Word: frack
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Dates: during 1939-1939
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...skaters that brought down the house each night were Frick & Frack, a pair of Swiss comics. Frick & Frack have been a scream ever since they first skated together in their native Basle three years ago. Frick, whose real name is Werner Groebli, was a student at the University of Zurich. Frack, born Hansruedi Mauch, was studying at a business school. One holiday afternoon they set to burlesquing some of their pompous neighbors who acted as though they owned the rink. Onlookers tittered merrily...
Before they realized what was happening, Frick and Frack were performing in Zurich, Berne, St. Moritz. At St. Moritz an English producer spied them, hired them to do a turn in a London ice show. In London last winter a U. S. promoter saw them, hired them to do their stuff at Hollywood's Tropical Ice Garden. When the Tropical Ice Garden melted after four weeks, Frick & Frack got one job and another, finally found themselves in St. Paul's Skating Carnival. There Producers Shipstad & Johnson, who know a good comic when they see one, grabbed the boys...
...Frick & Frack do not depend on costumes, grimaces or falls to get their laughs. With the pantomime of Charlie Chaplin and the rubber legs of Leon Errol, they take the elements of figure skating, distort them into crazy positions to create some of the most astonishing feats ever performed on skates. Frick's specialty: a cantilever Spread Eagle in which his body, bent backward from the knees, is almost horizontal with the ice. Frack's specialty: a rocking-chair Spread Eagle (gliding in circles in a sitting position...
...think our skating is eccentric. It is not so. Any figure skater should be able to do a serious Spread Eagle asleep. It becomes comedy when you do odd things with your body while the Spread Eagle is going on. We use our brains, nerve-control and concentration." Says Frack, the fractious one: "What we like most outside of skating is to go to a vaudeville show so we can laugh once in a while...