As popular and innovative in its day as its cultural sibling, opera, this highly artificial theatrical form known as, roughly translated, "professional comedy," featured players with honed comedic skills. Sharing the bill with musicians, jugglers, acrobats, and mimes, Commedia artists performed... [more]

As popular and innovative in its day as its cultural sibling, opera, this highly artificial theatrical form known as, roughly translated, "professional comedy," featured players with honed comedic skills. Sharing the bill with musicians, jugglers, acrobats, and mimes, Commedia artists performed unscripted skits deploying as much theatrical flourish and improvisational spontaneity as they could muster. Obviously, only the best-trained theatrical artists could routinely pull off the kind of coup that would hold the attention of Commedia audiences; hence, Commedia's reputation for showcasing the "performer's performer." Yet with all the tightrope walking between skill, timing, and impromptu story lines, Commedia artists needed several tricks of the trade to ease the daunting creative challenge. Generally an actor would play the same stock character throughout his career. Since performers worked together in troupes, with each actor owning a stock role, it became second nature to be suddenly "in character" and improvise a scene at the spur of the moment. All the characters had their own standard lazzi -- identifying comic shtick - which could be deployed in countless situations. Though the Commedia form has not survived, the tricks of the trade have: comic business, stereotypical characters, harlequin costumes, and clown-face makeup. Classic modern comedians like Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, and the Three Stooges unwittingly emulate the wildly repetitive slapstick and 'typed' characters that Commedia audiences knew and loved (Groucho as the witty and wordy would-be seducer, Harpo as the maudlin and childlike innocent, Moe as the irascible and temperamental bully, etc.). [show less]