Comedy’s Unlikely Allies

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Growing up as an Italian American, Mark Binelli always remembered the story of Sacco and Vanzetti from school. As an adult, it still stuck in his mind.”Then it weirdly hit me that Sacco and Vanzetti sounded like an old style comedy team,” Mr. Binelli said. He took these anarchists and “reimagined them in a completely ridiculous way,”in his debut novel, “Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die!” (Dalkey Archive).

“My idea initially was to write something about a comedy team,” Mr. Binelli said. “When I decided to commit to this silly conceit, I did begin to see parallels far more than I expected.” The book charts the comedic duo’s rise to stardom. Exotic characters such as clowns, knife sharpeners, and others populate its pages.

What does slapstick comedy share in common with anarchist violence? Mr. Binelli said slapstick involves “creating chaos in a stable environment.” Audiences tend to laugh at violence up to a certain point, he said. Mr. Binelli offered the example of a person who slips and falls. Audiences may find that funny, he said, but not if the person bleeds.

At McNally Robinson Booksellers in SoHo recently, Mr. Binelli introduced actors Stuart Rudin, who appeared in “The Silence of the Lambs,” and Al Ramos, who co-founded the Tribeca Lab, and gave a dramatic reading from the book. Their contrasting appearance recalled opposites like Abbott and Costello or Laurel and Hardy.

In researching the book, Mr. Binelli watched lesser-known old comedy films, like Laurel and Hardy’s final movie, and the Marx Brothers film “Room Service.”

And Mr. Binelli drew upon his journalistic experience in writing the novel. A contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine, Mr. Binelli has previously written on Johnny Depp, as well as on teenage marijuana smugglers sneaking across the border from rural Idaho. He landed his first celebrity interview with the actor who played Lurch in the Addams Family remakes while writing for the student paper at the University of Michigan.

At the event, Mr. Binelli said one of his influences in writing the novel was the collage-like style of Michael Ondaatje’s book “The Collected Works of Billy the Kid,” which also imagined historical personages anew.

***

Recent guests at Village Restaurant on West 9 Street drank special drinks called “Cos-Mae-politans” (containing vodka and gin) and read a specially printed “Maebill” (a pun on “Playbill”), all in honor of actress and temptress Mae West.

The evening was organized by LindaAnn Loschiavo, who wrote the play “Courting Mae West: Sex, Censorship & Secrets.”

Enjoying the event were Supreme Court Judge Edwin Torres, who wrote the book “Carlito’s Way”; Tony Award-winner Mario Fratti, who wrote “Nine”; and Broadway producers Pat Addiss and Sandi Durrell.

***

The Three Stooges did more to make Jewish culture accessible to the general population in America and Canada than nearly anyone else, the author of “Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods” (Harper Perennial), Michael Wex, said last week at Barnes and Noble Lincoln Square.

Mr. Wex gave examples of the Stooges use of Yiddish, one of which involved the colorful Yiddish phrase hahk mir a tchaynik, which literally means “hitting a tea kettle” but figuratively describes bending someone’s ear with tedious talk.

Why is a teakettle like a monotonous bore? Mr. Wex explained: “The kettle starts to boil, it whistles, and the top starts to move a little bit, the more water boils out of the kettle, the more the lid is going to move, the less the kettle has to offer, the fewer its contents, the louder and more insistently it’s going to go on making the same sound over and over again.”

He added that it was “seventh-grade science filtered through two thousand years of persecution.”


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