You gotta have a unique gimmick
DANNY Kaye
In the iconic musical “Gypsy,” a show-stopping song-and-dance number, “You Gotta Have A Gimmick,” is performed by three sassy, brassy ecdysiasts (striptease artists), to great, rousing effect and impact.
The audience laps it up because it’s so feistily and saucily performed—but it also drives home a strong thematic point that all show biz performers should take to heart: One of the best ways for newcomers to assure a stellar career for themselves is to stand out from the madding throng and offer something unique and new.
Stellar examples of this abound: In the field of comedy, for instance, Charlie Chaplin created the unique character of The Tramp, making him penniless, lonely and hungry to invite viewers’ sympathy and empathy.
He was also visually expressive and “articulate,” and this made Chaplin unique, because his training as a mime, acrobat and gymnast enabled him to come up with filmic feats of superlative dexterity, strength and subtlety that his rivals couldn’t approximate!
On the other hand, more energetic “physical” and in-your-face comedy was vivified in the ’40s and ’50s by carrot-topped Danny Kaye, who sent audience members rolling in the aisle with his gung-ho, all-out, in-your-face humor, in memorable cinematic vehicles like “The Inspector General” and “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”
The “outrageous” comedy performance style was so effective that, decades later, it inspired Jim Carrey to launch his own frenetic, kinetic and pneumatic stellar TV-film career by way of his own hit vehicles, like “The Mask,” “Ace Ventura,” “The Truman Show” and “Bruce Almighty.”
Finally, another comedy star, Don Rickles, has forged his own unique path by espousing the even more in-your-face, take-no-prisoners “school” known in the trade as the “comedy of insult.”
That’s right, Rickles generates (sometimes pained) yelps of laughter by enthusiastically insulting, not just his gallery of favorite celebrity “victims,” but even the members of his club audiences themselves!
Interestingly, this is the comedy style favored by our local (gay) club comedians, who insult their hapless patrons up and down, and inside out, with great scorn and relish—and their targets and victims laugh (painfully) along with everybody else!
Just in the field of comedy, therefore, we can cite three differing schools and styles—Chaplin’s subtle and mimetic visual comedy, Danny Kaye and his “apo” Jim Carrey’s over-the-top “physical” humor, and Don Rickles’ comedy of insult.
They may take radically diverging paths, but each approach has led to comedic stardom, because it’s been specifically suited to each comic’s strengths.
We trust that other performers who want to attain stardom can apply this insight to their own output. Don’t imitate, initiate (and break that other leg)!
