I STOOD ON Jasper Avenue in the sunlight and considered the horse’s guts. I knew nothing about a horse’s anatomy, let alone my own. If you take a man apart, piece by piece, you’d learn nothing. Even if you take his life apart, as so many try to do with the famous, like Keaton and Arbuckle, you’ll still learn very little. What have all these material lumps and twists and turns to do with the power in a horse’s gallop or the ferocity in its eyes? Idly, I tried to locate the bladder.
A horse couldn’t be so very different from a goat, and it was a goat’s bladder that gave the world the term slapstick. Indirectly, anyway. For in the early vaudeville days, the comedians used a curious prop, a goat bladder stretched on a stick, in their acts. One comedian would hit another with it, accompanied b
