The Comic Strip, Part 8 - Mr. Klaw (Mr. Vanity Klaw)

"Dirty Movie" - January 7th, 1984

Quite a while ago I thought it would be amusing to make a fake cooking show about making toast. The goal would be to make the most insufferably boring cooking show ever - have the thing actually be a half hour long and at the end we would have seen the host make one slice of toast.

(I have, at times, been accused of having too much interest in entertaining myself at the expense of my potential audience. Hello, Potential Audience!)

In order to draw this thing out to a full half hour, I needed to come up with some banter for the host to spew out as he waved bread around, not toasting it yet. So I sat down and brainstormed a bit and ended up with a list of things to banter to the camera about. The history of bread, how a toaster works, why a salutary drink in someone's honor is a toast, etc.

To my horror, this was starting to become interesting. My joke was lost forever. Nobody will ever see my boring toast video, because it was never made. (My new-found toast knowledge was not compelling enough to motivate me to make an interesting toast video.)

And so we get to "Dirty Movie." I wanted something different. Hoo Boy. This is different.

A cinema proprietor rents a "Dirty Movie" so he can watch it after hours. High-jinks ensue. The high-jinks are provided by (among other things) the local constabulary, a slapstick mailman and a pet lobster named "Breakfast."

To get to the heart of what makes this piece so different, I have to spend a little bit of time attempting to explain a small amount of comedy theory. There is a line of thought in slapstick that believes that while a person caught in a silly or uncomfortable situation might be funny in and of itself, it is when that same situation is observed by someone else that the level of humor increases. For example, if through some sort of comedy mishap I somehow end up with a toilet seat glued to my head, the visual image therein will possibly be amusing. If I then get on a crowded bus, the level of humor increases. The other people on the bus, by being sensibly not expecting a man with a toilet seat glued to his head, will react in a reasonable manner, being shocked, confused, amused, etc. The audience can then react to multiple things: First they see the reason why the strange visual has occurred so they can relate to me and my toilet seat head, then they see the reaction from the other bus riders and relate, because they understand that they would react the same way. Then they can relate to my attempts to cope with not only my toilet seat head, but also my attempts to deflect the reactions of the other passengers. The other passengers have become a knowing gaze, or the straight man to my toilet seat headed shenanigans.

In this episode there are no straight men. None. Well, perhaps Breakfast the Lobster. Everyone might as well be walking around with toilet seats on their heads and not noticing each other's toilet seat heads. This is a world where everyone is Stan Laurel, everyone is Lou Costello. It is a strange new world. And this strangeness brings me back to toast.

Remember the toast?

What I learned from the Toast Experience is that to sustain an idea for a half an hour, you can't just have a silly concept. You have to roll up your sleeves and work. If you don't, you get a half an hour of crap. Which this is not.

Despite the title, this is a rather benign (particularly compared to previous episodes) piece of television. It is well written, well constructed, the acting is consistently perfect, and after all the episodes so far, I have to say that the music here matches the mood exactly.

And then at the end it all comes to a screeching halt. Turns out that this episode seems to have been a commentary on the British Board of Film Censors' recent ramp-up in censorship activity. I hope that they were happy to have caused the climax of this episode to fall completely apart.