Journalist/Comedian Harmon Leon dives into comedy cult classics, comedic influences, and all things comedy history.
Tim Conway was one of the greatest second bananas in comedy history. Sadly, he passed away on May 14th at the age of 85. Conway’s comedy career started on a local TV station in Ohio, and he made his mark in sketches alongside Harvey Korman on the Carol Burnett Show. He also starred in the much overlooked TV movie: Roll Freddy, Roll.
We love the comedy work of Tim Conway - and today’s CH101 episode is a tribute!
Alex Jones began his career in Austin, Texas, back in the ’90s, as a local cable access cult figure - and built a rabid national audience by spewing out conspiracy theories.
To set the stage, ACTV (Austin Community Access TV) in the ’90s was pure Austin at it’s weirdest. Find out how Jones jumped on the scene as an amped up 22-year old - and originally wanted to be a standup comedian. Learn what happened when he got in a fight in the parking lot of ACTV - and claimed he was attacked by a man with “strange goat eyes.”
Read Harmon’s entire story about the incident in the NY Observer.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, slipping on a banana peel has been a fixture in physical comedy. A comedy trope, if you will. We’ve seen such legendary silent comedians as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Laurel and Hardy - all do a variation of the slipping on a banana peel gag.
But how did the “slipping on a banana peel” gag come into our lexicon? And why don’t we see people slipping on banana peels in 2019? Find out all this and more as we do a CH101 deep dive into the history of slipping on banana peels!
