academics and others argue the pen's of such variables as geographical location culture maturity age level of education intelligence context gender race religion personality e excess with all this in mind i met our guests for today show a few weeks ago at a three stooges festival at the film forum some may certainly certainly yuck yuck a long established art o not be transported with him into his childlike matter isn't and natural comedic charm columbia comedy shorts put it this way few comics have come close to equaling the pure energy and genuine sense of fun curly was able to project he was mary mint personified a kind of creature of frantic action whose only concern was to satisfy his immediate craving allowing his emotion to dominate and making no attempt whatsoever to hide his true feelings like my guest were just told self it does italy at his own cleverness now calm down when confronted with a problem reported the outside hoping beyond hope that they could get in the theater was jam packed with children from the very young to teenagers young parents grandparents their grandchildren middle aged men and women seniors seniors seniors   magination and were thrilled to have bob baer as our guest he performs regularly almost finished here but we need to get this that he was regularly at the friars club the mets one room and the gotham comedy club he's a stand up in probably less clown and comedian and all around funny man and you can also catch bob in the very near future at the theater in the upper west side one fifty eight west of the second street april seventh and ma to comes from this city too well actually it goes further back doesn't it well yeah i mean listen judy punch and judy allen i mean slapstick comedy what is slapstick well respirator yeah whatever and they'd be very physical because you had to play a whole arena so there was a slapstick that was actually a two prong stick with i think the same set it was a sheep splatter or a a bladder in the middle and when it and they pay a little gun powder and when you push the stick together and punch and judy has a slap stick you ever see a punch and judy show yes you're probably right and they're hitting each other right in the crap there's always a noise and the old clowns also would slap one on the butt and you'd see a little bit of gunpowder little smoke make that sound and the three stooges did that with sound effect when we would go back to the horses now and get the horses ye yes well then we'll go get to the studio i'll tell you what the history is please if you have this a little bit of time we need to know this well supposedly two stable hands came out to assist one of the horses in this were trying to take care of something that went wrong and the audience loved it and whoever was the proprietor of this horse circus i think they called them horses and thought oh we've got to bring those guys back so this is for the masses this year is a table audience ok the audience basically and then the clown element right happened the red faced clown represented the farmers the people who worked with their hands out in the sun that they used to have harlequin had the white and there was an old character and these are all stereotypes of people of that period but the red faced clown was usually dumber the farmer you know the  r the wiser the bugger all bonny i would say bugs bunny was the white face clown and daffy duck was the red faced clown abbott was the white face clown and look at style oh it was a red face clown that helps you any it clown sort of came from the red faced clown also the underdog or a bit of the blackface clown or the lead tramp often had a beard that was almost like blackface and since they'll be whited out and the lighting was gaslight so the white helped you to see their mouths and you could also hear better because when you see someone speaking believe it or not you can hear it better still so they would adopt and alice they lived like almost poverty level just so that the audience feels well you could say superior but i don't know if you want to say superior you want to feel sorry for the little little  no worse off than they are now was no one in one nine hundred fifty five still had an icebox they had at least a refrigerator and they didn't have a television they had a radio with nothing remember the candy dish n back on something like that to entertain to roast the fryer as we roast wow to make fun of a look at the butcher look at that oh boy you know they're going to get stuck with yeah maybe that it was a way of the two families would brag you know so you'd say that she a good dancer such a dancer regular ginger rogers she athletic god just like you know johnny weissmuller you know swings from vines she can swim and everything is but i heard she has a and feels it was more like a marx brothers movie where they would all of a sudden someone break into song of the be a dancer or something the girls in in that portion would be cute or in tights you know but it wasn't raunchy ok ok as a matter of fact the word burlesque they would do a burlesque on a fellow or a burlesque on hamlet parody a par they all see that they also used to use the word travesty a travesty on something and that was what mel brooks does with blazing saddles and young frankenstein so but the word burlesque was part of that ok sing sometimes tell jokes one of charlie chaplin's first gigs was dressed up as a hebrew comedian coming out and telling jokes that he felt later on are anti semitic but he didn't know he did even know any jews when he was a young performer tension i think there was a stage manager and a high heckler you know he would get he'd have a cane and he would pound it or or gavel to quiet people down ok and that evolved into vaudeville and we had a dying museum says i'm going to something else p t barnum used to have die museums you pay a dime sometimes they were nicolo audience go in and you would see jo jo you know the it was a was a museum a dime museum interesting ok we're located and the music as you proceeded through this venue you would hear music and you go into this room and these performers they perform all day i mean twelve hours wow you know that they would do eight minute turns so that they weren't totally but they were working right and then somebody would say this way to the grass this way to the grass and you'd wonder what is this vaudeville family vaudeville because in some of the saloons and whatnot it was pretty raunchy it was a mad man show or a man show and he realized bringing the wives in the kiddies because there was no television there was no five a day high class vaudeville was to a day that was the palace a matinee and evening performance matinee for the ladies and kids so i never evening for men and hopefully their wives but  people thought that fellow was crazy to go up to forty second street because twenty three skidoo you never went past twenty third street because it was considered dangerous but when you know gentrification it got better and he had the gorgeous girls if you remember and some would come out naked but there were several literally yeah if you if you posed there was there were acts like this living statues if you recreated a famous painting of a of a naked woman on a lower east side with minsky's and they started to do more interesting things like strip tease and dancing around and that was that was more to attract a lower encamped a lower income avoid long gauge went through the roof was a paid a lot and he didn't have to do much you could do eight minutes you twelve minutes you do eighteen minutes depending on where in the bell the marx brothers did forty five minutes they could do it they could do the second they start out as a singing act really and they started adding women and whatnot and then they started adding comedy and sketches they had a school act i think once i want to go to medical school then i think that's where i understood he  irish but i think he could remember his lines similar to curly or he didn't project well eventually to start doing more sanguine bets and he becomes harpo marx and they were like straight singer of the nice juvenile type things and that act developed into something more where they could actually be the second half of the void for bill because within their act they would do the teacher would say i think you talked about the jews the jews the irish were the relief well the irish two irish and the germans you know the irish and the jews kind of form these comedy teams the three keaton's featuring baby buster keaton was an irish knockabout comedy team they were jewish comedians like weber and feels who did german dialects and later burns and allen well that into german yeah that you know if you're not i like about it but they did what would what we would call original interesting what do you do in the bakery i'm a loafer oh you don't work you know i'm a loafer but you know for they can't pay it so they did that and so you had those dialect comedians and soon there's jewish dialect comedians i in that show they would black up i clown white but black up and they would do songs and dances that white people weren't doing or weren't listening to people like stephen foster and even later on al jolson would listen would go to black communities and hear this music and white people weren't dancing like that so they would actually play sort of a black character and they'd have like eight or nine of them sitting on the stage like a concert you had an whatever the nice see you with you know and they would they would get up and they would do they would bring people together and the audience was largely white large yet old although there was a black black face there were there were black troops in black face doing this and sometimes the comedians there was a comedian named you may remember him pigmeat markham who who went to the sixty's and whatever yeah he always wore black face he was a black comedian but williams yeah you've heard of as an very famous very famous six all star black actor wore black face because it was considered a character and the black actors didn't feel like they were representing a black people they were there representing this particular type of marr talk about it cared to the girls that you know are they keep you from getting beat up or i don't know just well yeah ok where were you when you were born and where i was born in brooklyn of course originally brownsville ok i would say my love for the old movies and answers what do they do what they have laughed they left yeah you have to remember they were all watching it i mean now we have so many different options but when you were a young person i'm dating myself i was born in primetime viewing kids bugs bunny popeye these were the things you know they were they were funny people like chuck mccann and sandy becker who did these shows where they would show cartoons and do funny skits know how they used to poke each other in the eyes like this and louis doesn't write right here and this is this is the trick because you know like react so you can tell it didn't really go on the ice and he went on and on about champ taught me everything about comedy and all that stuff so you know they didn't hurt each other they tried not to hurt each other occasionally they did yeah yeah yeah there are stories of people and they didn't like getting hurt they did not like it curly i think that at the worst when they performed on stage yeah because when they were doing they did these movies with the sound effects and everything and they would do a live appearance later on when they were curly joe to rita who was a replacement they had somebody off stage with sound effects but i think in the thirty's and forty's they didn't do that so they would just really sort of smack each other as likely as they could but judge joan morrow was mo's daughter used to say she'd be in the wings and and moe would slap curly on the top of his shaved head and make a sound he had a way of hitting it in such a way that it made a sound but a couple times she said uncle curtly look like he was a little gone for a moment because it was a little too  no we we talk about what we're going to do we walk around we say i'll bump into you here you fall down here that's going to come down there is and then we just do it and we get it right the first time we move on and he said when you're a hearse that's where you get hurt and of course these aren't just strangers off the street this is like a company of we have actors that they work together all the time they know how to fall you know in the physical humor was about one  get spanked still our teachers i think my father used to tell me that he had an irish teacher and he went to use in the lower east side with with a multitude of rings and she would hit the kids on the back with this heavy ring and you felt it you know it wasn't uncommon i think there's an episode of mad men where a father slaps a kid across the face for doing something and we assume he's the father of that child and the real father says what happened he says  like that so when people would go especially they were lower income madeon says special to the early silent movies and it appealed it was cheap it was a nickel if you get to the movies yeah when when charlie chaplin was working for moving man and something happens with the horse or whatever he assumes the the mule of the horse and he's pulling the wagon and the guys whipping him and we watch it today we go  come across smarter than their audience or maybe a little above their audiences comedians in the old days wanted to connect with the audience they didn't want to appear superior we were supposed to be together or maybe i was supposed to be a little below you so you felt sorry for me something happens and you have a moment where you react like i was in pain or that hurt whatever the audience connects with that and that's what manhood and the humanity of curling and we write the merriment in the face of all the trouble of clowns are not supposed to get hurt you knock them down they pop on out right which he does right they're not nothing can defeat you do what we did we so that you do a tremendous imitation of curly oh yes  rising star ok and that's may fourth and fifth and i'm called headlining with nancy numbered on that and then i'm doing thirty forty five minutes of thirty to forty minutes of standup comedy and i do the impressions too and i look at the audience if they're a little back by popular demand preserve the actors temple comedy benefit now you've got to tell us about the actors you have heard sunday at the actor's temples on forty seventh street between eighth and ninth  perform there and the members of it sophie tucker was a regular member smith and they all were regular members and we do a show once a year comedy benefit in this is to restore right we're trying to get a chair left we don't have a chair left so when you chair of ok th sometimes we have people like pat cooper or elaine boosler if i can get a celebrity to come in and do five minutes freddy roman did it last year you know we have bernie burns bernie burns was considered the king of the catskills he's going to be in colombia nine hundred sixty eight leading the rebellion here and so we're going to follow that first a jewish alfred hitchcock lou costello and the john gotti trial well here's another five minutes you've got me  least someone just got this one jackie gleason this next year is jackie gleason doing shakespeare