Daily Dialogue — March 4, 2017

“Short people have long faces, and long people have short faces. Big people have little humor, and little people have no humor at all.”

— Singin’ in the Rain (1952), screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green

The Daily Dialogue theme for next week: Sidekick, suggested by Angry Cyborg.

Trivia: The “Make ’em Laugh” sequence was created because Gene Kelly felt that Donald O’Connor needed a solo number. As O’Connor noted in an interview, “Gene didn’t have a clue as to the kind of number it was meant to be.” The two of them brainstormed ideas in the rehearsal room, and came up with a compendium of gags and “shtick” that O’Connor had done for years, some of which he had performed in vaudeville. O’Connor recalled, “Every time I got a new idea or remembered something that had worked well for me in the past, Gene wrote it down and, bit by bit, the entire number was constructed.”

Dialogue On Dialogue: Cosmo Brown, as played brilliantly by Donald O’Connor, is one of the greatest sidekick characters in all movie history. At times, he is friend to the story’s Protagonist Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) acting as a comic buddy or Mentor, other times Trickster, and occasionally a character who got in Don’s face. But mostly, we remember Cosmo because his performance is so incredible as with this number “Make ’Em Laugh”.