"I feel almost like James Bond... except no gorgeous girls," Jackie reports to Uncle-and- Police-Captain Bill in First Strike. The film was the first in which Jackie served as a secret agent for another country, but Jackie Chan will never be James Bond. The British spy may lapse into bad puns and cheap innuendo, but his hair is rarely mussed and his sleek physique almost never dented. Bond is the invincible, mythologized body; therefore his fights and conquests are not Lazzi. Lazzi is a particular kind of physical comedy in which the body demonstrates its "reality" through vulgarity or vulnerability. The Commedia dell'Arte clown had exaggerated, gymnastic ability, but still winced at staged enemas, beatings and having their hair combed with a rake. Gordon reports that early 20th-century scholarship on Commedia almost completely ignored or euphemized the sexual and scatological. "It was as if these scholars... were psychologically or morally inhibited from documenting the Commedia's best-known performance innovation, lazzi." [*(4)*]. Jackie Chan doesn't accentuate the vulgar body, but he does allow us to see that even his is a vulnerable one. Chan, like Arlecchino performs through a body that is extra-ordinary but not invicible, prodigious yet still mortal. Pain punctuates almost every film. Jackie shakes his knuckles after hitting a blockish, Eurotrash thug, and then flees out a hotel window. After several minutes of explosive opening-sequence action in First Strike, there's a 15-second shot of Chan trembling half-naked on a frozen lake -- an eternity of stillness after the avalanche of motion. And in the same film Chan "suffers" the humiliation of being forced at gun point to strip down to underwear adorned with a stuffed Koala.

Not only do these gestures provide guffaws, but they ultimately enhance Chan's virtuosity. Many of Bond's stunts are clearly impossible -- a trick of cameras and multiple stunt men. But does-all-his-own stunts Jackie Chan challenges the laws of gravity without hidden strings. The body that levitates on a ladder, completes elaborate somersaults and twirls long spears like pencils is the same universal physique that fears sadistic dentists, shits in the pot and gets cold... just like everyone else. Jackie Chan and Commedia dell'Arte present the human body as something that is mortal, but that can also transcend apparent limitations.

The now-standard outtakes at the end of every Chan film (an idea he claims to have borrowed from filming his bit part in Cannonball Run II) only accentuate his vulnerable and universal body. The audience is invited to see the continual practice behind his swan-like grace and dexterity: three takes were required to execute a cat-like maneuver leaping over a wall in three steps. If not for the outtakes you might have missed that second in which he vaulted over the door of a car, and into the driver's seat feet-first. And it wasn't a camera trick when a helicopter side-swiped Chan standing on a moving train. Some martial artisans have become the choreographers and string-pullers behind puppets like Keanu Reeves, or are masqued as ghoulish Darth Mauls. The audience will never see their outtakes because maintenance of the illusion is mandatory; action in those films isn't lazzi. But Chan is undeniably mortal, the same configuration of carbon and water as all humanity. We know he is more disciplined -- the prodigal child of opera school -- but his stunts and grace still whisper the promise, "I could be you." Dying for Action contains this Chan quote: "I can act. I can fight. I can direct. I can sing. I'm everything." [*(21)*] Chan may not be everything, but in showcasing his vulnerability, his is potentially anybody.

The primacy of the body in Commedia dell'Arte and the films of Jackie Chan makes for a unique theater, one in which the written text is vehemently shoved aside. While critics love to dismiss these cardboard characters and wordless dramas as pablum, ignoring text-by-body is a deafness to a universal language. In both Renaissance Europe and in our increasingly global environment, the body is our first language, hieroglyphs any human can create and exchange. Until the Twentieth Century painting, compositions, and the almighty novel were some of the few ways to guarantee artistic immortality. Now that the presence and genius of the body are being preserved and disseminated on film, physical texts have an authenticity that academic study can't afford to ignore. Why not drop-kick the text? The legacy of Commedia dell'Arte reminds us some performers never needed it in the first place.