Word: groebli
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Before Frick and Frack entered the English lexicon as a term for an inseparable pair of buffoons, it referred to a popular ice-skating comedy duo. Beginning in the late 1930s, Frick, Werner Groebli, and his partner, Frack, Hans Rudolph Mauch, performed some 15,000 shows incorporating a unique mixture of pantomime, physical comedy and athleticism. "People think our skating is eccentric. It's not so," Groebli told TIME during the pair's first U.S. tour, in 1939. "Any figure skater should be able to do a serious spread eagle"--in which he skates with his body bent backward nearly...
...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...
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