Walpurgis for Strings

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 359, 10 May 1946, Page 14

Walpurgis for Strings

HE interesting Mr. Spike Jones and ‘his City Slickers, who were the subject of a recent Listener article read with impatience by many and by a few with something approaching awe, have been on the air from 3YA. They are Members of a perfectly recognisable, though esoteric, tradition-that of entertainment by lunacy. It is said that the 16th Century gentility used to make up parties to go out to Bedlam for the afternoon and have a good laugh at the lunatics. Similarly, many professional entertainers of the present-especially in America-arouse mirth in their public by methods of unreason bordering upon nihilism. Of such are the Marx Brothers, the Hope and Crosby type of

humour, and Olsen and Johnson’s "Hellzapoppin." The last has a further feature in common with Mr. Jones; a slightly Sinister, uproarious and murderous destructiveness. It was Olsen and Johnson who, discovering the nominal hero and heroine embracing at the end of a film, shot them down with a tommy-gun and marched over the bodies declaring, "This is gonna be one picture wit’out a happy ending!" Mr. Jones and his henchmen, in the same way, start a sentimental, an old-favourite, or a latest-hit number a little more than straight-and then with a whoop straight from the Pit, start in with saws, hammers, shotguns, the human voice, and digestive processes, to deal with it in their own way. This deliberate diabolism and premeditated assault is characteristic of a certain type of ultra-modern entertainment, and the redoubtable Slickers have only carried it several stages further.