Marcel Marceau

I hope perhaps against hope that there will be nothing written on Marcel Marceau’s grave. In a world of blogs when people can’t seem to shut the hell up, Marceau made silence into an art. I hope the media give the man as much coverage as they did Pavarotti, though I suspect that they have a bias towards noise.

I suppose it’s hardly surprising when loud comedians are all in fashion. Friends look at me with a kind of benign pity when I tell them that I sit down at night and watch Keaton or Chaplin. They don’t even know who I’m talking about when I mention Harold Lloyd. Yet they gasp with outrage when I criticise the sometimes tediously unfunny 3 Stooges. Much as Laurel and Hardy are well loved, their silent work is little known, and the same is true of W.C. Fields, one of the world’s great physical comedians and jugglers.