It's December 26, Boxing Day! My favorite way to celebrate both Premier League Soccer and HAPPY FISTICUFFS DAY is with classic comedy. Chaplin the reluctant pugilist in CITY LIGHTS works for me!
How do we follow Chaplin? With the great movie comedy teams of yore, beginning with Laurel & Hardy in ANY OLD PORT (1932).
What Boxing Day entertainment can equal Laurel & Hardy? Our pals, The Three Stooges, who actually get story credit on the following, their second Columbia 2-reeler, PUNCH DRUNKS (1934).
PUNCH DRUNKS emphatically illustrates what Stooge-o-philes have long suspected, that Curly Howard's prodigious comedy talent was held substantially in check by how he, Moe and Larry were subservient as Ted Healy's Stooges. The break with Healy, who is terrific in such feature films as SAN FRANCISCO and HOLLYWOOD HOTEL, worked out well for all concerned.
For some reason, spending Boxing Day with The Three Stooges brings to mind Warner Brothers cartoons. Turns out there were actually Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies featuring boxing matches very early on, long before the Termite Terrace days.
There, in the screen credits of this 1932 Looney Tune, is the guy who worked on more WB cartoons than anybody, Friz Freleng.
The following Merrie Melodie, COUNT ME OUT, is a tie with BARS & STRIPES FOREVER as the best cartoon made by the directing duo of Ben "Bugs" Hardaway and Cal Dalton.
For some reason, this blogger finds the ever-cheerful yet unbelievably clueless Egghead, distinguished by his "Joe Penner" voice, to be weirdly endearing.
Not to be outdone, Chuck Jones took on Marquis Of Queensberry rules and brought Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd into the ring in TO DUCK OR NOT TO DUCK.
Never to be outdone, a few years later Chuck Jones and crew produced the boxing cartoon to end all boxing cartoons - Bugs Bunny in RABBIT PUNCH, a perennial favorite of this blog.
At Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, every year, the ceremonial December 26 blog entry shall feature the 1929 Fox comedy short subject Waltzing Around.
Waltzing Around stars the darkest, zaniest and most unpredictable of all movie comedy teams, Bobby Clark & Paul McCullough.
It's among only two existing examples of the team's 1928-1929 series for Fox.
All conventions involving boxing sequences in comedy films are turned upside-down, and the results are hilarious.
Paul McCullough has much more to do in Waltzing Around than he does in the team's subsequent RKO series, and, not surprisingly, he is very funny!
We sincerely hope more of Clark & McCullough's 1928-1929 Fox comedies turn up.
Happy Boxing Day!
2 comments:
Belated Boxing Day wishes! Locally, people were fighting traffic to get to stores to fight over Boxing Day bargains.
Poor Clark and McCullough are kind of lost to history. Did their shorts ever get onto television on any kind of regular basis?
One of my favourite boxing scenes is from Bob Clampett's Porky & Daffy when Daffy is riding his tricycle in the ring.
Belated Boxing Day wishes back 'atcha! No bargain hunting here, as a variant on "the common cold" has hit our household so hard that even the cat is slowed down.
The reason Clark & McCullough are not 100% lost to history is because Leonard Maltin wrote about them at length in Movie Comedy Teams and The Great Movie Shorts. I don't remember ever seeing Clark & McCullough on TV, although they might have made it into such PBS series as "Matinee At The Bijou." As opposed to 190 Three Stooges Columbia shorts, there were only 22 Clark & McCullough RKO 2-reelers.
Porky & Daffy will be my Boxing Day 2023 post! I find Bob Clampett's B&W Looney Tunes from the late 1930's incredibly funny.
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