The Escape Artist

Framed by his rainy 1976 funeral, a documentary traces the career of Cyril St. John, "The Escapist." His elderly sister Cecille recalls how he first escaped a paper bag as a baby, and newsreels show his early stage hit, bursting out of a large wet paper bag. His great City Hall stunt goes wrong when, after the mayor vouches for the straitjacket, Cyril is hoisted into the air and left dangling for weeks as the crowd drifts away. Still bound, he stumbles through World War II, stars as a helpless father in the 1950s sitcom "Fit to Be Tied," makes a disastrous Mountie film and ends up in an asylum, where a fellow patient breaks free beside him. A 1970s rerun craze, explained by an enthusiastic fan, leads to a Carnegie Hall comeback in which he sings upside down, before his straitjacketed coffin is lowered into the grave.

Fan sites list the sketch as "The Life of Cyril St. John." At his Carnegie Hall comeback Cyril sings "Lydia, the Tattooed Lady," the Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg song Groucho Marx introduced in the 1939 film At the Circus.