20060414

"I may look weird, but I'm just like you"

I was talking to a friend, AJ, this afternoon who's taking an acting class at a local college this semester. She has to do a monologue next week and is going to be reading the part of this wife who is confronting her husband while he is seated before her. Oh, did I mention that he is bound and gagged? Anyway, AJ read her part before the class Thursday afternoon for practice. Once done, the professor explained to her that this "snippet" she had been given was actually from a comedy and urged her to have fun with it; to be silly. As AJ thought about how this character might act, she thought of Michael Richards' character, Kramer, on Seinfeld, in the episode, "The Trip (Part 1)." That's the one where Kramer, out in California, sees Fred Savage at a restaurant and approaches him to give him a copy of a script, or "treatment," he had been working on. (The more he tries to play it cool with Mr. Savage, the more he winds up looking like a bumbling idiot.) So anyway, as AJ and I are talking about the episode, I have to recall the word "treatment" that Kramer uses, (remember that). AJ goes on to tell me that her professor told her he was thinking more like Robert De Niro's character in a movie with Jerry Lewis, though she couldn't remember the name of the movie offhand. So I went to IMDb, searched for Jerry Lewis, and started naming off his movies. After I passed "The King of Comedy" (1983) at number 14, (AJ said, "that's the one"), I was amused to see the #24 entry for Mr. Lewis was called "Silent Treatment" (1968). Eh? Treatment? As in the "treatment" Kramer gave to Fred Savage (and others) in the Seinfeld episode?

I already told this story to DJ who, (on the surface), was not terribly impressed. Basically, he said that Jerry Lewis has been in a lot of movies, so to have a discussion about a word that also happens to be a word in the title of one of his movies, was not that big of a stretch. He said he would have been more impressed if "Silent Treatment" had been the actual movie that AJ's professor was thinking of. I agree, that would have been even more impressive, but I think the situation is pretty cool as it is. However, now as I write this, I have a rebuttal for DJ. If it is his contention that Jerry Lewis has been in a significant number of movies so as to make this coincidence less spectacular, then what are the odds that the movie used to distinguish this Jerry Lewis from others in my search, (http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=Jerry+Lewis), should be the very movie that D's professor was talking about? Eh? Any way you slice it, I think we've got an interesting observation here...

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

« Home