In his recent rogerebert.com article about Harold Lloyd's "Safety Last!" (1923), contributor Max Winter declares, "There are no great physical comedians any more."
"Can [slapstick comedy's] popularity leading up to the 1970s or 1980s be dismissed as 'a product of a simpler time,'" he asks, contemplating the reasons we rarely see today's comic talents getting bonked in the head by falling debris. "Or is it that we're gradually deciding we don't need the pleasure of a stumble or the sight of a person accidentally being whacked with a board, that we've moved on, that if it isn't 'meta' it isn't of interest?"
Winter practically sticks a fork in poor slapstick comedy from the get-go with the title to his article, “Slapstick Last!” But slapstick isn't dead—it's just moved to pro wrestling.
Yes, pro wrestling, that mix of sports and showbiz that emerged from strongman challenge matches held in tents in the 19th Century, and that today stands as the last living piece of vaudeville in the American mainstream.
Taking out Stone Cold's chugging metal entrance music and the squeals of the announcers, this bit is totally interchangeable with the payoff to any number of Depression-era Three Stooges shorts where Larry, Curly and Moe drag a gathering of snobby sophisticates down to their level. "Hoi Polloi" (1935) starts with "Pygmalion" and ends with tuxedo-clad academics getting into slap fights. In "Pop Goes the Easel" (1935), patrons of the arts hurl globs of clay at each other. In 1947, the Stooges remade "Hoi Polloi" as "Half-wits Holliday," and adding a signature pie fight for the big finish. Moe Howard, the chief Stooge, called this "deflating comedy."
"We specialize in upsetting dignity," Howard once explained in an interview. "We only throw pies at guys wearing top hats."
And the Stooges weren't the only comics sticking it to the man. Although Chaplin was considered high art and the Stooges were poverty row, the Little Tramp spends just as much time running from cops as Curly and co. ever did, even in Chaplin's sound-era triumphs such as "Modern Times" (1936) and "The Great Dictator" (1940). Some 36 years after Chaplin's "Modern Times," Monty Python's Flying Circus had "The Upper Class Twit of the Year" contestants failing to walk a straight line and kicking beggars on their groundbreaking TV show.
While this kind of slapstick class warfare is all but absent from today's movie comedies, you know if you see a cake wheeled out on the WWE's "Friday Night Smackdown," somebody's face is going in it before they cut to commercial. The recipient of a mug smeared with buttercream frosting is almost always some kind of authority figure, or one of those effete heels with a penchant for lecturing the fans at ringside for their collective lack of education.
And those crowd-pleasing crotch-shots are a big reason why pro wrestlers are becoming the keepers of the slapstick flame while actual comedians have all but abandoned it: slapstick hurts. Standup comedy, which supplies nearly all of today's movie and television funny people, rarely gets any more physical than pacing in front of a brick wall and ruminating into a microphone on the sorry state of things. For most standups, the first time that any kind of physical comedy is demanded of them is when they're lucky enough to make the jump from the stage onto the screen after years of honing routines that are predominantly verbal.
During the one segment where the new Stooges got in the ring, Moe and Larry fled at the sight of the seven-foot tall masked brawler named Kane, leaving Sasso-as-Curly to take a choke slam. "The Big Red Monster" hoisted Sasso high into the air and then guided his body to the middle of the mat as gently as possible, where he stayed like a beached whale until the commercial break.
If it was the real Curly Howard in the ring, he would've gotten back up and said, "Come on, do it a little bit harder so they can hear it."
Bob Calhoun used to wrestle guys in sasquatch suits while drunks threw food at him. His latest pop culture memoir, "Shattering Conventions: Commerce, Cosplay and Conflict on the Expo Floor" (Obscuria Press, 2013), has a chapter on WrestleMania in it, along with passages on Comic-Con, a Portland "Twilight" con, gun shows, hemp expos, and rodeos.