I’ve Caught Bud Jamison Disease

By all accounts, Bud Jamison was an affable sort of guy. He certainly had a genial face. He used to play cops and tough guys, too, but it’s his big smile I remember most. He appeared in 450 movies and “shorts” in 30 years. With that sort of resume, he must have played every sort of person at one time or another. Except for a skinny person, of course.

Most of the movies were silent. It’s almost beside the point to describe many of those. Bud tries to punch Charlie Chaplin in The Champion, which is great fun. He’s “That Guy” in a lot of ancient stuff. However, I don’t know about you, but I’m not clamoring for a re-release of John Barrymore’s rendition of Ahab in 1930’s version of Moby Dick, even if I can see Bud play an uncredited shipping agent in it.  So it will be Bud’s curse or blessing to be remembered forevermore by almost everyone who recognizes him at all as the guy who suffers along while the Three Stooges do their thing near him or to him. He made 38 shorts with the Stooges, including the very first one.

My mother hated the Three Stooges. We were forbidden from watching them. Back in the day, there wasn’t much on television after school. The Stooges were run on a nearly endless loop on the off-brand teevee stations that couldn’t afford to show anything but re-runs of ancient entertainments. So you can imagine how well the interdiction about watching them went. Mom played pretty good defense when it was man-to-man, but faltered a bit when she had to switch to zone.

She testified that she was certain that if we watched the Stooges, I’d eventually hit my little brother in the head with an ax. That was just another of the endless series of moral panics that has gripped the American female zeitgeist down through the ages. Of course I would have liked to hit my little brother in the head with an ax from time to time, but I didn’t need the Stooges to urge me on. Who hasn’t wanted to hit their little brother with an ax, or drag a crosscut saw across their fontanel, or grab their nose with a pliers? But like most moral panics, there was no real danger of stuff like that happening. We didn’t own an ax.

In a broad sort of a way, there were only two camps in the recycled vaudeville teevee audiences. The Three Stooges, and the Marx Brothers. The Marx Brothers made full length movies, and the Stooges made shorts, but they were essentially weird doppelgangers of each other. It’s easy to say the Stooges were more lowbrow, because the Marx Brothers relied more on wit. But I’m not so sure that’s fair. The Stooges, like Bud, were genial. I like snark as much as the next guy, so I can enjoy the Marx Brothers movies, but in its heart it’s a bit nasty.

America has become a very snarky place. The teevee got really snarky after a while, when all the gentle humor was expunged and replaced with nothing but situational cutting remarks, doled out by the half hour. The Stooges hit each other, and made fools of themselves, but they didn’t ever exhibit a truly mean bone in their body, except by compound fracture, of course. Groucho was funny, but he helped adumbrate the proto-bile we’re all drowning in. They were both sets of Everyman, with posh operators, authority figures, and criminals taking whacks at them. The Stooges were better at taking haughty people down a peg when you get right down to it, just by being themselves, really. Like they did to Bud, when it was required:

“Gosh, I’d sure like to help. You know, I haven’t had a paintbrush in my hand in years.” There it is. That’s Bud Jamison disease, and I’ve got it bad.

You see, I’m on the sidelines now, as far as doing anything practical in the real world. At one time or another, I’ve done all sorts of manual labor that results in the world being physically altered by the end of the day. Besides the stuff I built or repaired out in the landscape, at any time in the last thirty years or so I’ve been able to go downstairs and return with whatever was required at the time, everything from a dining room table to a patched bicycle tire. Now I live in an apartment, and my tools fit in a shoe box, and I get to see people doing practical things, and think, Gosh, I’d sure like to help.

So I saw this video about mimicking oak woodgraining by a man who appears to paint scenery for lord knows what.

He’s disabled, so we have to make allowances. By disabled, I mean he’s English or British or something. He’s required by the Magnum Cortex or whatever they use for laws over there to talk with that funny accent, and call everything by its wrong name. He’s required to call shellac “button polish,” and starts blabbering about PVA, which stands for poly-vinyl-acetate. The poor sod is forced to talk in acronyms instead of saying Elmer’s Glue and being done with it. Then he’s probably got a gun to his head, and they force him to call latex paint “emulsion paint.” Just because it’s a British gun and will probably hang fire, doesn’t mean the threat won’t feel real. They really treat folks unfairly over there.

Everyone in the good ol’ USA calls every kind of paint you can wash out of your brushes (and your nose hairs, if you’re like most housepainters) using only water. Of course latex and acrylic paint (emulsion) are two different things, but no American can keep two things in their head at the same time, alongside all that freedom we keep in there. And man, did my eye twitch when he called a roller cover a “rag roller.” English, do you speak it? I’m pretty sure I do. Fairly sure. Whatever.

At any rate, videos like this turn me right into Bud Jamison. I’m sure if I told David Rowse, the pleasant and talented fellow who made the video, that Gosh, I’d sure like to help. You know, I haven’t had a paintbrush in my hand in years, he might be tempted to tell me to go mix up a batch of spotted paint. Fair enough. But in addition to being a busybody, I’d be the worst kind of busybody extant: I wouldn’t offer to help. I’d offer advice. That’s miles worse.

Of course my method is what we fellows in the painting trade used to call “quick and dirty.” You know, like having sex with a car mechanic.

Anyone can review my technique in an old couple of posts here: Graining a door.

And please remember my braggart’s motto: I can do it better than anyone who can do it faster, and I can do it faster than anyone who can do it better.