But this prejudice is deaf to the more universal language of the body - which is too often discredited as the font of obscenity and distraction. The physical text is "penned" with no less poetry than David Mamet's nettled verse; this text-in-motion has all the beats, rests and crescendos of a sonnet or symphony. Chan inserts beats in action as he dangles off the edge of a precipice or stops to wink at an between kicks. And fights are punctuated with rests; in Operation Condor, everyone pauses mid-battle to watch a decrepit Nazi bomb break loose and roll to a hard stop against the wall. The actors plug their ears, cringe, and then, ignoring the dud bomb, explode back into action. Punches fly faster as boxers test each other's limits, the fight builds into a cavalcade of gestures; the body authors conflict through its own pulses, and watching this verse-in-flesh can stimulate as much as an epic narrative. Like Jackie Chan, Commedia veterans had mastered the art of well-paced schtick. With this skill performers could exapnd a few descriptive lines into a full scene of a play. Descriptions from the Commedia scenario Pulcinella, The Physician by Force are as simple as: "One of them [servants] gets sticks... Pulcinella has his different laughes again. Then the servants beat him asking if he is a physician. He shouts yes and then denies it. This lazzo is repeated three times" [*(Gordon, 84)*]. Like the description of Operation Condor above, the text can only communicate shadows of the action. These intricate rythms are as difficult to preserve in a written text as character quirks that color in stock characters.

This inclination toward the assurances of written text has fueled a debate over the nature of Commedia. Scholars disagree on whether lazzi bits were the core of Commedia, or amusing distractions from the plot. Gordon cites an 18th-century scholar who suggested the term lazzi was the corruption of a Tuscan word meaning cord or ribbon, and therefore the comic business that tied the show together; Gordon seems to support the idea that Lazzi interrupted the plots; they were routines aside from the performance.

Was Lazzi the bricks or mortar of Commedia dell'Arte? If the physical comedy of Jackie Chan can be used to inform our understanding of Commedia, he can free us from our textual prison. Lazzi -- the gags, the fights, the fantastic comic ballets - were indeed the substance of Commedia. Plots were conceits, polite excuses for the more substantial performance text, the unstranscribable script of the body in motion. Fans similarly recall Chan's movies by famous stunts, not his character or the plot: Jackie dangles from a helicopter over Hong Kong, scrambles across hot coals, fights a shark, chases a foe in a hovercraft, or takes on a small army of men wielding axes. The dialogue is between bodies; the plot provides just enough conflict to motivate the characters' fight. The plot for Drunken Master II, for example, surrounds the theft of important Chinese art by imperialist forces -- that is, if the blurry English subtitles can be trusted. But Drunken Master II is celebrated for its inventive and elaborate fight sequences, not it's post-Colonial undertones. Like the vocabulary for ballet or martial arts, Lazzi were the passwords, the terms for orchestrating physical sequences.

Just as the Commedia troupes created their own repertoire of Lazzi, a similar vocabulary can be read in Chan's films of the '80s and '90s. The "Lazzi of saving the key" would be an apt title for an Operation Condor sequence in which Chan and his two female sidekicks wreck a desert hotel while keeping the key to hidden treasure away from mysterious thugs. Squeezing behind a tv in a tight cabinet, ducking into a shopping cart or shielding himself with a small table, Chan plays varieties of his "lazzi of small places." Then there is the lazzi of "flipping things into the mouth," be it cigarettes or a mint nested in the strap of some sunglasses. In the unfortunate Chris Tucker buddy movie Rush Hour, Chan must simultaneously fight and save valuable antique vases swinging off their fat bases like metronomes. Chan's used the plot of twins separated at birth to double the opportunities for lazzi. Tapping into a story as old as the Roman comedy The Menaechmi (copped by Shakespeare for his Comedy of Errors), Twin Dragons features one Chan as the rough street thug accidentally left in Hong Kong, and Chan #2 as a western-educated Conductor. Naturally, insanity ensues when the two are finally found in the same city; the film is rich with lazzi of two-Jackies-in-a-bath, misrecognition, and fainting girls, maitre'd's and door men.

These are the gags of comic Jackie, not the famed stuntman and martial artist. But great physical confrontations operate on the same logic of comedy -- the action must be unpredictable; delivery and timing are essential. Just as humor cannot be transgressive or irreverent without a conservative force to work against, fight drama requires context of character and situation to generate the wordless tension. Chan's character in the Drunken Master series is a young man struggling to obey his father and resist the temptations of alcohol. Unfortunately, Wong Fei Hong fights better when intoxicated. The lazzi of drunkenness provides unlikely comic context as Chan's swaying, rubbery body pummels his precise and rigid opponents. The environment of a fight -- lazzi of place - can also furnish props and dynamic levels for choreography: A fireworks warehouse provides small explosives, chutes and catwalks for Jackie to vault over, leap and climb on. And the final battle in Twin Dragons takes place in a Mitsubishi car-testing facility, where hydraulic lifts, vacuum tubes, rain chambers, cages and a collapsing box of heating coils give Jackie a blistering variety of toys and obstacles to stage the fight on. The airplane wind tunnel in Operation Condor requires that Jackie defeat the baddies while turbofans threaten to suck him into giant propellers. In any case, the enemy will be defeated; it is the Lazzi of playground jungle gyms, sporting goods stores and bars that keeps the audience riveted to the conflict. And if a camera could be turned back four hundered years, it would capture Commedia troupes using the location of their plays to similar effect.