Comedy Techniques for Variety Artists

Johnson, a.k.a. Charlie the Juggling Clown, offers this delightful, exhaustive, and charmingly illustrated guide to delighting an audience, vaudeville-clown style, offering a rich array of gags, set-ups, exercises, skit and scene models, and much practical advice crafted to give readers a serious leg up... Comedy Techniques for Variety Artists bursts with crowd-tested ideas and approaches for cooking up (or perfecting) an act to entertain a family audience. While the opening pages offer illuminating thoughts on how jokes work, what jokes are appropriate for individual acts, and the niceties of timing and running gags, the emphasis throughout is on highly specific techniques and routines any performer can make their own. Making it your own is crucial for any performer. Johnson encourages this with a host of exercises for readers... These follow inviting, incisive chapters on classic comedy techniques and routines ... that briefly examine the history of these bits reaching back to the circus, the funny pages, Burns & Allen, and Fibber McGee and Molly-and persuasive consideration of why they work: The advice throughout is flexible and pragmatic. The joy of the book is in how explicable Johnson makes this, and how he lays bare the structure and logic of the many amusing routines he shares, inviting readers to understand-and to create. This guide to crafting variety-show comedy for family audiences illuminates and inspires. -- Book Life, a division of Publisher's Weekly