Thus the Hull Truck's "The Hypocrite", a knockabout comedy revelling in Hull's walk-on parts in British history, was a co-production with the RSC, written by local-playwright-made-good Richard Bean.
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The Orpheum Circuit was started by the vaudeville impresario Gustav Walter, who opened the Orpheum Opera House in San Francisco in 1886. This first Orpheum seated 3500 and quickly became one of the most popular theaters in San Francisco attracting a wide variety of people. The Orpheum's tickets were scaled to draw a mixed audience. Customers bought tickets to the Orpheum because of its diverse program that ranged from knockabout comedy to opera.
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Saruman's use of "Ruffians" to tyrannise the Shire has been compared to the Nazis' handling of dissent, here by marching people off to an internment camp in Serbia. Various commentators have noted that the chapter has political overtones. The critic Jerome Donnelly suggests that the chapter is a satire, of a more serious kind than the knockabout "comedy of manners" at the start of The Hobbit. Plank calls it a caricature of fascism.
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The Complete Goodies – Robert Ross, B T Batsford, London, 2000.A Goodies Way to Go – Laughing, "Eastern Daily Press", Norwich (29 March 1975)Slapstick! The Illustrated Story of Knockabout Comedy – Tony Staveacre, Angus & Robertson, 1987, On 1 November 1977, Seema Bakewell, a 32-year-old housewife from Leicester, went into labour whilst laughing at a sketch in The Goodies episode "Alternative Roots". She refused to leave home for the hospital until the episode had finished.
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Wits To Wits has been noted as one of the precursors of the knockabout comedy kung fu genre that was later made famous by Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan. Another movie Wu directed, Manchu Boxer (1974), featured Sammo Hung, then a young choreographer and later one of the trend-setters of Hong Kong cinema. This marked the beginning of a strong working relationship between the two, which would become prominent towards the 1980s. He co- directed with his former mentor Chang in several movies – The Water Margin (1972), The Pirate (1973), All Men Are Brothers (1975) and The Naval Commandos (1976).
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First military comedy: Charlie Chaplin's Shoulder Arms (1918) Charlie Chaplin's Shoulder Arms (1918) set a style for war films to come, and was the first comedy about war in film history. British cinema in the Second World War marked the evacuation of children from London with social comedies such as Those Kids from Town (1942) where the evacuees go to stay with an earl (a country nobleman), while in Cottage to Let (1941) and Went the Day Well? (1942) the English countryside is thick with spies. Gasbags (1941) offered "zany, irreverent, knockabout" comedy making fun of everything from barrage balloons to concentration camps.
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Thomas Hanlon performing, 1860 A group of pre-Vaudevillian acrobats founded in the early 1840s, the Hanlon-Lees were world-renowned practitioners of "entortillation" (an invented word based upon the French term entortillage, which translates to "twisting" or "coiling") – that is, tumbling, juggling, and an early form of "knockabout" comedy (later popularized by such groups as the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges). The troupe consisted of the six Hanlon brothers and their mentor, established acrobat Professor John Lees. Originally billed as "The Hanlons," the group debuted in 1846 at London's Theatre Royal, Adelphi. At this time, the company consisted of George, William, and Alfred Hanlon, who were essentially wards of John Lees until his death in 1855.
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The Merry Frolics of Satan (, literally The Four Hundred Tricks of the Devil) is a 1906 French silent film by Georges Méliès. The film is an updated comedic adaptation of the Faust legend, borrowing elements from two stage féerie spectaculars: Les Pilules du diable (1839), a classic stage fantasy with knockabout comedy, and Les Quatre Cents Coups du diable (1905), a satirical update of Les Pilules du diable to which Méliès had contributed two sequences, one of which he incorporated into the present film. In addition to directing and acting in it, Méliès supervised all aspects of the film's design and trick effect work, including extensive use of stage machinery, in his lavishly individual style, which was already unusual in the mass production-dominated French film industry. The film follows the adventures of an ambitious engineer who abandons his family and responsibilities when he barters with the Devil (played by Méliès himself) for superhuman powers.
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