THE KIPPER KIDS MOVIE
THE KIPPER KIDS SERIES

Routh is softly laconic Von Haselberg is capable of the abstract discourse that reads well in art magazines. Between the two of them, they can dish it out any way you want to take it. Like our old performances, we want to be painfully funny, with an underlying disturbing element.” “We might one day do films that are more than just comic entertainment.

“We have just begun to explore integrating the Kipper Kids in a new context,” Von Haselberg said. Much of Harry’s humor is so subtle that it never gets past the corner of your eye. He grinned at his partner beside him in the restaurant with the shared prognathous-jawed gesture that confers instant goofiness on the face of the grin’s bearer. “They love their mum,” said Harry (Routh) drolly, in a soft northern British accent and tone that almost eerily evokes Stan Laurel. They have the emotional privacy of genuine lunatics, and a corresponding innocence. They look like stocky British louts of yore hired by the gentry to cudgel errant country taxpayers but who never could hurt anyone. Kippers’ ” scenes, they’re almost completely obscured in a cloud of chicken feathers). But they prefer chaos to linear plot situations–they’re almost always involved in some kind of physical mess, whether it’s food or garbage (in one of “K.O. In “Mondo Beyondo,” we saw an energy and sharp-featured harlequin look that recalled the commedia dell’arte. Kippers,” the assumption is that they’re to fight another two-man team, but when the opponents become violently ill after having consumed a bottle of their sponsor’s soft drink product (a rank concoction called “Fizzo” that makes battery acid seem comparatively benign), they’re forced to fight each other, which they promised Mum they’d never do.īy any modern comedy standard, their style is eccentric.

The Kids do everything in tandem–they are the closest team since Laurel & Hardy, with whom they bear a couple of similarities. (The Kids do their road work carrying the women on their backs.) The Kids have been allotted two merry but overweight and distinctly plain peasant women. The manager has two sleek hookers who accompany him everywhere. In it, the Kids have been contractually locked into a prizefight in some sleazy Mexican tank town by a crooked manager (Joe Spinell, oozing mendacity and corruption from every oily pore) who keeps them in a chicken coop (they work out on plucked dead chickens as light punching bags). 15, 17, 19, 21 and 23, is short and relatively slight.

THE KIPPER KIDS MOVIE

The black-and-white movie which debuts on Cinemax Aug.

THE KIPPER KIDS SERIES

They now use recognizable speech where once they communicated in a series of growls and raspberries whose flatulent variations, which still erupt in their exchanges, would be the envy of a symphonic brass player. (Creative Artists has put them under contract.) Even though the Kipper Kids are a great deal less esoteric than they once were, they still fall well within the classification of the avant-garde. It’s hard to determine what the industry types will make of them Tuesday. He was executive producer for “Mondo Beyondo”). (Von Haselberg, who has been a successful commodities dealer in his time, is married to Midler. Industry insiders will get a look at the two and only Tuesday night at the Hollywood Masonic Lodge, where they’ll show their latest short movie, “K.O. You may have seen them on HBO’s “Mondo Beyondo.” In a scene in a men’s room involving food, they performed the near-impossible in outflanking Bette Midler’s outrageousness and lending the program an unmistakable comic lift. The Kipper Kids have had big reputations in performance art circles, particularly in Europe, for the bulk of the past 20 years. For a while, they were Harry and Alf, but they couldn’t remember who was who. The Kipper Kids, the joint creation of Martin von Haselberg and Brian Routh, took their name from a British schoolboy chum who had a face like a fish. It will always be Harry on the right as well. In photographs and in the cartoon logo that shows their heads back to back, with concave faces like twin images of men on the moon or safecrackers with three-day stubble on their stalk-like chins, it will always be Harry on the left.

The kipper kids