Dammit, Bippy! I expected to miss Jack Benny (I even expected him in the OP.) but I had antici…pated being the first with Rocky Horror. Now all I can do is second Tim Conway, and mention the visual timing his clumsy-dentist sketch.
No! On preview I thought of Lucille Ball’s many burst-into-tears scenes. We all knew it was coming every time Ricky started calling her down for her latest screwup, but there was always that little pause…
I’m not sure it counts, but the Greyhound episode of the Simpsons.
22…23…(PAUSE, clock shows the passage of time)…24!
Also from the movie of The Producers, when the play’s first song and dance number (Spring time for Hitler) finishes, and the camera pans over the faces of the audience with their mouths hanging open in shock. Was deffinately the best part of that movie, IMHO.
Also, I like anytime in a cartoon when they pause and you can hear crickets chirpping.
From Young Frankenstein:
"…
…
…SED-A-GIVE?!?"
I can think of two more just from John Cleese. In A Fish Called Wanda, as Kevin Kline is spouting off to Cleese’s wife about how he’s a CIA agent canvassing the neighborhood, Cleese has the most perfect bewildered look. It steals the scene.
And of course:
DR. GUMBY Hello!
PATIENT GUMBY Are youuu the braaaaaaaain specialist!?
<pause>
DR. GUMBY Hello!
And as the Coyote is plummeting off yet another cliff, he falls and gets smaller and smaller, disappears, and then there’s a perfect pause before you see the little cloud of dust.
Then there’s Ed Ames’ appearance on Johnny Carson. Ames is a tomahawk thrower, and his target is the outline of a man on a plywood board. First and only throw lands right in the family jewels. The audience just about dies laughing. The laughs roll on and on and seemingly will never end. Finally, there’s the die-off and fade into near-silence. Johnny says, with a disarming grin, “Gee, Ed, I didn’t know you were Jewish.” The audience goes wild…
This is exactly what I’d opened up the thread to post! I’d once read something where Chuck Jones (I believe) said he’d worked out the exact number of frames to hold it before the cloud of dust appeared. Any more or any less, and it was much less funny.
In his pre-Mayberry incarnation as a comedian, Don Knotts had a character called “Nervous Man”, a sweating, swallowing bundle of neuroses.
Nervous Man would be addressed by an interviewer in some setting, asked his name, and then his occupation.
He would reply, “I’m a knife thrower…”
(Pause)
“Retired”.
Robot, you reminded me of Eric Idle’s interview with soccer hero Jimmy Buzzard (John Cleese) on Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
I can’t recall it verbatim, but Idle played a cloying, wordy talk show host better suited to interviewing literary figures.
He’d let loose a barrage of words, and Buzzard would reply with either:
“Evening Brian”.
or
“I’m opening a boutique”.
And after several such exchanges, Buzzard ‘improvised’:
“I hit the ball first time, and there it was at the back of the net”.
After gleefully repeating this response a couple of times, Buzzard listened to a particularly windy query, paused a long time, and replied:
“Evening Brian”.
(On preview, I realize that you have to see Cleese’s bottle-jawed, arms-crossed demeanor to know how funny that sketch was).
Gene Wilder has turned up a couple of times in this thread. I have one more of his, that has always been my favorite:
In Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, But Was Afraid to Ask, Wilder plays a doctor. One day a man walks in, sits down, and announces quite casually that he is in love with a sheep.
Wilder: I beg your pardon?
Patient: I’m in love. With a sheep.
Long pause, in which Wilder’s face goes through astonishment, amusement, an attempt at professional understanding, back to astonishment, trying to be polite,disgust, astonishment, and finally wrestling himself back under control. Then, very very slowly…
Wilder: I see…
That’s not quite how the sketch went. Conway was ad-libbing up a storm, talking about siamese elephants joined at the trunk, and how it was tragic that they couldn’t roar (makes “barooo-roo-roo” sound) but could only (makes “brmph” sound) and then during the act this little monkey’d come out and start dancing (makes dancing motions with his hand, then pauses briefly as he runs out of steam and Korman is trying hard not explode)
Vicki Lawrence:Is that little asshole finished?
At which point, the audience roars and everyone including Conway loses it.
Ahh, but there is more in the details. Ames throws the tomahawk, realizes what he has done, and starts to retrieve it. Carson grabs him and milks the pause for all that it is worth - 30-45 seconds?
Crucial to the humor of the moment, and a sign that Carson was a comedic genius.
And my all-time favorite is Benny and the stick-up man.
Also:
"…
…
…What hump?"
(I suspect that was stolen directly from Jimmy Durante’s “What elephant?” line.)
No one, but no one, misses a singing cue better than Tommy Smothers.
‘Ok, take it’ says Dick. But Tommy doesn’t sing.
Victor Borge did this I-used-to-give-piano-tuition-to-this-kid-when-I-first-arrived-in-America-penniless-from-Denmark routine. He hears that this boy, now grown up, is in the audience, can’t believe it, and asks him up on stage.
They chat for a while and then Borge asks the man to play something. He starts to play the Blue Danube waltz, with Borge looking on and muttering that he can’t believe it, etc. Then he gets to the main tune and plays the last two chords completely off key.
“That’s him!”
Anamorphic, I think it was 11 frames, but I’d have to look it up.
and when one of 'em would sneeze the other’s eyes would get real big.
I remember his example of the sound they’d make being more like “fnorkl”. Oh, man, that was good TV.
My favorite is another contribution from Steve Martin – the scene in “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” where he is making a pot of coffee for a hung-over Burt Lancaster. He opens a bag of ground coffee and begins shaking it into the coffee pot, and just when you think he’s poured enough into the coffee pot to make one pot, he stops… then begins shaking more coffee in, then pauses again… and again… and continues in this fashion until finally the entire bag of coffee has been emptied into the coffee pot. Pure non-verbal comedic genius. Has me rolling on the floor every time I see it.
As I’m writing this, it reminded me of a scene from “Get Smart”, where Smart is discussing a case with Agent 99, and during the entire scene he is absent-mindedly adding spoonful after spoonful of sugar to his coffee. Finally, at the end of the scene, he takes a sip, makes a horrible face, spits it out, and 99 asks “What’s the matter?” Pause… “This coffee’s cold!”
These arent’ classical pauses, but they’re just what come to mind right now. . .
The “Prohibitionist” Simpson’s episode:
Lawman is flung through the air by catapult.
thud
:: pause ::
Mayor Quimby: I, ah, didn’t see that coming.
(That’s my recollection. If there’s not a pause there, there should be.)
–
Or another Simpson’s. . .
KtK: “Why do they call it a urine monkey?”
:: pause ::
KtK: “ohhhhh”
How would this pause be comedic?