I’m not recommending that you read Paul Johnson’s new collection of essays, Humorists. It’s a bizarrely awful book, a meandering stream of glurge that would never have been published except for his name. His chapter on Noel Coward and Nancy Mitford requires you to read more than halfway through before he even gets to Coward, whom he polishes off in three pages, none of which will mean a thing to anyone not completely familiar with Coward’s career.
Johnson also does a chapter on W. C. Fields. Many people don’t know that Fields started his vaudeville career as a comic juggler. His most famous bit involved a crooked cue and a rigged pool table on which he could make impossible shots. He started his movie career with a silent short called Pool Sharks and tried to put a pool table into as many later movies as possible.
If you don’t know this - and Johnson doesn’t as much as give a sidelong glance to the word pool until later in the chapter - you’ll be dropped on your head as a reader when you hit the discussion of David Copperfield, which Fields always considered one of his best performances.
“His only complaint,” Johnson writes, “was that ‘It didn’t include a poo-room scene.’”
Is his juggling background so arcane? Lots of his movies contain juggling acts: Poppy and The Old Fashioned Way, for instance. Perhaps those who’ve only seen The Bank Dick and My Little Chickadee aren’t aware of this. But I was in college during the Fields revival, where a lot of the older movies were all over.
I should have said that Pool Sharks doesn’t actually show Fields’ stage routine. The pool shots are all stop-motion animated, which must have blown them away in 1915 but don’t really show off his comedy.
A two-minute bit that is taken from vaudeville can be found the short Six of a Kind.
Both the above are on YouTube. See them only if you’re a true fan.
Supposedly the longest and best example of a true Fields pool routine is in Follow the Boys, an all-star revue from 1944. Fields was near death at the time, but he’s said to pull it off as one of the best acts in the film. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen the picture - it’s so obscure there isn’t even a DVD for region 1. It’s not on YouTube, not anywhere online that I know of. Please let me know if I’m wrong.
