For the first 55 minutes of Red Skelton's More Funny Faces, Red treated his audience to bad jokes--when he could manage to tell them between overpowering guffaws of fake laughter--and pantomime performances by three other people, despite the fact the audience was there to see him. Imagine if Guns and Roses--the real band, not Axl and the guys he playing with today--reunited and were playing to a sellout crowd. But after playing a quick, poorly rehearsed medley of "Yesterdays," "Civil War," and "You Could Be Mine," they brought out a trained dog act. After that, they return to the stage for a half-assed, flat, out-of-tune rendition of "Paradise City." After that, more dog acts, including a few routines featuring Izzy Stradlin and his four Pomeranians.
While the G&R crowd probably would have burned the building to the ground, Red Skelton's audience couldn't have been happier. Because, as we've previously stated, the 1970's were completely devoid of entertainment. Fucking "Three's Company" was a top rated show!
Now, imagine Guns and Roses is coming back to the stage. Axl offers a heartfelt thank you to everyone for supporting the band and shares how great he felt when Appetite for Destruction and how much it meant for him and how often people come up to tell him about how much they love the album... then detours into a political rant that kind of misses the mark because he's trying to relate "Sweet Child O' Mine" to support for a school voucher program. Finally, the familiar opening chords of "Sweet Child O' Mine" blast from the amps...
And after about sixteen bars, the band stops and everyone leaves the stage.
That is essentially how Red Skelton closes More Funny Faces.
You have to assume that people willing to pay a lot of money to trudge out into a packed amphitheater in the dead of winter in Toronto to see a hack comedian twenty years past his prime are pretty hardcore fans. If they get nothing else, they're going to want to get some Freddy the Freeloader.
Instead, Red Skelton gives them a Freddy cocktease. And he didn't even take the time to make the eye makeup not look like shit. What a fucking asshole.
I also find it interesting that instead of performing as Freddy the Freeloader, he opted to discuss what Freddy the Freeloader means in terms of Skelton's own right wing politics. It should be noted that Skelton was a pretty hardcore conservative who got upset that he couldn't bring on Spiro Agnew and blamed liberals within CBS for the cancellation of his show in 1971.
However, the character is Freddy the Freeloader. He's a panhandler who steals from people. He may have a heart of gold, but at his core he is a layabout beggar who leeches off the more productive within society. One cannot make the case that "he doesn't ask anyone to provide for him." In fact, that's exactly what he does. He's not Freddy the Guy With a Steady Job That Pays the Bills.
The more disturbing belief of Freddy--and by extension of you and me and a little bit of all of us--is that he doesn't want equal rights. Freddy the Freeloader understands that some people don't want to have to look at a filthy hobo while they're eating their lunches, so he's willing to eat out back behind the restaurant, and he can't understand why the darkies can't do the same without raising a fuss. Freddy the Freeloader knows he's not as good as the rich, prominent, heterosexual white men who run the country and wishes the poor, gays, blacks, and women would accept the same!
If this is Red Skelton's most popular, most beloved character who symbolizes all that Red believes and stands for, then fuck you, Red Skelton, fuck you in hell.
Red Skelton's More Funny Faces began as a terribly unfunny observation of what comedy used to be in a time when people were so starved for amusement that "Chico and the Man" was considered groundbreaking entertainment.
After some bland jokes covering hot topics like bad women drivers and drunks, Red manages to throw in an appearance by one of his famous characters, Clem Kadiddlehopper, which the people of 1979 react to as though Santa Claus and Jesus jointly announced that everyone was getting a new Rolls Royce made out of orgasms with all-winning-lottery-ticket interiors.
Before I share the comedic brilliance of Clem Kadiddlehopper, let me share a story. In fourth, fifth, sixth, eighth, and tenth grade, I remember doing poetry lessons that included "Beans" poems. The idea of the poetry lessons was to teach us about different styles of poems and to have us write our own sonnets, haikus, limericks, etc.
The "Beans" poem was a standard part of this curriculum, I assume because it was the easiest to mimic. The poem was just a list of types of beans (pinto beans, green beans, baked beans, kidney beans, etc.) with the ending "Most of all/Best of all/I like jelly beans." The assignment was to pick a different thing and make a list of types of that thing, then end with some kind of twist thing that shared the name but didn't quite fit, like big dogs, little dogs, fluffy dogs, mean dogs, but last of all, best of all, I like hot dogs! Or:
Tough jobs,
Cushy jobs,
Part-time retail jobs,
Fat cat desk jobs-
Those are just a few.
Mall jobs,
Office jobs,
Low-paying menial jobs,
Afterschool jobs,
Dirty jobs too.
Temp jobs,
Service jobs,
Don't forget freelance jobs.
Last of all,
Best of all,
I like blowjobs!
Why did I take the time to go off on this tangent? Because that poem that I spent three minutes writing represents about the same level of effort that Red put into his bit featuring his second most popular character ever.
At least Clem Kadiddlehopper is a notable Red Skelton character. Where More Funny Faces really goes off the rails is when Red takes a break and hands over roughly twenty minutes of his hour long special to mimes.
Every couple of years, America will take an interest in some foreign country and try to co-opt bits of its culture. In the mid-80's everyone was saying, "G'day, mate," every restaurant tried to incorporate some variation of "shrimp on the barbie," Fosters beer sales went from absolutely nothing to slightly more than nothing, and Paul Hogan and Yahoo Serious enjoyed careers as film stars. A few years later, sushi restaurants and karate dojos began popping up in every strip mall. In the 60's, the British Invasion hit America and somewhere in the 1970's someone decided what America really needed was wine bars, fondue sets, and mimes.
Fuck but the 1970's sucked! Oh, and what's the deal with those fucking stupid mime outfits with long sleeves but the low-cut scoop front that exposes the 1970's forest of chest hair? It serves no practical purpose other than to announce, "I am a mime. You can tell because I am wearing a lycra mime outfit! You know... in case the fucking white makeup didn't tip you off."
Marcel Marceau does another routine where he acts as a lion tamer and a mime couple does some kind of routine where she's a balloon and he's got her by a string. When Red Skelton comes out between their acts, he engages in pantomime himself. As we all know, the key to good mime is not speaking. One must show and not tell. Only through the actions can the audience relate to the performer. If you have to explain it, you suck at miming.
With that in mind, please listen to Red's intro to his Eiffel Tower pantomime routine.
And, just in case making people who paid money to come watch you perform sit through half an hour of mime while you chill in your dressing room isn't insult enough, Red Skelton saved the biggest fuck you for the last five minutes.
Next time: Red Skelton, Cock Tease
If I could go back in time and punch anyone from history in the face, it would be Red Skelton.
Skelton is known as a classic American comedian by those who have never seen him or have no idea what humor is. If you look up his DVDs on Amazon or Netflix, you will find overwhelmingly positive 4-to-5 star reviews, but if you actually read them you'll find they are written only by the people who are so devoid of any taste that they could actually sit through an entire hour of this tripe.
The key thing you will notice in every positive review is a harkening back to "the good old days when comedians didn't have to work blue to be funny." They'll lament that "the youth of today have been poisoned by the lack of censorship" and "good clean humor seems to have left the public venue of entertainment" and "it is so sad that comedians now have to use profanity to make people laugh" Again and again, the endorsement you will see most often is "you can let your kids watch this and not worry that they'll be exposed to anything offensive."
True, Red Skelton won't bust out Carlin's "7 Words" or Patton Oswalt's "A Blowjob Behind the Tilt-a-Whirl." But suggesting that anything Skelton does or says is superior to either of those routines merely because of a lack of words deemed inappropriate by arbitrary standards of an uptight minority is either dishonest or moronic.
Those who claim Skelton's humor is funny--or more importantly funnier than modern comedians--do so with that same condescending moralizing and unconvincing zealotry of vegans insisting grilled eggplant tastes better than steak.
I first was exposed to and became dangerously obsessed with Red Skelton in 1997. I went to Los Angeles for a job interview with Fox Sports Net and stayed with my friend, Dan, at his apartment near USC. After dinner, we were hanging out debating what to do and a Red Skelton special called More Funny Faces came on PBS. We didn't change the channel immediately because we started discussing the fact that we'd both heard of Red Skelton and knew him as a comedy legend, but that neither of us were familiar with any of his material. As because of our hesitation, I have wasted countless years of my life hating Red Skelton.
Within the first two minutes of More Funny Faces, we knew we wouldn't be doing anything else for the rest of the evening.
The performance is like opening a time capsule. Presented without any context it gives a baffling look into the terribly entertainment-starved decade of the 1970's. Skelton's opening is a series of jokes that are typical old school stand up. For the last two decades, comedians have come to focus more on routines, taking a subject and making multiple humorous observations about it, rather than just telling jokes that have a set up and a punchline and are completely unrelated to the previous or following joke. Also, modern comedians' routines tend to focus on personal experiences or experiences to which we can all relate as opposed to "three guys walk into a bar"-type jokes.
Or in Red's case, "two seagulls are flying together"-type jokes.
Also, imagine David Cross laughing so hard at his jokes that it looks like he may wet his pants. Red has been doing some of these routines for fifty years, yet he cackles at the audience like he just heard them himself at every punchline.
If this was all More Funny Faces had to offer, it would have quickly faded from our memories, forgiven for its slice of terrible reminder that the 1970's existed, but as you can guess from the fact that Dan and I still discuss it and analyze it the way two war veterans might recall seeing an child run into the crossfire of a gun battle on the streets of Kabul, it got much, much worse.
Next time: Fourth grade poetry and mimes!
ADDED: It has been pointed out to be by a horrified reader that Red's elephant and hippopotamus joke from the above clip is more commonly told with a racist theme, substituting a person of Jewish heritage for the elephant and an African-American for the hippo.
Mind? Blown.