Spoofing Croquet

Abstract

In the Follies of 1916 Fields is given more speaking parts. In one scene, called “Recruiting,” he plays Reddan Greene, a bum anxious to join the army. In “The Blushing Ballet,” a dance scene with Williams and Fannie Brice parodies Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade.” He takes the part of O. Shaw in “Puck’s Pictorial Palace,” a lampoon of various movie stars and politicians, in which he imitates Josephus Daniels, ex-Secretary of the Navy and Theodore Roosevelt by singing a verse about each. Lastly, he performs his own scene, “A Croquet Game.” He does some juggling stunts with the mallets and balls and using a magnetized mallet makes the ball go through all the wickets in one shot. He spoofs the sport that was then popular among the affluent. He performed a variation of the croquet scene twenty years later in the film Poppy (1936). His spoof of croquet reveals the beginning of him as a satirist.