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An
Appeal to Humanity:
Give Mimes a Break
Do
you remember the 1970s? And I don't mean the Linklater film, or
some show with Ashton Kutcher, or something you saw on TV Land. Do you
really remember it? It's hard to tell who is an imposter these days, since
the media are artificially re-implanting these memories of disco and bellbottoms,
Kiss concerts and lightsabers, Starsky and Tenielle. It's almost like
what they did to Arnold in Total Recall. He never went to Mars, people!!!
This has been done to us so completely and compellingly that humans born
well into the 80s and 90s are swearing to a knowledge of this trademarked
decade. Complaint? Hardly. There are worse things.
AND
YET we are being misled! Admit it: we are proud to remember
such horrifying cultural landmarks as leisure suits, VCRs with analog
clocks, 12-inch afros, wooden fruitbowls (filled with wooden fruit), John
Travolta, street gangs with names that made sense, cars with bumpers,
a CHP that investigated deer-poaching, turlets, hairstyles without bangs,
and Bookman the Superintendent. If we can own up to ALL THESE THINGS,
then why is there one dirty little secret still left in the closet? This
one lynch-pin to understanding the 1970s has been totally whitewashed
out of the faux-stalgic craze.
Drumroll,
please. Believe it or not, America once had a love affair with....mimes.
Yes
you heard me, mimes. MIMES. MIMES.
MIMES!
I'm
talking about the art of "pantomime"-- a theatrical
discipline where people typically put on clownish whiteface, suspenders
and a red carnation, and act out physical comedic skits without speaking
or using any props, sometimes in a public place for donations. Yes,
there "was a time when ever'body loved a mime."
Liar, you say??? Want evidence? Try these...
-
French
mime Marcel
Marceau was hailed loudly as genius worldwide in the 1970s (he
still is, but not so loudly). He appeared frequently on American
TV shows, such as The Tonight Show, The Muppet Show, Dinah Shore,
Merv Griffin, and Mike Douglas. I say again: French
mime. That's 2 strikes in today's brutal climate.
-
Shields
and Yarnell hosted a weekly primetime variety show. The show was
heavily themed with pantomime comedy, and enjoyed high ratings.
The duo would get away with such bizarre acts as unraveling toilet
paper rolls on their heads, sculpting expressions into their
own clay-covered faces, and doing "the robot".
My older sister used to scare me as a child by doing "the robot".
I thought she was sick, or having a seizure, or maybe possessed by
evil. I fell for it every time. What did I know, I was
like 6. She would keep doing it for a long time, and I would
get more and more scared. Then she would pretend to barf on my head.
But I can't blame either Shields or Yarnell for this.
-
Robin
Williams- The brilliant physical comic and top box office draw of
today may have begun his career miming in 1970s San Francisco.
Only a myth? Perhaps, but consider this-- his most famous character
(Mork from Ork) was usually seen wearing a suspiciously mime-like
outfit: rainbow suspenders over a sheer jersey.
Maybe his incessant verbal stylings are actually a backlash to those
silent days....
-
Chilling
1970s urban gang epic The Warriors
managed to portray mimes as vengeful and intimidating.
Several groups of street toughs were seen in mime face, most notably
the "Baseball Furies", who never said a word, but mostly
just tried to beat ya' to death with ball bats (OK, so they did use
props, subtract one point).
-
First
Lady of Comedy Lucille Ball did some TV special in the 70s playing
a pantomime hobo. In one scene she slept in a trashcan (not
a dumpster-- a can, like Oscar the Grouch). I don't
think I saw the whole thing, it was boring and depressing.
-
One
time a mime gave me a pack of Skittles
at a mall. My mom told me not to eat them. I did it anyway.
-
I
once saw a famous mime
in Orange County who goes to places like Disneyland, he has a moustache
and wears a top hat. I don't know his name. He wouldn't
tell me. He seems nice enough. Chicks like
him.
So
what happened? Before you knew it, people were trashing
mime all over the place. Seemingly at the stroke of midnight, December
31, 1979, the abuses began. As a brief (and far from complete) catalog
of these atrocities, I present the following:
-
Dustin
Hoffman knocks over a balancing mime in the last act of Tootsie.
Had the tightrope been real and not an imaginary
line in the grass, somebody would have been killed. And this
from a man who himself had just been wearing a wig and makeup on national
television.
-
Homer
Simpson was once heard to say "No panto-ma-mime".
-
Even
the neurotic and ineffectual Woody Allen has scored off of mimes.
In Scenes From a Mall he actually knocks one to the
floor with a punch to the face. How low must that place the
mime on the masculinity food-chain? All this after his brilliant
robot-mime in Sleeper (and without the barfing I might add).
-
In
some weird movie I saw late on TV once, a big butch lady picked a
mime up over her head and threw him off a cliff,
it may even have been the Grand Canyon. I am not kidding.
If you can identify this movie, please contact
me.
-
The
film Shakes the Clown, starring comic heavyweights Bobcat
Goldthwaite and Adam Sandler features prominently the sport of "mime-bashing",
whereby speaking clowns jump out of cars and beat the tar out of these
gentle folk who could not even do so much as cry for help (lest they
break character). In the final act, Robin Williams (in yet another
uncredited cameo) is seen *as what*? A blatantly effeminate
mime-instructor. MimoPhobia anyone?
-
Ed
O'Neil has made a career of blasting mimes (and also the French),
which has followed him out of his role as Al Bundy into his commercial
spots for a discount collect-calling service.
OK,
you get the idea. If you would like to educate yourself on the topic
of mimes, there is an excellent site at pantomime.com, with plenty of
MP3s of mime performance for you to download. They take up very little
hard-drive space.
"Mime
is about communication and feeling. What's mime is yours, and what's yours
is mime."
No,
wait--
"If
you can't serve the time, don't kill the mime."
No,
this is it--
"A
mime is a terrible thing to waste."
Friggin'
mimes.
(c)
1999, 2006 James Hakola
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