TE||The last of Vaudeville
'
1
导读
中国的stand-up comedy
2
音乐| 精读 | 翻译 | 词组
The last of Vaudeville
最后一个“幕前喜剧演员”
本文英文部分选自经济学人Obituary版块
Ken Dodd died on March 11th
肯·多德于3月11日去世
Britain’s only remaining front-cloth comedian was 90
英国最后一个“幕前喜剧演员”，享年90岁。
Stand-up comedy were known as front-cloth comics,referring to the staging in variety theatres,in which perfomers would do their turns in front of stage cloth hung closest to the front of the stage. Stand-up comedy（站立喜剧）在西方被尊为“喜剧的母艺术”。进入中国后，与相声相比，stand-up当然门槛低多了——不用拜师，不用练基本功、背传统段子，但要表演成功却非常难，能在大剧场里立得住60分钟、做得了个人专场的演员也是寥寥无几。和单口相声不同的是，stand-up comedy（站立喜剧）里讲的都是演员自己的故事——没有什么历史典故，也没有朱元璋和“珍珠翡翠白玉汤”，梗没有“说学逗唱”的模式和“练嘴皮子”的才艺展示。贴近现实生活，说的都是自己独特的人生经历，以及对生活富有个性化的理解和观点。
THEY couldn’t say they weren’t warned. Thick and fast the gags came. “The first thing the manager said to me was, ‘Crack on, Dodd. I’ve got to get this theatre cleared by 2am.’ I told him, ‘Looks like we’ll have to do the second half outside the town hall, then’.” “Are you looking at your watch, sir? You don’t need a watch, you need a calendar. We should be finished by Tuesday.” “The sooner you laugh at the jokes, the sooner you can go home. But they say the breakfast here is good.” “This isn’t television, Mrs. You can’t turn me off.”
他们不能说自己没有被警告过。笑话纷至沓来。经理对我说的第一件事是，“加油，多德！我需要在凌晨两点前把整个剧场清空。”
“看样子我们得去市政大厅外去演下半场啦！”我告诉他。
“先生，你看时间了吗？不，你不需要手表，你需要一个日历。我们得在周二前完成演出。”
“早点笑完可以早回家，不过听说这儿的早餐不错（咱们可以一直演出到明天早上）”
“我又不是电视机，夫人。你不能把我关掉！”
They couldn’t turn Doddy off (or not for five hours or so) because once the audience was warmed up he couldn’t bear to stop. “You all represent the crème de la crème. That’s French for evaporated milk.” “Hello, Mrs. Is this your husband with you, or is it novelty night?” Between the 1960s and the 1990s he averaged 100,000 miles a year, playing nearly every theatre in Britain. Though he starred on TV too, it didn’t suit him. The Varieties at Liverpool’s Shakespeare Theatre, his boyhood passion, were his ideal. He was the last of the front-cloth comedians, meaning they dropped a cloth behind you while they cleared up the stage from the Liberty Horses and got it ready for the man who pulled doves out of his jacket, and there you were, but with an act that had been burnished until it was a jewel. And he knew he was the last, for all the greats, from Max Miller on, had crossed the boards before him.
他们确实不能把多德关掉（或者让他在五个小时左右结束演出），因为一旦现场气氛被带动，他就无法停止了。
“你们都是精华中的精华，就像法国炼乳。”
“您好，太太，和您在一起的是您丈夫吗？还是一个奇妙之夜（应该意指和这个夫人一起的男士不是其先生）？”
从上世纪60年代到90年代，多德平均年行十万公里，在英国几乎每个剧院都表演过。虽然他也主演过电视节目，但这并不适合他。他孩童时期的理想就是在他热爱的利物浦莎士比亚剧院进行各种表演。他是最后一个幕前喜剧演员，在他们身后会放下一块幕布，当工作人员清理好自由马演出后（马戏表演中听号令进行表演的自由马）的舞台后，为下一个即将出现并从夹克中变出鸽子的人做准备，这一幕被不断打磨直至经典。他知道自己是最后一个，因为所有的大师，从马克思·米勒开始，都曾纵横过他脚下的戏台。
Not that this lessened his plumptiousness. “What a beautiful day!” he would cry. A wonderful day to beat a big drum, in true trouper style, in a shaggy red greatcoat or a mustard-yellow suit (“My tailor is colour-blind”), his hair like a bats’ nest and his teeth, bucked when he’d tried to ride a bike with his eyes closed, going proud before. (“My mother used to use me for crimping the pastry.”) His chief prop was a tickling-stick, a red, white and blue feather duster extendable into the stalls to get those chuckle-muscles working and reduce the hall to that beautiful thing, helpless laughter. “How tickled I am, under the circumstances! Tell me, Madam, have you ever been tickled under the circumstances?” He brought on dancing children as the Diddymen of Knotty Ash, his home suburb in Liverpool, and smoothed his hair to sing sentimental ballads in a light baritone. One of these, “Tears”, topped the charts for five weeks in 1965; he was good at crying songs. But then he resumed the gags. He held the world record for cracking them, 1,500 in 3 hours 7 minutes, with no script. Just off the top of his wild tousled head.
当他大声喊叫着“多么美好的一天呀！”时，这并没有减少他喜剧的丰富和美好”。这是敲打大鼓的绝妙日子，他带着十足的戏剧演员范儿，身着蓬松的红色厚大衣或者深黄色套装（“我的裁缝是色盲”），他的头发像蝙蝠的巢穴，当他试着闭眼骑车时，他的龅牙早就流露出了骄傲。（“我母亲曾用我做蛋糕花边。”）他的首要道具是一个挠痒棒，一个红、白、蓝色相间的鸡毛掸子伸向观众席，调动笑肌，让这个演出大厅沉浸于这种美妙的、止不住的笑声中。“这样挠得我好痒啊，告诉我，夫人，这样挠你会不会痒，忍不住发笑？”他引入了跳舞小人，来自诺托阿什，他利物浦老家郊区的迪迪人（利物浦诺托阿什地区身材娇小的人），捋平他的头发以轻柔的男中音唱起了伤感的歌谣。其中，“泪水”这首歌曾在1965年连续5周占据榜首；他很擅长悲情歌。然后他又重新回归喜剧。他保持着没有剧本创造笑料的世界纪录，在3小时7分钟内说了1500个笑话。这些笑话就这样从他狂野的顶着蓬乱头发的脑袋中蹦了出来。
Jokes about fat ladies.“An official told my big Auntie Nellie to come off the beach, because the tide was waiting to come in.” Repairmen: “On Friday there was a tap on the door. Funny sense of humour, that plumber.” Mothers-in-law: “I haven’t spoken to mine for 18 months. I don’t like to interrupt her.” Men: “How many men does it take to change a toilet roll? Nobody knows, it’s never been tried.” And himself. “I do exercises every day in front of the television. Up, down, up, down, up, down. Then the other eyelid.” “It’s ten years since I went out of my mind. I’d never go back.” His life (in fact coal-merchant’s son, left school at 14, sold pans and detergent out of a van, first professional gig as Professor Yaffle Chuckabutty at the Nottingham Empire in 1954) was made as mythical as Knotty Ash itself, which acquired treacle wells and black-pudding plantations. “I was born one day when my mother was out. We were so poor, the lady next door had me.”
文中对于笑话的翻译，由于文化差异，不是很妥贴，希望专业大佬指正
有关胖女士的笑话。“一位官员让我的大姨妈内莉离开海滩，因为潮水还在等着进来。”
关于修理工：“星期五的时候，有人敲门，滑稽的是，又是那个水管工。”
关于岳母：“我已经18个月没和岳母说话了，我不想打扰她。”
关于男人：“换个马桶卷需要多少人？没有人知道，也从来没有试过。”
“我每天都在电视机前锻炼身体。上，下，上，下，上，下。然后换另一个眼皮。”
“我已经十年没思考过了。我再也不回去了。 ”
他的一生(实际上是煤炭商人的儿子，14岁离开学校，开着货车卖平底锅和洗涤剂，1954年在诺丁汉帝国剧院的第一次职业演出/戏剧歌曲“Professor Yaffle Chuckabut”)充满神话色彩，形同以蜜糖井和黑布丁种植园而蜚声的Knotty Ash。“有一天，我母亲出门时，我出生了。我们很穷，隔壁的那位女士收养了我。”
水管工：英式幽默，举两个例子
1. 累并快乐着！英国一水管工年薪远超首相
http://news.163.com/18/0206/11/D9V8LRCE000187VE.html
中国日报网2月6日电（潘一侨） 据英国《每日邮报》2月4日报道，英国水管工弗里依靠疏通马桶和修理漏水的水龙头，已经在伦敦较贵地段拥有自己的房产，并且每年还要去马尔代夫和加那利群岛享受奢华的假期。最让人意想不到的是，他的年收入竟比英国首相还要高出50%。
2. 英国人的幽默 转自https://www.gricen.com/a/115594/
一个英国大学数学教授发现家里下水道堵了，就请来一个水管工来修，看到账单后不禁大叫：“什么！ 就30分钟你收的钱当我一个月收入的1/3了！。我去当水管工好了！”。 水管工说，“你可以去啊。我们公司正招人呢。还包培训。不过你得说你只是小学毕业。公司不喜欢学历太高的人”。于是教授就去参加培训，当了水管工。他的收入一下翻了三倍。
It seemed scatty, but every joke and gesture was rehearsed and re-rehearsed. In each new town he scoured the public library for books about comedy and the psychology of wit. His house in Knotty Ash was full of them. He read Schopenhauer and Freud. “Freud said, Laughter is the outward expression of the psyche. But he never played the Glasgow Empire on a Saturday after both Celtic and Rangers lost.” In dozens of notebooks he recorded his jokes, where told, and how they’d gone down. In the Black Country he had to unfold them slowly. Nottingham liked picture gags. The south coast enjoyed a bit of spice, but Wigan didn’t. His favourite photo of himself was a back view, walking across a theatre car park in red-and-white striped stockings, tickling-sticks in hand, thinking: “I could have told that one better.”
这听起来很傻，但每一个笑话和姿势都经过再三排练。每到一个新城镇，他都会在公共图书馆里搜寻有关喜剧和心理学智慧的书籍。Knotty Ash的家里堆满了这类书籍，他读过叔本华（德国哲学家）和佛洛伊德（奥地利心理分析学家及精神病学家）的书。“佛洛伊德说笑是心灵的外在表现，但是自卡尔特人和流浪者比赛失败后，他再也没有在周六玩过Glasgow Empire.”他有几十本笔记本记录他的笑话在哪里讲过，怎么被演绎。在黑乡（英格兰密集工业区），他不得不慢慢地抖包袱。诺丁汉人喜欢图片恶作剧，南部沿线地区的人们喜欢带点情趣的笑话，但是威根（Wigan）人不喜欢。他最喜欢的照片是自己的一张背影：脚穿红白相间的条文长筒袜，双手拿着挠痒棍穿过剧场的停车场，边走，边想：“那个笑话我本可以讲得更好。”
Cash in the attic
阁楼里的现金
His buoyancy was tempered only once, when the Inland Revenue in 1989 found that in his attic, together with Charlie Brown, his first ventriloquist’s puppet, and a life-raft, and a giant bottle of stout, and box upon box of scripts, there was also £336,000 in cash that he hadn’t declared for tax. More sat in shoe-boxes under the bed. He’d put some of his earnings in offshore accounts, but he didn’t trust banks. He kept his money close to remind him that he’d played the London Palladium for 42 weeks in the mid-1960s, another record. To prove he was somebody. Everyone acquitted him, and the joke-book benefited. “Self-assessment? I invented that.” “I told the Inland Revenue I didn’t owe them a penny, because I lived by the seaside.”
肯·多德只郁闷过一次。1989年，税务局在他的阁楼上发现了他第一次口技表演木偶查理·布朗(Charlie Brown)、一支救生筏、一大瓶黑啤酒和一箱箱堆着的剧本，还搜到了他没纳税的336000英镑现金；大部分钱都藏在床下的鞋盒子里。他把部分收入存入离岸账户，然而他并不相信银行。肯·多德把钱放在身边是为了提醒自己在20世纪60年代中期演了42个星期的《伦敦钯》，这又一个新纪录。他想证明自己是个人物，每个人都不会怪罪他，并且笑话书也能大卖。“自我评估？我造了这个词。” “我告诉税务局职员，我住在海边，所以我不欠他们一分钱。
By then he was invulnerable, part of the national fabric. It was just the music-hall tradition, old-style variety, that was dying on its feet. And jokes about death never went down well. Apart from the one about the mother-in-law and the sharks...the taxman and the boa constrictor...
那时的他是国家文化事业的栋梁，坚不可摧。这只是音乐大厅里的老式传统，风格过于老套，随着时代发展正在垂死挣扎。除了他那些婆婆，鲨鱼，收税员以及大蟒蛇的故事，那些关于死亡的笑话从未被好好记下来过...（一种过时的无可奈何感）
翻译组：
Yi, 女，财务民工，经济学人爱好者
Cece，女，消防工作者，CATTI三笔
Neil, 男，外贸民工，经济学人铁粉
Samantha，女，滑冰狂人，邓伦未婚妻
Shirly，女，笔译研究生，经济学人爱好者
Amber，女，文学研究生，经济学人爱好者
Lucia，女，翻译学硕士三年制，经济学人爱好者
校核组：
Forest，女，自由职业，经济学人爱好者
Lee，男，医学英译 Timberland爱好者
3
3观点 |评论|思考
本次观点为Forest独家奉献
Forest，女，自由职业，经济学人爱好者
斯坦福大学的心理学教授卡罗尔.德韦克提出”思维模式（mindset）“理论。一种是成长思维模式（growth mindset），就是学习不在天赋，而在乎努力；一种是固定思维模式（fixed mindset）就是特别相信天赋的作用，擅长的东西就是擅长，要是不擅长就怎么学都没有用。上次的印度女神希里黛玉；本期的单口喜剧大师Ken Dodd，如果没有更多了解，也许我们都会觉得这种以对身体、表情、发声的驾驭为职业的人都一定是特别有天赋，可是实际上我们看到的不过是有斐君子，如切如磋，如琢如磨。
4
愿景
小组
小编理工男，建筑底层民工，经济学人铁粉，和小伙伴(经济学人小群不超过8个人）看经济学人到现在已经将近700多天。现有一经济学人大群,如果您也有兴趣，可加入我们学习小组，群规甚严，请三思后而入群，WeChat : foxwulihua