All the Tricks of the Trade: Everything You Need to Know about Comedy: A Practical Handbook and Complete Performance Guide for Actors, Writers, and - Paperback

by Robert Blumenfeld (Author)

A must for actors, writers, and directors All the Tricks of the Trade: Everything You Need to Know about Comedy is an indispensable handbook and practical performance manual, which lives up to its title. It provides a detailed guide to performing all genres of all periods, from ancient Greece to the twenty-first century, including comedy of manners, farce, the comic film, and the television sitcom. It gives actors, directors and writers all the details of how to create comedic characters using the Stanislavsky system. Actors and directors will constantly consult chapter 1, with its compendium of all the comedic tools and techniques (how to tell jokes, the different takes, deadpan, double-talk, etc.), and its summary of lazzi and physical comedy techniques (different kinds of falls, dealing with props, faked injuries, and so forth). The section in the Introduction to part 2 on the age-old comedy plots is an invaluable resource for writers as well as for actors and directors. The Introduction to part 4 (Comedy on Camera) includes a complete guide to working on camera. And chapter 14, with its tips and lessons from the great film and television comedians, is a concise summary of how they created memorable laughs. For easy reference, and as a guide to further reading, there are three appendixes: first, an annotated list of the major European and American comedy writers of all eras; second an annotated list of major comedy film directors; and third, a glossary of comedy terms.

Author Biography

Robert Blumenfeld is the author of Accents: A Manual for Actors (1998; Revised and Expanded Edition, 2002); Acting with the Voice: The Art of Recording Books (2004), and nine other books on the performing arts-all published by Limelight. He lives and works as an actor, dialect coach, and writer in New York City, and is a longtime member of Equity, and SAG-AFTRA. He has worked in numerous regional and New York theaters, as well as in television and independent films. For ACT Seattle he played the title role in Ronald Harwood's The Dresser, and he has performed many roles in plays by Shakespeare and Chekhov, as well as doing an Off-Broadway season of six Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas for Dorothy Raedler's American Savoyards (under the name Robert Fields), for which he played the Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe and other patter-song roles. He created the roles of the Marquis of Queensberry and two prosecuting attorneys in Moisés Kaufman's Off-Broadway hit play Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, and was also the production's dialect coach, a job that he did as well for the Broadway musicals, Saturday Night Fever and The Scarlet Pimpernel (third version and national tour) and for Jay Lesenger's production of Weill's Street Scene (2008), which he also coached for Mr. Lesenger at the Chautauqua Opera. Mr. Blumenfeld currently records books for Audible, among them Pale Fire (joint recording with Mark Vietor) and Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov. He has recorded more than 320 Talking Books for the American Foundation for the Blind, including the complete Sherlock Holmes canon, Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, and a bilingual edition of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, in Beckett's original French and the playwright's own English translation. He received the 1997 Canadian National Institute for the Blind's Torgi Award for the Talking Book of the Year in the fiction category, for his recording of Pat Conroy's Beach Music; and the 1999 Alexander Scourby Talking Book Narrator of the Year Award in the fiction category. He holds a BA in French from Rutgers University and an MA from Columbia University in French language and literature. Mr. Blumenfeld speaks French, German, and Italian fluently, and has smatterings of Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish.