Can anyone tell me who invented or started the rim shot. You know that thing that drummers do after a punchline to announce the end of a joke. This one has really been troubling me. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I have to know.
:}
Well, we started that discussion here, but unfortunately we didn’t get too far. Today is another day, though.
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thanks oh and by the way ‘rim shot’ in “goodgle” only returned 1 porn site. It did give me a good anamaniacs drinking game for some reason.
When using a search engine it pays to be as descriptive as possible. I searched using “comedy rim shot origins”, and got some interesting hits.
From this page:
I’m headed back to Google to see what else I can find.
::peeks over shoulder to see if the boss is around::
Yeah thats not the guy cause he’s still alive. http://www.ceolas.org/instruments/bodhran/performers.shtml
And he’s also clearly only being credited with developing the rim shot as a bodhran technique. The rim shot as both a standard drum technique and in comedic use certainly goes back further than 1967.
As noted in that other thread, we need to realize that the comedy use for the term includes drum signals which are not, technically, “rim shots”, such as a single pronounced thump on the bass drum.
The writer of this article credits it to Vaudeville:
http://www.s-t.com/daily/10-00/10-01-00/e01li146.htm
He forgot Milton Berle