Peter Sellers recites the lyrics to “A Hard Day’s Night” in the manner of Olivier doing “Richard III”
It’s a high concept, but it works. This is apropos of nothing. I just happen to like it:
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
Sellers did a bunch of those. For me the funniest was “She Loves You” in four different accents including Dr. Strangelove.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEzJTMf1ZF8
The man was a genius.
Neo: You mean “Richard lll” – not “Henry”. ( “winter of discontent” and all that sort of thing ).
That’s hysterical. I think I may feature that in a future post.
Thanks, I needed these!
Reminds me of the silly movie, The Magic Christian.
everybody has their price (my idea of what the movie is about)
With Ringo and Peter Sellers.
Not a good movie, but with some hilarious sketches.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064622/
Before Monty Python.
First time I read the title of the post I thought Oliver! (Twist), not Olivier. And was wondering if Artful Dodger had anything to do with it.
LeClerq:
Thanks, yes! I just fixed it.
I often get my “IIIs” mixed up.
Yep, The Beatles were huge Peter Sellers fans and some of the other British comedian/sketch comics of the time. And of course Beatles producer George Martin produced a couple Peter Sellers records and many other comic records pre-Beatles.
Not bad! Captures the prancing faggotry in tights of Olivier in his prime. Good if Sellers could have followed it up with a Richard Burton version.
Absolutely brilliant satire and totally absent any cursing. However did he manage it?
The other day I stumbled across a 2014 Conan O’Brien interview with Mel Brooks discussing the recent passing of Sid Caesar. They showed a clip demonstrating Caesar’s “Masterful Gibberish”
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=conan+o%27brian+with+mel+brooks%2c+sid+ceasar&PC=U316&ru=%2fsearch%3fq%3dconan%2bo%2527brian%2bwith%2bmel%2bbrooks%252C%2bsid%2bceasar%26PC%3dU316%26FORM%3dCHROMN&view=detail&mmscn=vwrc&mid=EE34E597E6B5F668BFCFEE34E597E6B5F668BFCF&FORM=WRVORC
A brilliant ending.
Off topic but that Boris Johnson campaign ad going around today may be the best political ad I’ve ever seen.
Brilliant in every way.
At 16 seconds and 41 seconds, he actually looks passably like Olivier’s Richard.
I followed Huxley’s link and listened for a moment. And Sellars is no doubt a big talent. Even some of his earlier English films have amusing moments. “I’m Alright Jack” maybe?
But it suddenly occurred to me that when I was a kid, some of the oldest of the cousins who were newly married or about of that age showed up at get-togethers with portable record players and began exclaiming how everyone had to hear the latest and greatest … comedians on record albums.
I cannot remember who all they thought was so funny … might have been Bill Cosby, possibly George Carlin, or whoever else it was that was a hit on mid to late sixties variety shows. But I got the impression it was part of the latest trend: comedy albums. I think there was some guy even earlier who made a career out of imitating Kennedy. And there was a fat guy who sang about summer camp.
By the time years later my pot-head friends were doing that, it was the execrably boring Cheech and Chong they were all in tizzy about. Guffaw guffaw guffaw …
I’d rather have gone to a dump to shoot rats, if only I had known where there was a dump – with rats you could shoot.
The Sellers track sounds like one of that previous era’s recordings.
DNW,
Bob Newhart was another of the comedians who made some great albums. Part of it I think was there weren’t as many ways to get your material out to a wide audience. HBO and cable tv in general probably killed the comedy record I would say.
As I recall sixties comedy albums — it was a new big deal when you could buy a comedy album rather than listen to comedy on the radio or in person.
However, albums were kinda expensive and one couldn’t listen to a comedy album as much as a music album, so one person would buy a comedy album and everyone would troop over to that person’s house or dorm room and listen as a group. It was fun. It was a golden age for the comedy album
So there was a sixties comedy album boom. By the seventies, albums had become more common, the counterculture was mainstream and the comparative whimsy of the comedy album was lost in the shuffle.
*Vaughn Meader was the JFK impressionist. His album, “The First Family,” was wonderful and quite successful. His career took a turn for the worse after Lee Harvey Oswald ate lunch alone in the Texas School Book Depository that day in November. You can hear Meader’s album here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwu8S6Ekx9w
Huxley,
Yep, and then there is Rudy Ray Moore a.k.a Dolemite who was the king of the raunchy party album. Netflix has a new biopic of him starring Eddie Murphy that is funny and good hearted but still very raunchy. I remember as a kid in the late 70s early 80s one of the coolest things were those Richard Pryor concert films which were the next step from the comedy album.
To say that material wouldn’t fly today is a massive understatement.
Griffin: Yes, in the seventies Richard Pryor was *the* comedian who was carrying the mail for comedy. Remarkable talent and a huge heart.
Also Saturday Night Live became a big force in the 70s. I remember how every Saturday night party I attended would come to a standstill when SNL came on the TV and everyone would huddle around.
Probably SNL was the spark for the local comedy club boom which emerged in the 80s and still trundles on.
As for the Dr. Strangelove accent, it’s a real thing. I was watching a Youtube video from a guy building a marble-driven music machine, and one of his assistants had that exact accent.
I just watched the original “Lolita” with James Mason, Sue Lyons, Shelly Winters, and Peter Sellers. I mainly wanted to see a great James Mason performance and it was, but I forgot how large the Peter Sellers role was.
The film begins with Mason getting ready to kill Sellers with a revolver, then nearly all of the film is a flashback, and it finishes with an extended end to the revolver scene. Sellers jokes, verbally dodges and parries, and deflects. Amazing.
Kubrick said, in later years, if he had it to do over again he would not have made the film. He didn’t realize how deeply subversive the plot was, until much later. That’s a bit hard to believe, but who knows.
I couldn’t decide watching the film if Sue Lyons was actually a 14 year old actress who sometimes looked like she was 20, or the reverse. She was 14. Another amazing performance. In the Nabokov book, she’s 12. Oh my.
Ah, if only he had done it as the great Shatner!
RNB – LOL.
DNW – my folks had some of those records when I was a teen.
I can still recite some of Vaughn Meader’s schticks, and pretty much all of “Noah” by Cosby (so sad how he destroyed himself).
And how could anyone not like that fat guy singing “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah, Here I am at Camp Granada” — so totally evocative of Summer Camps everywhere.
Firesign Theater and Tom Lehrer were the big names when I went to college.
I recently watched the first “Pink Panther” movie, and Sellers’ persona as Inspector Clouseau exactly fits his recitation of the song, down to the tone of voice and strategic pauses.
“We used to steal,
the wheels,
off of baby coaches.
To make go-carts.”
Bill Cosby was fantastic on his early albums, mid-late 60s. My mother and sisters and I used to listen him often, drinking Black Cows (root beer & ice cream). (They don’t have root beer in Slovakia.) He also did Fat Albert skits. “The Chicken Heart that Ate New York City”. “When you get your tonsils out … you can have ALL the ICE CREAM in the WORLD you can eat!” (My guess of which comedian sold the most albums 65-70.)
Vaughn Meader’s JFK voice & sketch of Jackie pointing out the pictures in the White House is fantastic; also the American Businessman’s lunch with top International Leaders. “There is no Eastern Sandwich.” “Then I’ll have the Eastern portion of his Western Sandwich!”…
Richard Pryor meets the SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army) was pretty funny, “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin”, but often very obscene. Lenny Bruce and F-speech was “cool”; so was George Carlin & Lou Reed (& VU), Take a Walk on the Wild Side, Live.
Dr. Demento started in LA in early 70s, playing old novelty songs & comedy, including Alan Sherman, with Hello Mudda, tho I preferred, and sang to my kids when young, Old King Louie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ohom8t0O-bg
In college in the 70s, I got an old double album of stand up comedy by Woody Allen — quite funny, often very Jewish but goy-friendly. And of course, Steve Martin “Let’s get Small”. One I’ve told my family and often recall ends thusly:
“Always carry a litter bag in your car.
It doesn’t take up much room,
and if it gets full, you can just
toss it out the window.”
A bit like the “Mawage” scene from Princess Bride by another splendid 60s comedian, Peter Cook. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3odMTPuzLwY .
Tom Grey: You hit a bunch of my faves, for sure!
Maria Bamford is my favorite comedian of the past ten years. She does a great range of voices. Her work is closest, I’d say, to Richard Pryor for how personal, edgy and surprising it is…not to mention funny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yp2stpr-aGA
(Skip to 1:20 to miss the mud wrestling.)
Firesign Theater and Tom Lehrer were the big names when I went to college.
AesopFan: Weren’t they though!
Recently I discovered that Firesign Theatre’s “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers” (their third comedy album — 1970) has been chosen for the National Recording Registry as among the recordings which “are culturally, historically, or aesthetically important, and/or inform or reflect life in the United States.”
There are only 525 selections (so far) which puts Firesign Theatre up there with Martin Luther King, Frank Sinatra, Woody Guthrie, and Duke Ellington, to name but a few. You can hear the whole album here:
“Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers ~ The Firesign Theatre”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLZOXm3zY1w
It’s been called the “greatest comedy album ever made” and the boys themselves as “the Beatles of comedy.” I suppose both claims are arguable, but I don’t see any competition.
Ok, I think I remember someone playing that, and wondering if it was not somehow blasphemous [haha], though none of the adults seemed disturbed and they were probably laughing.
I’m pretty sure I knew the difference between Noah and Moses. Cue the “How many animals of each kind did Moses bring onto the ark?”, joke.
Now that I think about it, years later I bought the Martin Mull “No Hits, four errors” album. And as other describe doing, it was something you might listen to at a gathering in the rented house or apartment of the oldest and first married in your circle.
The “Flexible” cut, …. I thought it was hilarious. And the “blues” line about waking up in the afternoon so low down deep inside “that I threw my drink across the lawn” still seems funny to me.
But like Python, if less so than with Python, that kind of humor has worn a little thin over the years.
Cynicism almost seems like an unaffordable luxury to me nowadays. Though bumptious earnestness remains, as ever, a deserving of a skewering.
I remember seeing parts of it on television around college age and while not paying that much attention:
1. Thinking that Sellers was brilliant
2. That, Mason [No! Not the Rommel guy!] was acting like a totally pathetic and irrational sap. I mean really, disgustingly unmanned.
3. Wondering what the deal was with Mason and this 17/18 year old high school girl.
If I understood what was going on, I probably would have turned it off sooner.
Perhaps I’ll pick up one of Nabokov’s books one of these days. He’s supposed to be one of the greatest prose stylists of the English language, ever.
Well, excuuuuuuse me!
The best comedy records of the 70s were courtesy of Steve Martin.
I still know the words of the Grandmother Song.
Cosby was good, too.
Let’s not forget the sometimes brilliant Rowan & Martin, Smothers Brothers, and Flip Wilson.
I suspect the SJWs would deplatform them all today, although Flip might get cut some slack because of “Geraldine”.
Believe it or Not, even ventriloquists made records!
“In the late 1950s, Jimmy Nelson [Danny O’Day & Farfel the Dog] released two LP records, One being “Pinocchio”, which involved his four major dummies, which was released on Cricket Records in 1959, and the other being “Jokes and Riddles”, which was done before a live audience of children, released on Rocking Horse Records.”
DNW,
Yes, Prof. Humbert Humbert (James Mason) is in many ways an insipid character. He is a man with an severe affliction, and not overly concerned with morality issues.
I remember Mason from other films like “North by Northwest” (not insipid), “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” and “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” His filmography is quite large, so there’s lots to choose from.
Ah yes, back in the day, it’s a hot summer afternoon. after a few rounds of “what do you want to do” it’s decided and the Cosby albums come out and we gather on the floor around the portable record player and just enjoy.
Too bad we need to remember Cosby with an asterisk-