WHAT WALL-E, DANNY KAYE & THE SECOND CITY ALL HAVE IN COMMMON
by Jason Loewith on 9/02/2008 04:08:00 PM 

I'm writing to you from the top of rehearsal week 3 for THE U.N. INSPECTOR, adapted from Gogol's 1836 masterpiece THE INSPECTOR GENERAL. Fortunately, we're working with some of Chicago's best comics on this show - the elastic-bodied Joe Dempsey, the delightfully manic Bill McGough, master of comic timing Joe Wycoff, mistress of the clever turn of phrase Susie Hart, and many more of the best character actors and actresses you're likely to see in town.

The thing they're all good at - and the thing they share in common with Danny Kaye (who portrayed the Inspector General in a 1949 musical film adaptation of the play), The Second City, and even Wall-E is a talent for what we in the business call "a lazzi."



Lazzi is a term derived from the Commedia dell' Arte, the wonderfully wacky Italian improvisational form that began in the 15th century, reaching its popular height in the 16th century. At the root of Commedia is a series of stock characters - the lascivious old man, the miser, the beautiful young lovers, and drunk doctor (Battlestar Galactica fans will recognize that type)... and of course, the Arlecchino, in French Harlequin, the clever servant. These stock characters would travel from town to town, improvising their way through delightfully simple plot scenarios involving sex, food and money. Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors and Moliere's The Miser are two examples of Commedia scenarios turned into scripts; in our day, clowns from Charlie Chaplin to Monty Python to the stars of Judd Apatow films rely on Commedia plots and characters.



At the core of the clown character is the lazzi (from the singular "lazzo", meaning joke), a physical bit of comedy, rehearsed to perfection and played until the last laugh can be wrung from a willing audience. Danny Kaye was a modern master of the lazzi, and you can see some of his best lazzis on display in The Inspector General. But the work of The Second City often owes a lot to the lazzi tradition, and so does my favorite film character of the past year, Wall-E. If you've yet to see this Chaplinesque animated character, I urge you to do so - as research for your trip to The UN Inspector. If we've done our job right, the lazzis in our play will come as organically and beautifully from character as Wall-E's travels on a futuristic earth (the Vacuum Vignette is a great example).

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