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5 - “The hardy Laurel”: Beckett and Early Film Comedy
- Edited by William Kinderman, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Joseph E. Jones, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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- Book:
- Genetic Criticism and the Creative Process
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 02 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 December 2009, pp 81-92
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- Chapter
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Summary
When the first director of Waiting for Godot, Roger Blin, initially met with Samuel Beckett in 1950 to discuss the production of the play, Blin suggested that it be staged as a circus. Not wanting to offend Blin, Beckett gradually shifted their conversation around to the films of early comics such as Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. According to Deidre Bair, Beckett's first biographer, Blin immediately got the hint and gave up the circus idea,1 but one can sympathize with Blin because Vladimir and Estragon themselves compare their evening (albeit unfavorably) to an assortment of popular theatrical forms, with Estragon emphasizing the circus. They describe their evening as:
vladimir: Worse than the pantomime.
estragon: The circus.
vladimir: The music-hall.
estragon: The circus.
All of these modes of entertainment informed Beckett's early views of character, action, place, and time, but Beckett was right to steer Blin in the direction of early film, even though Beckett, like later critics, failed to acknowledge his special debt to the films of Laurel and Hardy. No doubt Beckett was correct when he told Blin that Hamm and Clov, as well as Didi and Gogo, were ultimately he and his long-time companion and wife Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, but the artistic shape in which he developed these couples and later directed productions of his plays was informed in no small way by this famous comedic pair, or what Colin Duckworth might have called a “pseudocouple,” following Beckett's reference in The Unnamable to the interdependent title characters of Mercier and Camier.3
Beckett's passion for the cinema is well documented. As a young man in Dublin, Bair tells us, Beckett “never missed a film starring Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy (who became the “hardy Laurel” in the novel Watt), or Harold Lloyd.”4 During the 1930s, Beckett saw every Marx Brothers movie he could, and his love for films continued well into the 1950s; moviegoing, in fact, was by then one of the few activities he still regularly enjoyed with Dumesnil.
Of the Beckett critics, Ruby Cohn was the first to observe a specific debt to film when in 1973 she pointed out that Vladimir's and Estragon's comic exchange of hats in the second act of Waiting for Godot was inspired by a scene in the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup (1933).
Alcohol, Aging, and Cognitive Performance in a Cohort of Japanese Americans Aged 65 and Older: The Kame Project
- Gail E. Bond, Robert Burr, Susan M. McCurry, Amy Borenstein Graves, Eric B. Larson
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- Journal:
- International Psychogeriatrics / Volume 13 / Issue 2 / June 2001
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 10 January 2005, pp. 207-223
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- Article
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Objective: To investigate the effects of light to moderate alcohol consumption on cognitive performance. Design and Setting: A cross-sectional analysis including older Japanese Americans in King County, WA, enrolled in the Kame Project, a population-based study of cognition, dementia, and aging. Participants: 1,836 cognitively intact participants aged 65 and older who participated in the baseline (1992-1994) examination. Measurement: Cognitive performance was measured using the Cognitive Abilities Screening Instrument, reaction time (simple and choice), and a measure of vocabulary (North American Adult Reading Test). Results: Multivariate analyses were used to examine the relationship between cognitive performance and alcohol consumption at baseline with men and women together and then separately controlling for age, education, smoking, history of stroke, angina, hypertension, diabetes, and coronary heart disease. Findings showed lower cognitive test scores were observed for men who were either abstainers or in the heavy drinking group. For women, a linear relationship between alcohol consumption and cognitive performance was seen on two of the four measures of cognitive functioning. No significant difference in the association of drinking and cognitive function was identified within the different Japanese American subgroups. Conclusion: Results suggest a possible positive relationship between light to moderate drinking and cognitive performance in an aging Japanese American population. Additional long-term prospective and cross-cultural studies are needed to determine the generalizability of these findings to other aging cohorts.