do comedians get their material? The answer is usually, from other comedians. Comedians found their jokes in joke books and humourous magazines and revamped them to fit their act. George Burns wrote: 

Performers would take material from anyplace they could find it. Harpo [Marx] told me about a theatre the Marx Brothers played in Fargo, North Dakota; the manager had hung up a big sign in the wings listing about 100 jokes and the warning, THESE JOKES HAVE ALREADY BEEN USED IN THIS THEATRE — DO NOT USE THEM. And nobody used them there, but everybody wrote them down and put them in their act for the next booking. 

Nat Wills, one of vaudeville’s greatest draws, was known to have been a regular subscriber to Madison’s Budget, a joke magazine published between 1898 and 1918. It sold for one dollar and was a treasure house of comedy gags and situations. Later the author, James Madison, sold complete sets of his old journals to comedians like Eddie Cantor and Fred Allen. 

In the vaudeville days, the only way a comedian could protect material was to seal it in an envelope and send it to Pat Casey, of the Vaudeville Managers’ Protective Agency. But this was not a foolproof method. Fields, like other professionals, lived in a constant anxiety that carefully worked out routines would be pilferred by rivals, 

The censors:

Delete underlined words in the line “I can’t go to bed, I'm not married yet.”... Delete action of Fields looking in keyhole, including line, “What won’t they think of next.”’ And of course, the whole pussy sitting scene, once again. 

At its initial release, the film was approved without cuts only in two states - New York and Kansas. In Pennsylvania they eliminated the underlined words — “Tommy, don’t you see we’ll never be married; you just can’t take the strain.’ In Virginia, the nuts and bolts had to go. In Maryland, they didn’t like the line ‘Oh, doctor, I can hear my heart beat.’ In Ontario — ‘Don’t let the posy fool you.’ In Ohio, 8 deletions, including Quail’s line to Peggy, when he tells her he’ll come back to collect her: ‘Don’t forget, tap on the window as soon as the chumps leave.’ 

It should be noted that America was far from the only country seething with puritanical fever: in Australia, the censors were even more cautious, deleting — ‘I’ll be down as soon as I take off these pajamas.’ And in Japan, they took umbrage at Peggy Hopkins Joyce taking some shorts out of a suitcase and saying to the besotted Tommy: ‘I packed these by mistake in the desert.’ In Sweden the whole film was ‘CONSIDERED UNSUITABLE - Story too artificial and absurd.’ 

When we watch International House today, we are struck at the carefree innocence of these 1930s comedies, with all their silly twists and turns. But it is salutory to realize with what horror such high jinks were regarded by the censorship boards of the day. From that point on, Breen had Fields’ number, as an unconscionable vulgarian, who would get away with murder, obscenity and every other transgression in the censor’s book, if only he could. The battle lines had been quite sharp drawn. 

&

It was in this period that the eccentric artist, John Decker, painted a portrait of W. C. Fields as Queen Victoria. In the world outside the Hollywood cocoon, World War II had broken out — on x September, Germany invaded Poland, and on 3 September, Great Britain declared war on Germany. But this was happening quite far from Los Angeles. 

John Decker, none the less, had more cause than most of his friends to worry about events in Europe since, as he would later reveal to Gene Fowler, he was in origin a German national, whose real name, he claimed, was Leopold Wolfgang von Decken. Son of a German Baron and his San Franciscan bride, he had fallen foul of a mix up in the First World War involving a forger of Old Masters, from whom he had learnt his craft of copying, and who, as a sideline, sewed messages to Berlin in the double-canvases of his forgeries. As a result, Decker had spent the war in an English prison camp on the Isle of Man as a suspected spy, and his friends, after the war, had arranged his passage to America by means of a fake passport. Now he was living in a hillside studio in Hollywood earning his keep by painting stars like Clark Gable, Fanny Brice and Harpo Marx in the manner his disastrous mentor had taught him. (But without the secret messages.) The outbreak of war was to kindle his old fears of internment. 

Neither Gene Fowler nor anyone else was able to verify this shaggy Hun story. But Decker’s studio, which was soon moved to a new property in Bundy Drive, Brentwood, was to become the central hub for the coterie of dilapidated old masters such as Bill Fields, Gene Fowler and John Barrymore. The Queen Victoria portrait was requested by Gene Fowler, who hung it in his office, resisting Fields’ poignant cry of ‘Sabotage! Decker has kicked history in the groin!’ 

Fowler remembered the day he hung the portrait well, because it was also the day on which he adopted an even stranger new member of the Old Boys’ convocation: the crazy Japanese-German Sadakich! Hartmann. 

In 1954, Gene Fowler published his memoirs of this period, entitled Minutes of the Last Meeting. Fowler’s book is by far the most distincve account that has come down to us of the private side of W. C. fields’ last years. It is not a biography of Fields, since Fowler had ceded this task to Robert Lewis Taylor. Having already written his biography of Barrymore, Goodnight, Sweet Prince, Fowler decided to focus on the extraordinary Sadakichi as the hub of his tale of the Twilight of these Hollywood Gods. 

Sadakichi, in fact, was probably known to both Fields and Barrymore from their drinking days in the Lambs Club. Sadakichi Hartmann was the son of a German father and Japanese mother, born in Nagasaki in 1867. His father took him to Germany to be educated and from there he travelled to America in 1885, where he specialised in the history of art. He became a kind of unpaid secretary to Walt Whitman, who later cast him out for revealing his caustic views on fellow artists. Back in Europe, he became acquainted with Mallarmé and Verlaine. A grade-A leech, he set out on a life-long career as a celebrity groupie. Bill Fields said of him scathingly: ‘He has been a peeping tom, a cap-and-bell interloper at all the art shrines.’ But Barrymore adored him, as the ultimate offender against the pretensions of high society, and dubbed him ‘the last of the Pharaohs, and nicely mummified at that’. 

Sadakichi knew no boundaries. He was the ultimate egotist, who would yell, when told that a toilet was around the corridor: ‘Bring it to me!’ Or he would cry out: ‘Other people talk and talk about dying. I’m doing it!’ At the turn of the century, he had been the self-styled ‘King of Greenwich Village’, and had in fact published two volumes of an important History of American Art. He had pioneered the appreciation of early photographers, such as Stieglitz, Henry Havelock Pierce and Frank Scott Clark, as well as publishing a blasphemous book called The Last Thirty Days of Christ, in which Christ was enamoured of Mary Magdalene. He was well ahead of his time, but by the late 1920s he was already an established sponger. By the early 1940s, he was a physical wreck, staggering about with a homemade truss which supported a great scrotal hernia. Sadakichi’s perverse admirers called him The Gray Chrysanthemum.