Koo Koo Korrespondance Skool

Along with the comedy shorts of Joe Cook, this 1937 short featuring cartoonist Jefferson Machamer is one of the most surreal 1930s American comedy shorts I've seen. Of course, the whole idea of building a short around a working cartoonist playing himself would require an odd premise to be interesting for 17 minutes, and this one has Machamer (who takes time to sketch a few ladies on easels that just happen to be handy)enrolling in a Art Correspondence School-- which magically comes alive lesson-by-lesson in his mailbox at the post office and features lovely women hosting the lessons. Aided by his sidekick "Cloudy" (played by Henry Jines), Machamer (who wrote the short also) free associates his way through the short with all kinds of absurd literalisms and he has a wonderfully engaging screen persona, kind of like a better-natured Dabney Coleman! I saw this about 20 years ago, and just watched it again, and I really don't know what to compare it to. I'm reminded of the 1950s British radio show "The Goon Show" or Monty Python--and of course, Machamer's colleague at Educational Pictures a few years earlier, Joe Cook, and his comic surrealism. Are all of Machamer's comedy shorts this off-the-wall and this well done? This short could have wide appeal today if it were shown on television or made available on DVD. My copy is from an Official Films 16mm print, but unlike many of those, it does retain its Educational Pictures opening credits after the "Official" logo. This is the kind of short that once seen is not easily forgotten. Bravo to cartoonist Machamer for being such a pioneer. Is it too much to hope that someday someone could find all the extant Machamer shorts (the IMDb lists seven) and release them?

The plot of this movie is as ridiculous as its misspelt title. I've never heard of Jefferson Machamer, but he was apparently a successful comic-strip artist. Still, his career as depicted here is sheer wish-fulfilment: he has a huge opulent studio, and he pays gorgeous models to lounge about so that he can sketch them at his leisure. Oh, yes.

Even more offensive than this insult to my intelligence is some unfunny racial humour: Machamer has a black manservant named 'Cloudy', whom he mistreats while Cloudy says things like 'Yassuh, Marse Jeff'son'. Memo to this movie: Lincoln freed the slaves.

I was more impressed by a couple of sequences in which Machamer executes an entire drawing on-camera, undercranked so that his technique is sped up in time. Much more interesting for me than Machamer's linework is his scumbling technique: he scumbles with his fingers, without letting go of the pencil. I might have recommended this movie to would-be artists just for this brief glimpse of Machamer's scumbling technique ... but nowadays, with computer graphics software replacing hand-scumbling, why bother? My rating for this unfunny, racist and implausible movie: 1 point out of 10.