Funny on purpose

[supergee]

Satchel Paige said that his old teammate Cool Papa Bell was "so fast he could turn out the light and be in bed before it got dark." That story appears in most baseball histories; in many of the older ones, we are informed that actually the light was on a timer.

Try to imagine how someone could make a mistake like that. I cannot. I can only assume that the writers telling that dubious tale found it less implausible than the possibility that a simple cullid boy like Satch was actually being funny on purpose.

I'm reading Saul Austerlitz's Another Fine Mess, a history of film comedy arranged according to the names of those who did the most to make it funny. Recent events point me to one serious omission: Leslie Nielsen. (Though Austerlitz does have kind words for him in the entry on the Zuckers.)

Austerlitz mentions that there is a theory that Margaret Dumont never really appreciated that Groucho Marx was making fun of her in their many movies. That strikes me as another example of the idea that They cannot be deliberately funny, the way We can. Or has anyone suggested that the magnificently po-faced Nielsen (perhaps due to Canadian humorlessness) thought all along that he was still portraying a dramatic hero and couldn't understand why people kept laughing?

Comments

[laughingrat]

Oh yeah, I hate that perception of Ms. Dumont. She was a bad motherfucker, and despite Groucho's remarks that the brothers "got her alone one night and taught her what all the jokes were about" (let's not even get into the rape "joke" there), there's lots of moments where she's obviously trying to keep from cracking up. Hmp. Now I need a Margaret Dumont icon.