my afternoon on youtube

This afternoon I spent some time on my computer watching youtube videos. The first thing I did was watch an episode of The Big Comfy Couch. This was one of my favorite tv shows when I was a little kid, it caters to 5 and 6 year olds and I was definitely Loonette the Clown one year for halloween. The basic idea of the show is that Loonette is a clown and she lives in a world of clowns, with Grandma Garbonzo and Molly the Dolly on her big comfy couch. She does goofy tings with toys all day and was my inspiration for the type of clown I want to be. She has pigtails and a colorful outfit and is just goofy. She doesn't do alot of tricks but speaks to kids on a personal level, falls down alot and makes silly noises. She uses alot of illiteration in her speech and dance moves/body motions to go with everything she says. By watching these videos I see that younger kids are entertained by her silliness, the random element of the things she says. Everything is very visual, she throws toys and shows pictures  of everything she and her doll molly are thinking of. Lastly, She's always a positive role model, picking up her toys and exercising everyday so that kids will follow suit. If you'd like to get a glimpse this was a good episode http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jFDah-uTXY&feature=related

I've also been signed up for an e-course, The Ultimate Secrets of Being a Professional Clown, (more on what I've learned on that later) but one of the suggestions was to look up videos of Bob Newhart and his telephone acts. By observing him, clowns can learn to use props to be funny and have conversations with, while being the only person on stage. My particular favorite was the air traffic controller skit... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TD1MW-nyhxg&feature=related  While watching him in a few other acts I saw him use pauses and facial expressions to really emphasize what he was saying. The fact that he was keeping an incredibly serious face while he was saying hilarious things was just as funny as the thigns he was saying. His acts have made me consider the use of props in my own clowning "act" and what I would say if I had them. Honestly, I have no idea what I would use or say if I had them, so I should probably start thinking!

Community Contacts

Over the past week I've been trying to get some help from the community on my project. The first thing I tried was looking up when the Cornell juggling clubs meets, because I've been having trouble moving past my simple three ball cascade and on to more difficult things. I emailed the listed president of the club who emailed back very quickly with some disappointing news. Their club has dissolved and no longer meets regularly, to my sadness and frustration. I really need someone who knows good tricks to show me how to do them. While learning from The Juggling Book has been extremely helpful, having someone who went through the same learning problems is what I needed. Fortunately Jared Dominguez was super helpful and gave me a whole list of sources that I could learn from

http://www.kingscascade.com/JugglingTricks.html

http://homepage.mac.com/abramr/juggling/tutorial/difficulty/index.html

http://www.twjc.co.uk/tutorials.html  as well as great advice with what to learn next. He said work on more three ball tricks such as columns and then practice two balls in each hand going continually until you're very comfortable and then I should start with four. He also said I could contact him with any questions I had later in the project! I've been working on my columns and my right hand with two balls and slowly but surely each day I've been getting a bit better.

    I also emailed Hilby the German Juggling Boy on tuesday, with no repsonse. I'm planning on calling this coming week because I think he would really help me develop a routine with a few pointers after seeing the videos on his website http://www.hilby.net/who.html. And after all this project is all about interactions with others. I'm assuming my best resources will be other clowns.

    Lastly, I've been searching the Cornell and Ithaca College websites for the past hour trying to find a professor in the physcology or sociology departments who specializes in humor development or sociaal interactions through jokes but as it turns out, no one specializes in that directly. So I'm trying to search through people who's backgrounds look close to those topics and email them with my project idea and ask for their thoughts on what people find funny.