Tag: steve massa
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Looking for Squibs
Two main elements in film programming, I’ve found, are knowing the films and knowing where prints of them are. The rest, to a certain degree, is setting the table or parking cars in a lot. Sometimes the prints turn up in unlikely places, and one film we scheduled for Silent Comedy International at MoMA (Nov 23…
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What’s a Nice Car Like You Doing in a Comedy Short Like This?
Putting Humpty Together Again, Thanks to the Museum of Modern Art and the Library of Congress It isn’t often that a two-reel comedy can be reassembled by accessing a reel from one archive and a reel from another, but we were fortunate in the case of this film. Oh! What a Day (1918) is a…
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The Humor of “Jackass” and AFV In the Early 1900s, as Performed by Marcel Perez and Others
The injury humor of Johnny Knoxville, the Farrelly Brothers, and thousands of anonymous klutzes is nothing new — French and Italian comedians were doing it during movies’ first decade. Last September, a lot of people sent me a link to an article in the New York Times that articulated something I’d been thinking for some…
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Slapsticon 2008 photos
Haven’t had a chance to post since returning from Slapsticon, and am squeezing this post out. There’s lots to report, but this posting of photos taken last week will have to suffice and I’ll post again soon. Here are (L to R) yours truly, Richard Roberts, Philip Carli and Andrew Simpson posing at the Kohler…