Funnymen

From Nick Altrock to Casey Stengel, Dizzy Dean to Satchel Paige, Bill Veeck to Bob Uecker, baseball has always admired the clever. This book tells the stories of some of the players, coaches, managers and broadcasters who had the most fun in the Major Leagues and made fans laugh out loud (or shake their heads in disbelief). The author recounts tales both famous and little known that capture the character of unusual and offbeat players, unique and engaging personalities and the succession of eccentrics who were officially dubbed "Clown Prince of Baseball."

The twelve classic comedy films examined within these pages are distinguished by an equal number of defining comic performances. Ranging from The Great Dictator (1940) to A Southern Yankee (1948), each film focuses on the most central theme of “clown comedy”: Resilience, the encouragement or hope that one can survive the most daunting of life’s dilemmas—even during the war-torn 1940s. And each film can be regarded as a microcosm of the antiheroic world of its central clown (or clowns). Among the performers represented are Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, Abbott and Costello, Jack Benny, Eddie Bracken, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, the Marx Brothers, Harold Lloyd and Red Skelton. This lavishly illustrated work includes an introduction by noted film critic and historian Anthony Slide.

Sigmund "Ziggy" Blissman isn't the best-looking, sanest boy in the world. Far from it. But this misfit child of a failed husband-and-wife vaudeville team has one thing going for him: He can crack people up just by batting his eyelashes. Vittorio "Vic" Fontana, the son of a fisherman, can barely carry a tune or even stay awake while attempting to, but he, too, has one thing going for him: Women love to look at him. On their own, these two men are failures. But one summer night in the Catskills, Ziggy and Vic step onstage and together become the funniest men -- and hottest act -- in America. Written as a fictional oral history and filled with more than seventy memorable characters, Funnymen is the wildly inventive story of "Fountain and Bliss," the comedy duo that delighted America in the 1940s and 1950s. The episodes recounted here by managers, wives, children, mistresses, friends, fans, and foes -- and the truths Heller reveals about human ambition, egotism, and friendship -- make Funnymen not only a masterpiece of storytelling, but also a thoroughly hilarious read.

Here is a kaleidoscopic analysis of Jewish humor as seen through Funnyman, a little-known super-heroic invention by the creators of Superman. Included are complete comic-book stories and daily and Sunday newspaper panels from Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s creative fiasco. Siegel and Shuster, two Jewish teenagers from Cleveland, sold the rights to their amazing and astonishingly lucrative comic book superhero to Detective Comics for $130 in 1938. Not only did they lose the ownership of the Superman character, they also agreed to write and illustrate it for ten years at ten dollars per page. Their contract with the DC publishers was soon heralded as the most foolish agreement in the history of American popular culture. After toiling on workman’s wages for a decade, Siegel and Shuster struggled to come up with a new superhero, one that would right their wrongs and prove that justice, fair-play, and zany craftsmanship was the true American way and would lead to ultimate victory. But when the naïve duo launched their new comic character Funnyman in 1947, it failed miserably. All the turmoil and personal disasters in Siegel and Shuster’s postwar life percolated into the comic strip. This book tells the back story of the unsuccessful strip and Siegel and Shuster’s ambition to have their funny Jewish superhero trump Superman. Mel Gordon is the author of Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin. Thomas Andrae is the author of Batman and Me.

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created two superheroes. One is Superman. The other is Funnyman, and this book details his amazing back story. Inside find reproductions from Funnyman, s rare comic books, Sunday funnies and daily strips. Revealed by au..

For more than 20 years, fantasist Bruce Taylor has been entertaining readers all over the world with his masterful blend of surrealism and magic realism. This collection showcases an imagination at once intense and gentle, absurd and cutting.