Movies are magic. That may be why magicians had a surprisingly influential role to play in the earliest days of film. Host Shane Rhyne has a conversation with Dr. Matthew Solomon from the University of Michigan about the life of Georges Méliès and the influences of magic and magicians on early comedy. Shane also talks with magician and comedian Erik Tait (as seen on CW's Penn & Teller: Fool Us) about how comedy and magic still work together today.
Full notes will be published on the Acting Funny website at actingfunnypodcast.com
YouTube link for this episode's featured film: Une nuit terrible
YouTube link for Erik Tait's appearance on Fool Us.
YouTube link for the Audiovisual Lexicon of Media Analysis, co-edited by Matthew Solomon.
Matthew Solomon University of Michigan faculty website.
Books available from Matthew Solomon.
Erik Tait website: ErikTait.com
Erik Tait social media: Instagram - Twitter
Penguin Magic Podcast (hosted by Erik Tait)
This episode's sponsor is Offbeat Agent.
ACTING FUNNY
Season 01 - Episode 02
1896 - Une nuit terrible (Dir. George Méliès)
SHANE RHYNE:
Welcome to Acting Funny, the podcast that takes comedy films seriously. I’m your host, Shane Rhyne- a standup comedian, voice actor, and movie lover.
I’m hoping to see what I can learn about the 125-year history of comedy film, one year at a time, with the help of experts from around the world. Each episode of Acting Funny focuses on a single year where I’ll spotlight one film from that year to see what I can learn about the movies and people who make us laugh.
And, I’m inviting you to join me as I learn from scholars, comedians, filmmakers and experts on a variety of topics. I hope together we’ll learn more about comedy, films, and ourselves.
Today, Acting Funny is going to the movies in the year 1896.
Hello friends, and welcome to episode 2 of Acting Funny. In this episode we’re returning to Paris to spend A Terrible Night with cinema pioneer Georges Méliès in the year 1896.
I’m hoping to learn why magicians played such an important role in the early days of cinema. To help me with that question, I’ll be joined in conversation with the University of Michigan’s Dr. Matthew Solomon, a film historian and author of Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the 20th Century.
And, for my next trick, I’ll talk with magician and comedian Erik Tait, seen on the CW network’s Penn and Teller: Fool Us, about his own journey into the worlds of comedy and magic today.
Through both conversations I get a better idea of why comedy is so important to our human nature. And also, why comedy is not just a stand alone art form, but an important part of the development of other genres, too, such as drama, horror, and science fiction, to name just a few.
So, don’t vanish, we’ll talk about all of this, plus one giant bed bug, right after a few magic words from this episode’s sponsor.
SPONSOR ANNOUNCEMENT (OFFBEAT AGENT)
SHANE:
Today’s episode is sponsored by Offbeat Agent. The Offbeat Agent is Matt Ward, a comedian and real estate agent in Ohio. Buying or selling a home can be stressful, having someone who can keep you smiling through the process can be invaluable. Follow him on Instagram at offbeatagent. That’s offbeatagent at Instagram to learn more about Matt Ward and how he can help you buy or sell your next home in Ohio. He’s totally not a douche.
[MUSIC: Offbeat Agent jingle]
SHANE:
Have you ever been lying in bed only to have your sleep interrupted by a creepy, crawly visitor? Hang on, this isn’t a weird mattress ad. This is a description of our featured film for today’s episode.
So, have you ever felt a bug crawling on you while you tried to relax in bed? How did you react? Were you scared? Did you do battle or run away? And, after it was all over, did you fall back to sleep peacefully or did you reawaken constantly convinced there were more bugs in your bed?
That’s pretty much the story told in the one minute long film Une nuit terrible, known in English as A Terrible Night, by Georges Méliès in 1896. There is, of course, a YouTube link in the show notes so you can watch this film yourself if you’d like to, before going any further.
Méliès is our film’s star, as well as it’s director and writer. Even if you don’t know him by name, you likely know a little something about his work. Chances are pretty good that you’ve at least viewed one scene from his 1902 cinema classic A Voyage to the Moon. You know the one. The one where a rocket ship crashes into the Man in the Moon’s eye? Even if you haven’t seen the original version of that scene, you’ve likely encountered one of the countless parody versions of it or even outright tributes.
Perhaps you’ve seen the Smashing Pumpkins’ 1995 video for Tonight, Tonight if you’re of a certain age and spent a fair amount of time watching MTV back in the days of flannel shirts and mumbled lyrics. Or, maybe you enjoyed the 2011 Martin Scorsese film Hugo. If you’ve done any or all of these, you’ve spent at least a few moments in the world of Georges Méliès, and it is a world made up of whimsy, fantasy, and wonder. It is a place where the practical and the improbable live side by side in a childlike visual world that seems like the entries in someone’s dream journal have come to life. In short, his world is magical.
And what is more magic than movies?
We speak in terms of “movie magic” when we try to describe the ways film connects to our emotions, the way movies transport us to other times and other worlds, or to the special effect techniques that make us believe a man can fly or that a giant ape can climb a skyscraper.
But in 1896, the very idea of cinema itself was a magic trick and some of the first pioneers of the new artform were, quite literally, magicians.
Méliès himself was the manager of what was at the time the world’s most famous magic theater: the Robert Houdin Theater in Paris. It was this gig that earned him an invitation to attend the December 1895 screening of the films by the Lumière brothers at the Paris cafe which was the centerpiece of our previous episode.
By all accounts he immediately saw the potential benefits of introducing film technology into his magic show performances. And, by April 1896, films were indeed being shown as part of the entertainment at the Robert Houdin Theater. By the summer of that year, Méliès was making his own films with a camera he had cobbled together from a projector he had purchased from a British inventor and filmmaker named Robert W. Paul. (Fun fact: we’ll be featuring Mr. Paul in our 1897 episode.)
By December 1896, one year after sitting in the audience for the Lumiere showing, film had taken on a very prominent role in the creative energy of Georges Méliès as he founded Star Film Company, his own film production company, in Paris.
Our featured film today is among the first of those films made by Méliès. Une Nuit Terrible is listed as film number 26 in the Star Film Company catalog.
Méliès is best known today for his pioneering of in-camera special effects such as double exposures and trick photography where he quickly substitutes one image for another to make people or objects appear and disappear. But, A Terrible Night doesn’t make use of any of his usual bag of advanced tricks. Instead, the special effects found in A Terrible Night are pretty simple by his standards: a giant cardboard or paper bug is pulled along a wire by an off-screen stagehand.
When I watch this film I see Méliès at work playing with audience reactions in multiple ways. I feel confident the giant bug is meant to create both a sense of the ridiculous and horror to the viewer as our would-be sleeper confronts a comically-oversized, but no less skin crawling, insect. The continued unease of our hero, even after killing and disposing of the bug, is a nearly universal reaction that would certainly be seen by the viewer then and now with some sense of levity and recognition. I don’t think it’s a stretch of the imagination to say that Méliès understood that comedy and horror are closely related to one another in how they generate instinctive and uncontrollable physical reactions from the audience.
Méliès is frequently hailed as one of the founding fathers of the genres of horror, science fiction, and fantasy films. Whether his movie characters are doing battle with giant bed bugs, tormented by demons in haunted hotels, journeying to the moon, or swimming with mermaids and King Neptune himself, you can easily see why he earns that recognition.
But, I have to wonder if Méliès isn’t also a founding father of film comedy, for his films like this and many of his other creations in the 1890s, are filled with cartoonishly over-blown, sometimes hyper violent, images and effects that, I believe, are meant to make us laugh more than they are intended to horrify us. Or, at least, I think they’re meant to do both equally. So maybe Méliès should be credited as founding father of the comedy hybrid subgenre where you’ll find categories like comedy-horror, sci fi-comedy, action comedy, and others in your Netflix search screen.
[SFX: Audio Clips from Wonder Man and Babe]
[WONDER MAN]
DANNY KAYE as BUZZY BELEW:
Oh what a set-up! When I think of all the time I wasted livin’...
DANNY KAYE as EDWIN DINGLE:
Please be serious. Did you say you sing and dance in a nightclub?
VIRGINIA GILMORE as SAILOR’S GIRLFRIEND:
No. I work in a bakery. But a lot of people take me for Lana Turner.
BUZZY BELEW:
Oh, you can fool me honey.
EDWIN DINGLE:
Please stop that! How am I going to take your place?
SAILOR’S GIRLFRIEND:
What? At the bakery?
EDWIN DINGLE:
No, at the nightclub.
SAILOR’S GIRLFRIEND:
But, I don’t work in a nightclub.
BUZZY BELEW:
But I do!
EDWIN DINGLE:
I know you do.
SAILOR’S GIRLFRIEND:
Are you trying to tell me where I work?
EDWIN:
Will you please stay out of this conversation?
SAILOR’S GIRLFRIEND:
Well, you talked to me first, you masher!
BUZZY BELEW:
Oh no!
[BABE]
DANNY MANN as FERDINAND:
You look like an intelligent, sophisticated, discerning young fella.
CHRISTINE CAVANAUGH as BABE:
Who, me?
TRAILER NARRATOR:
The pig with the gift of gab…
BABE:
La la laaa!
TRAILER NARRATOR:
...nerves of steel…
BABE:
Get outta here ya...ya...big butt heads!
TRAILER NARRATOR:
...and a heart…
BABE:
May I call you Mom?
TRAILER NARRATOR:
...of gold…
ANIMALS:
Awwww
TRAILER NARRATOR:
Babe.
SHANE:
You’ve just heard excerpts from the 1945 comedy Wonder Man starring Danny Kaye and directed by H. Bruce Humberstone, along with an excerpt from the cinematic trailer to the 1995 comedy/fantasy Babe, directed by Chris Noonan.
What these films, released half a century apart from each other have in common is a gold statuette named Oscar. Wonder Man was the first comedy to win an Academy Award for special effects. Babe, released more than 25 years ago now, was the most recent comedy to win that same award.
Making a comedy may not be the most reliable way to earn an Oscar for special effects, as most people think of special effects as the primary domain of science fiction blockbusters and superhero fantasies.
And, I think that Méliès and his role as a pioneer in special effects makes it easy to focus on his connections to sci-fi, horror, and fantasy. But comedy and the magic of special effects have been lifelong partners from the very birth of cinema itself as we learn from Georges Méliès.
I want to know if others see Méliès as an influence in comedy the way I see him and I’m curious to know more about the role of magic and magicians in the birth of cinema. So, I’m excited to see what I can learn from our first guest today, Dr. Matthew Solomon.
Matthew Solomon is an associate professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Media at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century, winner of the 2011 Kraszna-Krausz award for best moving image book, and he is the author of a monograph on Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush for the BFI Film Classics series. He is the editor of Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Méliès’s Trip to the Moon, for which he produced a critical edition DVD, and he is currently completing a book about Méliès and material culture prospectively titled "Méliès Boots." He co-edits The Audiovisual Lexicon for Media Analysis, a compilation of short educational videos that can currently be found on YouTube along with two book series: “Cinema Cultures in Contact” for the University of California Press and “Out of the Archives” for the University of Michigan Press.
Matthew spoke to me from his home in Michigan about the life and influence of George Méliès.
SHANE (to MATTHEW SOLOMON):
I guess one of the first questions I want to ask you is why were magicians and magic shows so integral in the early days of cinema’s creation?
MATTHEW SOLOMON:
Magic was important to early cinema because it was a new technology of trickery. Cinema at it’s base is an illusion of movement. We don’t actually see movement on screen. We see a bunch of still images that succeed each other so quickly that we believe we’re seeing motion. Likewise, it’s an illusion of depth. It’s a flat image which takes on depth when projected on screen. So, it’s fundamentally an illusionist’s technology. And so, magicians in 1895, they immediately recognized this.
SHANE:
They did recognize this as “This is something that we can use in our performances” moreso than “This is something I can use to move to a new field.” Is that more or less correct? They were just looking at how to integrate that into what they were already doing?
MATTHEW:
Correct. The thing to remember is that there was no field of cinema. A better way of looking at it is, there was this thing called the cinematograph, which was a machine that did what we know it does. But there was no film business. There was no cinema industry. There was no institution of going to the movies.
Purpose-built movie theaters don’t really come in until 1905, 1906. Then you have an explosion of nickelodeon theaters. So there really was no such thing as “cinema,” per se. And that’s, I think, important to remember during that ten year early period.
SHANE:
So, you didn’t “go to the movies” as an audience member. You went to something else and you might and you might have encountered a movie while there as part of the experience. And magicians then would be the very likely place that that would happen.
MATTHEW:
So, you know, in the 1890s, you would have seen movies in a vaudeville theater. You would have seen them maybe as part of a magic show, as part of a traveling fairground show. And those are some of the spaces where magicians were very active and they were immediately using cinema, which was a relatively inexpensive technology at that time, to project films as part of their shows.
SHANE (to the LISTENERS):
Early on in the interview, Dr. Solomon turned the tables and asked me a question.
MATTHEW (to SHANE):
How did you come to Méliès who, unfortunately, is not usually thought of in terms of comedy?
SHANE:
I guess with him...is the idea that these films that he makes where he’s doing the trick editing and things like that, the object of it, I think, is that he is-- because the things are so fantastical and beyond reality-- that one of the expected results has to be that he’s thinking the audience is going to laugh at this. Because it is a wild fantasy to be able to snap your fingers and be able to make people change clothes and these ideas.
So, I latched onto it almost immediately as this had to be some sort of comedy, or have comedy built into it. And, I would imagine his stage performance style was like that as well?
MATTHEW:
So, I think you’re onto something which I think hasn’t gotten its due really, in thinking about Méliès, because people are so eager to think about him as a storytelling filmmaker and as a trick filmmaker, as this special effects kind of genius.
But, I actually think you’re onto something which is equally, if not more important, which is the element of comedy. And he certainly brought that to his stage performances. He was doing magic sketches at his magic theater, which he operated since 1888.
And one of the things that he brought to those magic sketches, which the other magicians didn’t always love, was this really irreverent, violent, physical comedy, which I think is crucial.
He had a long-running show- over a thousand performances- The Recalcitrant Decapitated Man, and it was just wild comedy mixed with the kind of unexpected transformations and the impossibilities of magic. So, I think that’s there from the beginning. And, one of the things that I’ve found in looking through his surviving films- 520 he made, a little more than 200 of which survive- is how often we see characters on screen laughing physically in a silent film. Laughing. And if you look at Trip to the Moon, there’s a great sequence where they’re supervising the construction of the capsule which will take the astronauts to the moon and somebody falls in a pail and people stop to laugh. And I think that’s an important moment and it’s kind of characteristic of what Méliès was doing: mixing together comedy and magic. Both of which, as you astutely note, are based on this unexpected transformation, almost like a punchline effect that comes through visually.
So, again, for me it’s welcome to see somebody approaching Méliès not as a pioneer storyteller or pioneer special effects artist, but as a kind of gifted comedian who was trying to do something quite irreverent in terms of comedy.
SHANE:
I guess one of the things when I first started out watching the early films that I could download or find on YouTube, places like this, is I was struck by the idea that- as you mentioned- they are very violent at times. He’s decapitating people or he’s decapitating himself and putting four or five of his own heads on a table. It is, before the invention of cartoons, it is cartoon violence and that is always meant to make us laugh as well. So, that’s why I think I reacted the way I did.
I said, “Oh. This is comedy.” He’s trying to make us laugh because this is so absurd. Even as a magician for a magic trick, you wouldn’t do this on stage, or if you tried to you were obviously trying to, I think, make them laugh. Not to stun and amaze them and make them wonder how you did it. You’re just trying to get them to be a part of the fun with it and that’s where I started to see him and to realize he has a very important role to play here in this evolution of comedy as we move forward in inventing a kind of cinematic language.
So, let’s back up just a little bit and look at when these magic shows are going, when he’s performing and managing the theater in France, what does a typical magic show of his look like? Do you have an idea of what that’s all about?
MATTHEW:
So, if you look back at the programs which one can do now through the magic of the Gallica, the Bibliothèque Nationale’s online platform, there are generally three parts. And, the thing to remember as well is that Méliès was not the magician on stage. He was a kind of director…
SHANE:
Oh. Ok.
MATTHEW:
...a creator, a kind of behind-the-scenes guy who might appear on stage in a supporting role, but he was not the magician. And, I think this is another misconception that’s worth gently correcting.
So those shows… what he brought to that theater, which was entirely new, was what magicians call a magic sketch, which was a very kind of loose narrative in which illusions are incorporated into a very elementary story. These were not very well-developed stories. It’s maybe about twenty minutes on screen.
And that was part of a kind of three-part show that would involve other kinds of more straightforward magic. After 1896, it eventually involved films as part of that structure. That was the kind of context into which he developed his aesthetic.
The thing that I would again emphasize is that magicians didn’t quite know what to do with it. This was not only a magic theater in Paris, but it was the most famous, the most renowned magic theater. So, to have this guy come in who wasn’t terribly experienced as a professional magician take over the theater and start performing these magic sketches which really nobody had seen before. There were magicians in London who were doing something sort of similar. I think that was a shock to the system. And he carries that over into cinema when he starts making longer films starting in 1896, 1897.
SHANE (to LISTENERS):
And so, naturally, now that Dr. Solomon knew what drew my interest to Méliès, I was curious to know the same about him.
SHANE (to MATTHEW):
What brought you to Méliès? You have a great interest in him. You’ve written some works on him and you’re working on another one I understand. So, how did you get involved and what drew you to him?
MATTHEW:
I saw his, probably A Trip to the Moon, in a film class in college my response was utter confusion. I didn’t understand what it… “What? What is this?”
It was like nothing I’d ever seen before in a way that just made me curious. I just have a natural affinity for trying to sort out things I don’t understand and it became a kind of puzzle which for better or for worse has been over two decades of just trying to sort of get at what some of these things were.
And then I had the pleasure of meeting his granddaughter...
SHANE:
Wow.
MATTHEW:
...and got very interested in their story which is told so nicely, I think, in Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Scorsese’s Hugo. So, I got very interested in that part of the story which continues today with his descendants.
I’m working on a book about Méliès which should be complete early next year, but alongside that I’ve also been working to get his biography finally translated into English, not by me but by a professional translator. I’ll be excited for the world, the English-reading world, to get that story coming from his granddaughter who just passed away two years ago at the age of 92.
It became fascinating in some cases because I was having direct contact with the people involved, quite literally. So, that continued my obsession, if you will.
SHANE (to LISTENERS):
A great thing about these conversations is that I am often presented new (to me at least) ideas on how the comedy and films of our past are interconnected with those of our present. In our discussion of Méliès and his early comedy, Dr. Solomon introduced a surprising connection for me to consider.
MATTHEW (to SHANE):
Méliès, one thing he might be the originator of, is the prank film. Later in the hands of Jackass and others it becomes a kind of really robust genre. But Méliès is a prank filmmaker and I would insist that some of his greatest early films are essentially prank movies that are a hundred years ahead of their time. A hundred years before this stuff goes viral on YouTube, Méliès was doing prank films. And there’s several which that’s the whole structure of the thing is somebody gets pranked and to me that’s pretty cool.
And I also think it’s not the Méliès we think we know. I would urge you to look at some of those titles because I think that’s a different kind of comedy even than comedy-magic which is pretty sedate is pretty- not genteel, but it’s not… you know… Jackass is not acceptable for all ages. Jackass is not G rated.
SHANE:
No.
MATTHEW:
And, there’s an element of Méliès which is exactly that. And it’s something we ought to remember when thinking about what he did, what he contributed to cinema.
I think it’s connected with a group of artists called The Incoherents who were deliberately trying to overturn some of the kind of assumptions of what art was or what art did. I don’t think Méliès himself was an Incoherent, that was the name of the movement so to speak, but he took something from that group which was… you know…
Famous Incoherent art: a sculpture made out of cheese, a loaf of bread upon which something had been painted.
SHANE:
(laughter)
MATTHEW:
Just to try to overturn the entire idea of what art was or what art could be. I think Méliès brought that to the stage of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin. He brought that to cinema. And I would say it’s perhaps his most lasting contribution.
SHANE:
Well that’s perfect because that’s one of the questions I wanted to ask. I think it’s interesting that you’re making a direct connection to Jackass, because I also have seen interviews with Johnny Knoxville where he makes a direct connection to himself and Buster Keaton. But I can see both of those influences, whether or not he even knows of the Méliès influence. I can certainly see from your description why that is a possibility.
It’s interesting because the first film in this series I’m doing is a prank film. It’s obviously the Lumière’s gardener, and so the very first film is a prank film.
MATTHEW:
To me it’s remarkable that some of these “dead” genres that are very present in early cinema but seem to disappear with longer cinema and then probably they reappear pretty much intact even if Johnny Knoxville never saw a single Méliès film, he’s part of that lineage in some way.
SHANE:
Yeah, the DNA is still very alive. In stand-up comedy, we will tell a joke. We will write a joke and be very proud of ourselves for something we have written and thinking how original this is. And then realize, somebody told this joke in 1910 or a variation on this theme. (laughs) Will Rogers did this better than we did 70 years ago, or 80 years ago. And that kind of idea is great fun, really, to me. That’s one of the things I enjoy about it is finding out, “Oh! There’s a context to all of this.” This doesn’t just spring out of nothing. There’s an historic trail we can follow. And that’s why I wanted to do this project.
MATTHEW:
But, I would also urge you to think about the ways in which… let’s not ghettoize comedy as its own thing. Let’s see the way it inflects all genres. Again, I was so surprised and delighted that you’d be contacting me about Méliès in the space of comedy, because that is not the way he appears in the history books and that’s not the way he’s talked about. And I thought, “How astute that this guy would call him out under the heading of comedy.”
Frankly, you know, in every single book about Méliès ever published there’s a side note at best and to the book that was published weeks ago on Méliès I don’t recall seeing much about comedy there. I think that’s a major loss and I really do think that we sadly have really wanted to put comedy in a separate space. Certainly, it’s a genre, but like melodrama it’s a genre that inflects every single genre. So, let’s not keep it separate.
SHANE:
That’s my goal. Because what I want to get into is… It starts early on with a conversation I had with friends. We were talking about the Academy Awards of all things and why do comedies not get recognized there. And even though box office numbers tell us that people love comedies the Academy does not seem to care. It’s not serious film. But I make the comment, and that’s what the tagline of this podcast is, “The podcast that takes comedy film seriously” because I think it has a serious role to play in film and in society in general.
As a comedian, I understand that comedy is an important part of how we evolve and move forward. It tells us where we are, where we’ve been, and where we hope to be going with comedy. We do that with stand up. I think comedy film does that as well.
And when comedy crosses genres, especially you know, comedy-horror, comedy-action films, all these types of places where comedy is infused into the DNA of other genres, I want to explore that. How did we get there?
Because when you talk about Méliès, what I hear most of the time is horror and science fiction. And with A Trip to the Moon, legitimately with science fiction, he has an influence there to play. But I am like you, I keep saying, “But there’s this comedy piece.”
I don’t know why I saw it. I show it to my friends and they say, “Oh, that’s interesting.”
They don’t see the same bit of comedy that I’m seeing. This is clearly a comedy. He’s making this to be… It’s not me seeing it and thinking it’s funny 125 years later, it was intended to be funny 125 years ago.
MATTHEW:
Absolutely right. If you have come through a class and you’ve been taught “Well this is what this thing is,” then you tend to go down that road and it really takes someone who’s outside the situation and who hasn’t had a kind of formal training of “Here’s what this actually represents” to see something which is hidden in plain sight.
The other thing I would stress that was such a discovery for me was part of his artistic legacy that usually gets dismissed in about two sentences roughly is that he spent six months as a professional caricaturist drawing political caricatures in 1889-1890. I was doing some research at the Library of Congress and I asked for this book of caricatures, which I think there’s only two copies in the world, three maybe. It blew my mind because you have these giant oversized pages and Méliès is an amazing, amazing draftsman. And they’re political images, but they’re funny as well.
And I thought, “Why aren’t we thinking about Méliès in this framework” as comedy. Caricature is funny. It’s meant to make you laugh, smile, and recognize something that is from the real world but is absurdly exaggerated and distorted. And, it’s also a commentary on the society that it’s a part of.
I think that’s one of the misreadings of Méliès, that he was utterly disconnected from his world, that he was off making journeys to the moon. If we look at Trip to the Moon, I could argue- pretty forcefully- that it’s a takedown of colonialism. We have these folks that spend all this energy getting to the moon and what do they do when they actually get there? They obliterate these poor hapless Selenites and then they come back to Earth for an award ceremony in which they are celebrated and medals are pinned on their chests and they prance around in the most absurd way.
That’s a takedown of colonialism. To me, that’s a really pointed commentary on what the French and other European nations were doing around the world.
There’s this other part of comedy that we ought to not lose sight of, which you mentioned, which is a kind of commentary, satire, parody.
SHANE:
As a matter of fact, in the intro to Disappearing Tricks, I remember a passage where you had talked about caricature as one of these tenets of comedy and satire, parody, and pranks (I believe), was one of the others. And, you can certainly see all of that happening in his films, that he’s building on all of those. But, the caricature one is actually the revelation part for me. I was not aware going into this that that was part of also who he was. But it makes sense when I look backwards. OK, I can get this because it’s about overblowing things, making them bigger than life, emphasizing certain aspects of them for the humorous quality, but also you’re making a commentary on that thing while you’re doing it, but in a way that people will laugh and not be upset with you. I guess that’s what I’m seeing with that.
MATTHEW:
Yeah, if you could see these images, I think you’d be equally blown away as I was sitting in the reading room of the Library of Congress. They’re just remarkably, well one: accomplished, in terms of drawing, but funny, unexpected. He was turning these things out at a rate of one a week, while he was busy managing his magic theater at the same time. To me that was really such a revelation to see those images. For all these years we’ve known that was there, but it seems to me that we didn’t linger on them long enough to really appreciate what was going on.
SHANE:
Thank you for teaching me. It has been great. I am enjoying this and I am grateful for your help and for your support. I am glad Dr. Abel recommended you to me. He knew exactly who I needed to talk to for this.
MATTHEW:
No, I really appreciate your perspective. Frankly, you’ve helped me think about a chapter that I’m working on about magic and comedy, so this has been mutually beneficial. And again, I love it that you’re coming to it with curiosity, willingness to learn from received ideas, but also to put a different frame around them. Again, I’m excited by what you’ll generate and I’ll be happy to weigh in anytime if you think that would be useful.
SHANE:
I think that would be perfect. I appreciate it very much.
SHANE (to LISTENERS):
I want to thank Dr. Matthew Solomon for taking the time to teach me about Georges Méliès today. You’ll find links to Dr. Solomon’s publications, including Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century in the show notes, along with other links related to films mentioned today. You can find the show notes in the episodes section of the podcast website at actingfunnypodcast.com.
[SFX: Audio Clips from The Geisha Boy and Get to Know Your Rabbit]
[The Geisha Boy]
TRAILER NARRATOR:
The laughs come quicker than a bunny when Jerry plays The Great Wooly, a slap-happy magician on a USO tour dropping in to entertain the troops.
AUDIO: helicopter noises and music
[Get to Know Your Rabbit]
AUDIENCE: (light cheering sounds)
TOM SMOTHERS as DONALD BEEMAN:
Thank you. Thank you very much and it’s great to be in your fine little town. Hit it, Maestro! And now the grand finale!
TRAILER NARRATOR:
You too, as this man already has, can realize your hidden potential and enter the world of applause and live life at the gut level as a tap dancing magician.
AUDIO: piano music and tap shoes tapping
AUDIENCE MEMBER: (laughs loudly)
SHANE:
You’ve just heard excerpts from the cinematic trailers from the 1958 Jerry Lewis comedy The Geisha Boy written and directed by Frank Tashlin, as well as the 1972 Tom Smothers comedy Get to Know Your Rabbit directed by Brian De Palma. Lewis and Smothers both play performers following the rocky road to fame as aspiring magicians. And they are but part of a long line of films that mine the world of magic for comedy.
And, as we learned in the previous segment, the worlds of comedy film and magic have been interconnected since the birth of cinema itself.
And I have to admit that learning about this cross-pollination of magic and comedy delights me. I know that a good chunk of my childhood television viewing habits centered around watching magicians on everything from Saturday morning television to the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson alongside my mother, who marveled at the tricks along with me as we tried to puzzle out how folks like David Copperfield and Doug Henning made their magic. My favorite magicians were the ones who could also make me laugh as I discovered in my teens when cable TV introduced me to performers such as Harry Anderson and Penn & Teller.
I knew I needed to get some insight into the marriage of comedy and magic from someone in the world of magic. And, it just so happens that the most famous magician I personally know is Erik Tait. Like me, Erik grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee. We both entered the world of comedy from the local standup comedy open mic scene, although just a few years apart. In fact, when I first crossed paths with Erik as a performer, he was based in Columbus, Ohio, as a part of that city’s vibrant comedy scene.
Erik has won awards for both his standup and his magic performance. He has performed on the CW network’s Penn & Teller: Fool Us, and was the 2018 champion of the International Brotherhood of Magicians Gold Cups Close Up Competition. He has a college degree in comedy writing and performance from Humber College in Toronto, and has performed at Second City Toronto, the Magic Castle, and XM Radio, as well as comedy, magic, and burlesque festivals across North America. He also is a videographer for Penguin Magic and is the host of the Penguin Magic Podcast, a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top names in magic.
Erik spoke to me from his home in Columbus, Ohio, about his love of the history of magic, and how he learned to combine comedy and magic.
SHANE:
Please welcome to the episode: Erik Tait. Erik, thanks for joining us on Acting Funny.
ERIK TAIT:
Hi, Shane. Thanks for having me.
SHANE:
Well great. I am so glad to have you hear. I have been a fan of your comedy. Actually, I was a fan of your comedy before I knew you were also actually a magician.
SHANE and ERIK: (laughter)
ERIK:
Well clearly you have terrible taste in very niche subjects.
SHANE:
I have been accused. But actually the first few times I saw you perform I don’t think I saw you perform magic with your comedy. It wasn’t until later that you revealed to me that you also do this thing.
So, I wanted to talk to you for a little bit. In this episode we’re talking about Georges Méliès…
ERIK:
Yeah.
SHANE:
...from the Robert Houdin Theater in Paris. And I don’t know how, where you are, in his work in cinema, or also what I’ve been learning on this whole journey where I’m teaching myself the history of comedy film, is that magicians were some of the very first adopters of the new technology of cinema. They flocked to it.
ERIK:
Yeah.
SHANE:
Does that make sense to you?
ERIK:
Yeah, magicians have tended to early adopters of almost every technology, because (A) you have to be kind of nerdy to be into this thing. So you tend to examine all kinds of weird avenues. A really good example, not in cinema, of magicians being early adopters of technology in general in Velcro.
The first people who had Velcro were NASA, you know the hook-and-loop fabric. And then magicians were the second. It got out into the wild and magicians were the first to have widespread adoption of Velcro. So, it doesn’t terribly surprise me that magicians would be early adopters of film and film-like technology.
I do know that Méliès worked with Robert Houdin, who we sort of consider the Father of Modern Magic. Prior to Houdin bringing magic into the theater, magic was often done in the streets and magicians wore wizard’s robes and things like that. It was still light entertainment and like conjuring as you would think of it. And it was very much, “Hey, let’s do our best to look exactly like” sort of Arthurian legend… why am I blanking on the name?
SHANE:
Merlin?
ERIK:
Merlin! Yeah, Merlin the Magician. You’ve got a lot of people who try to look like that. Early tricks they would have done would be “ball and cone” in which there is this little ball that appears on top of and underneath the leather cone and disappears and vanishes and changes and things.
But Robert Houdin took it off the streets and put it into the theater. He was the first magician to wear a tuxedo. He was also a watchmaker and made clockwork contraptions. His most famous one was an orange tree where he would borrow a handkerchief from a woman and would vanish it. And then this tree on stage would sprout flowers and these flowers would grow oranges. And he would pluck the oranges off and throw them to the audience to eat as a treat. But then two moths, clockwork moths, would rise up out of the orange tree with the lady’s handkerchief. And so it had vanished and then appeared in this impossible location.
If you actually watch the movie The Illusionist, there’s a CGI version of this particular effect. But the orange tree that Robert Houdin did is still in existence. I don’t know if it’s in Copperfield’s collection or in Mike Caveney’s collection, but people have seen it. It was a real thing.
SHANE:
Wow.
ERIK:
When you read this description of it, it sounds like something that could only be accomplished with modern pneumatics and Servo mode or somethings like that, but nope, he did it all with clockwork.
Magicians have always been on the cutting edge of technology. Like today, I work for Penguin Magic, we’re the world’s largest online magic retailer. We’re one of the biggest magic companies in the world and we deal with new magic tricks that use really, really cutting edge technology inside of it. So, it’s not all sleight of hand. It’s a lot of tech. So being one of the early adopters of movies is not a terrible surprise.
Really when you start to think about what early cinema was, the idea of being able to show a series of pictures so fast that they moved and apparently of their own accord. I mean that’s magic. Even today when I watch a YouTube video, there’s a little part of me that goes, “This is insane. What I’m looking at is a miracle.”
SHANE (to LISTENERS):
During our conversation, I mentioned the idea that I had shared previously with Dr. Solomon, that Méliès’ wildly fantastical images must have been intended to evoke laughter as much as shock. Erik shared with me his thoughts on how laughter and shock are so closely related.
ERIK:
Humor is in an innate state in humans. It’s a defense mechanism. Beyond the fight or flight response that we have, we also have the response for laughter and that can sort of almost be considered a third thing. Because laughter is sort of the way we deal with the unexpected whether it’s humorous or grotesque. Laughter is the way we do that.
So, I think anyone anytime is sort of approaching presenting something to people I feel like comedy is always inherently a part of any exploration of a new medium, just because we want people to think we are clever and charming and things like that. Whether or not you’re approaching it as a craft, like you and I do, it’s something like…
If you go onto a dating site right now and you look at ten different profiles, I guarantee you at least eight of them will say, “My friends think that I’m hilarious” or something like that.
And in exploring a new medium like film the way Méliès was, it’s only natural for him to want to play with absurdity or play with something humorous because quite frankly drama is difficult and uncomfortable. And when you’re playing with something new, you don’t want to play with something difficult or uncomfortable.
Take Photoshop as an example. How many kids got a bootleg copy of Photoshop 3 and the first thing they did was photoshop their head onto a horse or something like that. They didn’t want to make something, they didn’t want to recreate a war scene, or some sort of horrific thing, they wanted to make something that would make them laugh. That’s almost the first thing everyone does with Photoshop.
It’s the same thing with making films. I think a lot of people just want to play with something that makes them comfortable and happy and that’s just where humor lives. It’s not surprising that it would be early on.
I think that people take cinema very seriously and films very seriously because it’s an art form. There are people who have elevated it to a very serious art form and dealt with interesting and difficult topics, but at the end of the day when you first play with a camera, oftentimes you’re just taking photos of weird things or happy times or of enjoyable times. So, it’s a no brainer that this would have been some of the first uses for it.
SHANE (to LISTENERS):
When I had watched Erik’s performance on television on Penn & Teller’s Fool Us, I was struck by something he said about the dueling motives of comedy and magic. In short, he said that comedy is about telling a truth while magic is about telling a lie. So, finding a way for magic and comedy to co-exist involves a delicate balancing act to get just right. I have thought about that comment and lot, especially as I learned more about the role of magicians in film comedy, so I asked Erik to expound on the idea a bit more for me.
ERIK:
Yeah, it’s based on something I heard a really wonderful comedy magician named David Acer, he’s a wonderful Canadian comedian and magician. He said that comedy and magic have a hard time because they compete against each other. Because it’s very difficult to make somebody laugh and have a moment of astonishment at the same time. Usually what happens is you get half of a laugh and half of a trick and they compete against one another.
Comedy is fundamentally about telling a truth. Magic is fundamentally about telling a lie. Magic may be about telling a truth through a lie, but at some level there is deception going on. There’s very few magic tricks where you can tell the truth the entire way through and when we find those we guard them jealously because they’re so rare.
So, telling the truth and telling a lie at the same time are very very difficult to do. So very often what you have to do when you’re combining magic and comedy is you have to tell a lie in service to a truth or use the lie as a metaphor for the truth that’s in the comedy. This is all expanding on some thoughts and theories David Acer had and I feel like when we filmed that thing for Fool Us that I talked for hours and hours and hours about it and you obviously have thirty seconds to convey exactly who you are so they just sort of pluck the quote out and put it in there, which I’m not begrudging them at all because their editors are fantastic and they work very hard at what they do. They have a very difficult job to convey who a magician is and where they’re coming from.
And it was all so interesting to put in the context of that trick, because that trick is not necessarily funny. That trick is all about skill and the demonstration of overt skill, because it’s a competition piece for magicians. It was really only designed to be seen by magicians, not by lay people, but here we are.
SHANE:
What I love about that and what you’re getting at is that the trick itself is not meant to be funny, but the way you present it was very funny and that’s based on your background as well. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Let’s walk back a little bit.
ERIK:
Yeah.
SHANE:
And let’s find out more about who you are and how you got into comedy and magic and all of that.
ERIK:
I got into magic kind of at an early age off and on. I had magic kits as a kid. My first trick arguably, was a trick called “The Cups and Balls” that my dad bought for me at this magic shop in Atlanta that was really amazing and fascinating. I’ve been doing that trick for twenty years. I still do it to close a lot of shows.
I didn’t really get seriously into magic until I was 18 or 19. I was on the cusp of graduating high school and I was working as a juggler. At a very young age I got heavily involved in juggling and had some wonderful mentors in juggling who sort of brought me in and helped me put together an act and start getting gigs. I started working at this theater called The Comedy Barn in Pigeon Forge and the owner said, “Well, you’re a juggler, you must know magic. We have a magic shop at the counter. Go sell tricks there while we’re not doing a show.”
Because the cast all worked in the concessions stands, souvenir booths, and things like that. So, I walked over to this magic shop and there was this ventriloquist back there named Stephen Knowles. I think he’s still in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, which is where this was. And he taught me my first couple of pitch tricks- the Svengali Deck, Mental Photography, Magic Coloring Book- things you would buy in a touristy magic shop and then I started performing them that day. And quite literally the same day I learned real magic tricks was also the same day I became a professional magician. And it sort of took off from there. I got very interested in card tricks and focused on that.
In comedy, because I was a quote-unquote professional juggler from almost middle school on, doing corporate gigs and company picnics, and birthday parties and things like that…
There’s two kinds of jugglers in the world as far as I can tell: there’s technical jugglers and there’s comedy jugglers. Sometimes the technical jugglers are also comedy jugglers. But there’s very few people who are doing very serious political and social commentary with juggling. And so I took the comedy route very early on and so when I ended up in high school… you know my mentors were comedians, too...Scott and Joan Houghton were a comedy husband-and-wife juggling team. They introduced me to a lot of people- Avner the Eccentric, Bob Sheets, people like that who were all comedians and variety entertainers.
So, when I ended up in high school, I was taking theater classes and I tended towards the comedy. I went to Farragut High School which has a very well-known improv team in the area at least when I was there 15-20 years ago. The improv team would perform shows once a month and they were always sold out and we fed into some of the other adult improv teams in the area after we graduated. So I started doing comedy in high school working with improv and at the same time a profound thing happened in my household: my parents divorced and my dad got us cable for the first time. And that is where I found Comedy Central and Friday nights was Comedy Central Presents followed by Premium Blend. It was the first time I’d really seen stand up comedy and so I’m a sophomore in high school. And every Friday night I’d get a bottle of ginger ale and some Kroger sushi and I would watch all of the stand up that they had. And I really wanted to do that because there was something very powerful about these people.
I think I talked about this on a different podcast recently. My family has always highly valued education and I like to think that I’m intelligent, when I roll up a D&D character I often place the points in the intelligent and wisdom category. But I value it very highly and what seemed to me was that these comedians were the most intelligent people in the room. They were discussing difficult but important topics and concepts in our culture and society and they were doing it in a way where everybody listened to them and they appreciated it and laughed. So, I wanted to do that. And, I found some stand up comedy nights in Knoxville.
I didn’t really marry those two until I got well into college. I ended up going to Humber College where I studied comedy arts. My degree is in comedy writing and performance. I got it from Humber College in Toronto and ended up going to Los Angeles where I ended up getting more seriously involved in magic. I started getting known for some things, started working at The Magic Castle as a regular job. Now I’m in Columbus, Ohio, where I work for Penguin Magic, the world’s largest online magic company, as well as doing my own shows. Not right now obviously because of COVID.
I’ve got lots of corporate clients- Honda, Barkbox, Nationwide, Macy’s, all clients of mine- I do private parties and corporate events when I’m not filming magicians. It’s one of the things I do for Penguin Magic because I’m a videographer, director and producer. We make instructional materials for magicians and we also make the demos or advertising videos for the tricks that we and other people produce.
SHANE:
Well let me ask you this, it’s a curious question I have about magic. When you’re creating a trick, particularly you, because you have that comedy background stirring in your DNA. Does the comedy… do you ever think about while you’re making the trick what role the comedy could play in the presentation of that trick or are you just making the trick?
ERIK:
It really depends on what I’m doing. Lately for the last year or so I’ve been concentrating on putting together a stand up act because not all magic is made equal. Comedy is nice because the same act can work on a giant theater or a small stage, or in a bar somewhere. But magic doesn’t work the same way.
I’ve been primarily a close up magician for twenty years and I primarily work with cards. So my first theater show, Please Shuffle the Cards, when I put that together I put together some of my strongest material, but I had to set up a camera system so that it could play larger theaters. Without that camera system and projecting my hands and the tabletop over my head the show is really only able to be seen by ten people because it’s that small.
SHANE:
Is there an open mic for magicians? How do you work a joke- work a trick, I mean?
ERIK:
There are. There are more and more open mics. A good friend of mine, Felice Ling in Boston has Magic Lab. In Toronto, the Toronto Magic Company run by Ben Train has put together some magic open mics. In general, there’s not too many magic open mics. Well, the other place to go is magic clubs.
I’m a member of the IBM, the International Brotherhood of Magicians not the International Business Machines. But, the International Brotherhood of Magicians is the world’s largest magic organization. We have 88,000 members in 33 different countries. And, it’s very likely there’s an IBM Ring, that’s what we call our clubs, in your area and they probably meet monthly and they usually have an opportunity for the members to perform. That’s where a lot of people get their very early stuff.
Beyond that, showing it to friends, family. When I’m just hanging out with friends, my friends know I’m a magician, and I’ll ask, “Can I show you something I’ve been working on?” and I’ll do that.
And the other thing is just putting on your own shows, going into a place and saying, “Hey, can I do a magic show here?”
For me, when I’m doing stuff, a lot of it is that I’m advanced enough now that I’m able to work something to the point where I know it’s going to be stage ready and I can just slip it into an act and go, “Is this going to work? I can put it here. If it doesn’t work, it’s fine, because it’s bookended by these two things that are very very strong and I know work.”
I think there’s a lot of Discord groups on magic where they have jam sessions, spontaneous jam sessions, where people will just turn on their webcams and their mics and start doing tricks for each other. I think that’s another great place to work magic out.
SHANE:
Oh, that’s fantastic.
ERIK:
Oh yeah, the pandemic and people getting on board with streaming has really really made that happen. I was in one Friday night. I finished up doing something else I was doing and I hopped into this meeting- there was probably nine or ten people in there- all with videocameras on, all focused on decks of cards on their desks, and we were jamming, doing tricks.
But those are the areas. As far as when I’m just creating a trick or I’m creating magic, with the stage stuff I’m doing, I’m focused on creating an effect that will play for a group of 500 people or more that I don’t need cameras and projection systems to look at. I’m very concentrated on getting it up and out.
For close up stuff, often I’m just working on the trick and then the comedy comes later. For stage stuff, I’m really looking for something where I can go, “Oh, I can write that into a comedy piece.”
There’s an old trick called 20th Century Silks, where you’ve got two blue silks and one red silk. And you tie the two blue silks together and you stuff them somewhere and then you put the red silk in there and you grab the ends of the blue silks and you pull them apart and it’s revealed the red silk is tied on to the two ends of the blue silks in between them. It’s sort of an impossible thing.
I’m sort of looking at this thinking, “Oh, I know how to turn this into a comedy piece.” This is a classic piece of magic and I’m just looking for a new presentation. And a lot of times, that’s just what I’m doing. I’m taking an existing effect, which is if a magic trick is public. Magic is a little bit different than comedy because a lot of magicians learn by imitation. A lot of magicians perform magic never creating an original trick in their entire lives. An original trick is a hard thing to create. And so, a lot of the magic that you see is very often either a variation on something that has been published or someone is hanging a new presentation, a new script- some people would say the word “patter” but I detest that word. It’s a script. It’s a presentation. So, they’re hanging that on this existing thing.
Because I work in creating new magic a lot, I am frequently altering it. So, I’ll go, “Oh, that method’s good, but what would be better is if we did this.”
An example of that is one of the opening effects in my show right now is an effect called Card to Pocket. Basically, a card is signed, it goes into the deck, I snap my fingers and the card reappears in my pocket. Classic trick. Lots of different methods.
I have expanded this into an eight minute piece with the card jumping into my pocket over and over and over again. It’s signed. There’s a moment where you can see the signed card placed on the deck at the same moment that the card is coming out of my pocket. These are all new concepts that I’ve added to it.
I’m going, “What can I do? What is interesting choreography? What is an interesting look? How can I make this more impossible?”
So, now I’m expanding on something. Now it’s sort of becoming jazz. Occasionally, I’ll create a new trick from the ground up and there the comedy is not the most important thing. The most important thing is the effect. What is the overall effect that I want to have on my audience?
With the Invisible Monte, that started as a love affair with a particular piece of sleight of hand. There’s a particular type of card switch that happens with one hand and it’s in the process of turning over a card. I fell in love with it and I wanted to use it as the final moment in a routine because of the way it works. Because with the sleight of hand I’m known for, I’m typically known for doing very difficult sleight of hand that is also very unusual. I’m attracted to rare and difficult sleights, that’s probably because of my background as a juggler.
And so, a lot of magicians like to go see my show because they know I’m going to be doing sleight of hand you just won’t see anywhere else. Someone may do this sleight, but not many people do this collection of sleights in order to use them in the way I do. So, a lot of people are coming to see it, because what I do is really a lot more of a technical display and skill sort of dressed up as magic.
So in that piece, that piece of sleight of hand is the marquee, it’s the show piece. And then, it being combined with other unusual sleights turned it into something and I went, “Oh! Well the clear way to go here is for this to be a Monte. For it to be an Invisible Monte.” That is the hook. A lot of people have done different types of Three Card Montes, but no one has ever played it with invisible cards. And using these sleights, I’m able to get that effect and now at that point it becomes: What are the classic tropes of a Monte effect? Because a Monte effect is a classic plot in magic.
If I examine the nine other routines out there that everyone does, what are the things they all have in common? Ok, well those are the beats that I need to hit. But now, how do I hit those beats in context of this invisible routine and also keeping an eye towards “this needs to happen, I need to have moments that fool people.” And layered on top of all of that is that routine was created specifically for competition. So there are certain actions and activities that magicians will notice and twig to and go “Oh, ok, this is what’s going on.” And, they won’t be fooled. Well, I still want them to be fooled.
So, I have to continue to develop the method and develop the routine so that multiple methods are working in concert to either point towards a false method where I can then pull the rug out from underneath them, or eliminate any possible known method because I’m using something new.
And then once all of that is done, it’s time to go back and relook at the script and go, “Oh, ok, what are the funny parts?” “What is the interesting part?”
Well, playing with invisible cards is inherently funny. I think probably the best way to play this is to play it straight as though it’s happening for real. And so now we end up in sort of an absurdist situation where I am playing this as though it’s real, but we all sort of know that it’s not real, because it’s in this fabricated construct of a show.
The interesting thing is getting people to play with objects that I clearly know where they are because I’m acting and miming these objects and understanding where they exist in space, what direction they are. If someone turns it face up or face down…
There have been moments in doing that routine where someone picks up a card and they put it back, but because of the way they turn their hand and I intellectually know that if they were to place the card back down this way -- I’m miming this so your audio listeners can get the full effect-- but if the card was to be placed back on the table it would be placed face up.
And so I, in that moment, in that instance of that performance, I reach out my hand and I turn the card face down and I can make a comment that it’s a lot easier to find the card if the Queen is face up.
Well, that’s a funny moment in that, but that is built out of this idea that these cards are real to me even though they are invisible and the reality of the situation is that they’re not there and someone else is engaging in terrible mime, for me they’re real. And so all of those moments become possible humorous moments for me to play with.
Now, if you follow the script as I have written it, and most people do, none of that happens. But, making it that real and making the choice as a comedian to play it as absolutely real allows for those things to happen.
SHANE (to LISTENERS):
I want to thank Erik Tait for joining me today to talk about his life in the worlds of comedy and magic. You can learn more about Erik’s works and performances on his website at eriktait.com (that’s Erik with a k - e..r...i..k...t...a...i...t...dot.com). You’ll find a link to his website, his weekly magic podcast, and other info in the show notes on ActingFunnyPodcast.com.
On a December night in Paris 1895, while watching the exhibition of the Lumière films, it is said that Méliès remarked simply, “What a marvelous trick.”
And, as we learned from both of our guests today, Dr. Matthew Solomon and Erik Tait, magicians have enjoyed a long history as early adopters of new technology. So, it should be no surprise at all that Méliès and others immediately saw potential for the cinematograph as a part of a marvelous cutting edge trick for magic performances. Especially Méliès, who had been innovating how magic was presented to an audience during his time as manager of the Robert Houdin Theater.
I also learned along with you that traveling magic shows would be one of the main ways many people would experience motion pictures for the first time, either as a part of the magic act itself or as a piece of a broader program of entertainment curated by these magicians.
And, we learned that Méliès can certainly be considered as much a pioneer in film comedy as he is in the other genres of horror, science fiction, and fantasy. Through his work as a caricaturist and his development of the sketch format in magic, comedy has always been an important part of his creative palette and it certainly remained so as film became his next performance stage.
Méliès had a wonderful sense of fantastical whimsy, combined with a showman’s need to shock an audience into paying attention with over-the-top acts from beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. I believe he meant for these movies to be seen as comedies at least in part, as films that evoke laughter from a sense of wonder and astonishment, and from the pure joy of seeing such improbable realities brought to life before our eyes.
I believe that Méliès knew then what we know now. That comedy is more than a stand-alone genre. As Dr. Solomon reminded me, while the focus of this podcast is comedy films, it is important to remember that comedy does not live in a vacuum. It can, and does, cross-breed with other genres, creating hybrids such as comedy-adventure, sci-fi comedy, and more.
Méliès knew that and may very rightly be considered a great influence in developing a cinematic language that left room for comedy within other genres. And, therefore, to take an interest in comedy films, also requires an interest in exploring other genres to find where comedy’s DNA strand is woven into the work. As Erik Tait pointed out, humor is an innate state of the human experience and is an inherent part of the expression of any new medium, whether that’s a YouTube video in the early 2000s or cinema in the 1890s.
It reminds me of how little I have paid attention to this concept of comedy as a building block for other artistic expressions before today, but it was not a revolutionary idea to Georges Méliès 125 years ago. He knew that comedy and horror are very close siblings to one another and one terrible night could provoke both laughter and discomfort in less than a minute of film. He knew that before we could laugh at the adventures of the Guardians of the Galaxy, we would need him to take us first on a trip to the moon.
And perhaps that was Georges Méliès’ greatest magic trick of all.
Once again, I want to thank the guests for this episode. Matthew Solomon, associate professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Media at the University of Michigan, and Erik Tait, magician, comedian, and host of the Penguin Magic Podcast.
You will find links relating to all of my guests and various projects we discussed in the show notes for the 1896 episode. Visit the extras section of ActingFunnyPodcast.com and you’ll find a listing of movies mentioned in this episode, as well as links to information about books and other media also referenced today.
Thanks also to the Offbeat Agent, Matt Ward, for sponsoring today’s episode.Visit him on Instagram at offbeatagent.
And join me next time as we continue to explore the lives and works of people who have been acting funny for the past 125 years.
In the next episode, we’re taking a quick detour out of the 1890s and paying a surprise visit to the mid 17th century where we’ll learn about an invention that will play a major influence on the careers of our earliest filmmakers.
Be sure to like, follow, or subscribe to Acting Funny on your favorite podcast listening service so you’ll know when the next episode is available.
My name is Shane Rhyne and I’ve been your host for this episode of Acting Funny. Thanks for listening!
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Thank you for listening to this episode of Acting Funny, the podcast that takes comedy films seriously. This episode was written and produced by me, Shane Rhyne.
The theme music was written and performed by Saint Thomas LeDoux.
Sound editing and engineering is provided by Kyle Tollett.
Additional music for this episode was created by ExclusiveSound.
The show’s logo was designed by Andy Forrester. Social media and communications are managed by Shane Rhyne and Tamara Rhyne. You can find links and info about these people on the show’s credits page at actingfunnypodcast.com.