I’m not funny, and wish I were. Witty, yes, sometimes, and I’m pretty good at making an audience laugh when lecturing (a situation in which the prevailing standards are admittedly fairly low). But plain old drop-dead funny? Absolutely not. The only time I ever brought down a house was when I contrived to be hit in the face with a cream pie in front of an audience of pubescent classmates who thought they were going to be forced to listen to me give a prize-winning speech as part of a talent contest. That stopped the show….
Charles Coburn appears as the mystery guest on What’s My Line? John Daly is the host and the panelists are Steve Allen, Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, and Dorothy Kilgallen. This episode was originally telecast by CBS on August 2, 1953:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Journalists are plentiful everywhere and entertaining too, full of jokes and stories. Only their jokes are not very funny and their stories not quite true. Their information is always incomplete, because nobody tells them the truth about anything.”
In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review the PBS webcast of the 2016 Broadway revival of Noël Coward’s Present Laughter. Here’s an excerpt.
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PBS has telecast dozens of plays and musicals on its “Great Performances” anthology series since the long-running program made its debut in 1972. Now the network is endeavoring to lift spirits crushed by the coronavirus pandemic by pulling some of those fondly remembered performances off the shelf and rebroadcasting them on Fridays on TV, and for a limited time via free streaming video. This week’s offering is a bedazzling gem, a live performance of the 2016 Broadway revival of “Present Laughter,” Noël Coward’s best play, starring Kevin Kline. Rarely have I laughed so hard as I did when I saw it on stage four years ago, and I am very happy to report that it comes across on the small screen with near-identical comic vitality….
“Present Laughter” cannot be made to take flight without an actor oozing with star quality sufficient to take on the showy leading role that Coward originally wrote for himself and which has since been essayed on Broadway by Clifton Webb, George C. Scott and Frank Langella, a list that gives you a pretty clear idea of what an actor needs to come up to scratch as Garry Essendine, Coward’s barely fictionalized alter ego. The brilliance of Mr. Kline’s performance lies in the fact that he plays Essendine not as a grossly inflated caricature but for truth, which—of course—makes him even funnier…..
