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Because if he had lived another year or so he almost certainly would have had a nice supporting role in Bob Hope's I'll Take Sweden, which seemingly gave employment to every actor in H'wood who could fake a passable Swedish accent. It just aired on TCM and I need to watch a Road picture as an antido...

The thing about Jack Douglas and his wife Reiko is that they were never introduced as Jack and Reiko Douglas. The act was called Jack Douglas and His Wife Reiko, kind of like Mr. Peabody and His Boy Sherman. The dialogue would go like this: Merv: How are you doing Jack? Douglas: Hurumph. Reiko: He m...

Speaking of comics whose appeal was a total mystery, remember Jack Douglas and his wife Reiko? The central joke of the act is that Douglas was old and dyspeptic and Reiko was young and bubbly and mangled her English. Douglas, whose reputation rested on his work a writer for Jack Parr and George Gobe...

Thanks Rich. Now, if only Ramblin' Down Radio Row had a scene where Shemp slaps George Jessel around!

I gotta admit that when I listened to Ron Hutchinson talk about Shemp Howard slapping Jimmy Stewart around in a Vitaphone short on his recent Leonard Lopate show appearance , I thought he was mistakenly converging the tame and kinda boring Chic Sale vehicle "Important News" with a Shemp sh...

Even today folks long for the pioneering days of the Internet before everything was commercialized and comodified, waaaay back in 1999.

Thanks Rob. Now I don't have to scan anymore. Although some of the color plates in my edition are different than the color plates in the archive.org volume. Another interesting factor is Linda Arvidson Griffith's recollections of Biograph written a full decade before the publication of her book in 1...

Here are a couple of stories and photos about Mabel Normand. Note the reference to her head injury in the caption in the second file:

http://slapsticon.org/MabelLeavesComedy.jpg

http://slapsticon.org/MabelInjury.jpg

The Unknown Peter Sellers may be gone, but here is an hour-long radio documentary on Sellers' life called Being Here: The Peter Sellers Story. It will be on BBC Radio 2 for the next 6 days. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00t5vdw

Soon after Slapsticon I visited Wonder Book in Frederick MD and picked up a volume I never heard of called Film Flashes: Wit and Wisdom of a Nation). It was published by Judge magazine, which I take to be a kind of American "Punch". I quickly realized that it was a yearbook containing arti...