“Kaye Notes Danger In Making Comedy”
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By: Danny Kaye (Written For UPI)
HOLLYWOOD – The most dangerous element in making a comedy is to fall into the fatal trap of repeating the cliché.
I’m doing my best to see that there aren’t any in the picture I’m doing now at Columbia, “The Man from the Diner’s Club.”
What started me thinking about the subject of clichés were some late, late movies I recently saw on television. Like the musical comedy which opens in a cellar saloon, with sawdust on the floor and waiters with handlebar mustaches running around with trays held high over their heads, doing a soft shoe number in between drinks; the piano player in a striped silk shirt with arm bands and a derby perched at a jaunty angle as the customers yell for another chorus of “Piano Roll Blues.”
The piano player is in love with the girl singer who wandered in during a blizzard for a job and fainted from not eating.
Singer Becomes Hit
The biggest talent agent in New York, with the black double breasted coat and the
chesterfield collar, who has his car break down in front of the nightclub, strolls
in for a beer while waiting for it to be fixed, listens in amazement to the singer,
drops a contract in her lap for a ten-
She hits Broadway, the piano player hits the bottle and the audience hits the road.
And then there are the “cactus clichés” in westerns. The ones that have a cowpoke who is a stranger in town and who strolls into the bar and dramatically announces drinks for the house.
The man doesn’t know a soul in the room, his salary as a cowboy is naturally a medium one, and yet he jeopardizes his whole budget by ordering drinks for a lot of strangers.
Pursuers Lose Direction
And there’s the “boulder dodger” who always eludes his pursuers by suddenly dodging between two boulders as they thunder past him.
I often wonder how they miss seeing the ruse. They are usually right on top of the man, but they invariably seem to lose their sense of direction.
Of course, there’s the new, young gunslinger who arrives from nowhere and tells the old gunman, “there isn’t room in this town for both of us.”
We also have the “mirror William Tell.” This is the reverse deadeye dick who looks in the mirror and sees the heavy aiming a gun at him from the rear of the bar.
Using only mirrors he brings his gun around over his left shoulder, and shooting
backwards a very awkward position even if he’s double-