#ping-pong

Thelonious Monk playing ping-pong, 1959.

"I used to play him in ping-pong. He was like a cat around the table. I never won a game, but it was a joy to play him." —Herb Snitzer

From "The Return of the Gorilla-Man" in Tales to Astonish #30, April 1962. Stan Lee (?) plot, Larry Lieber (?) script, Jack Kirby pencils, Dick Ayers inks, Stan Goldberg colors, Ray Holloway (?) letters.

OKAY

THIS WAS THE BEST QUESTION YOU COULD HAVE ASKED

Pigsy from Lego Monkie Kid was the first person who came to mind

Doesn’t matter who else I pick, Pigsy would win without contest

EXCEPT!!!!!

Except of course, the King of Ping: Harold Buttowski (from Kick Buttowski: Suburban Daredevil)

They’re BOTH absolute menaces when it comes to ping-pong, I honestly think the world would end before they’d ever finish a game

SO LET’S MAKE A POLL OUT OF IT!

Just felt like collecting the Peter Lorre ping-pong pictures in one place. Any others?

The bottom one is Conrad Veidt + Peter Lorre during the simultaneous shooting of the three versions of "F.P.1 antwortet nicht," 1932 (Peter was in the German version, Conrad in the English; Charles Boyer was in the French):

"After dinner, there was only one diversion—Ping-Pong. Much to everyone’s amusement, the six-foot-five Veidt and the five-foot-five Lorre—who tipped the scale at the same undisclosed weight—paired up. 'And these two guys, the one who played ‘Caligari’ and the other one who played the mass murderer in M became a team in Ping-Pong that was unbeatable,' said [screenwriter Walter] Reisch. 'It was not just if we win tonight, it was a matter of life and death to win the tournament. Not for the money, but there was a gala reception afterwards and a medal. And these guys played together like a team, with beautiful timing.'"

And not too much later:

News of Lorre’s arrival in Los Angeles had preceded him by over a month. “In all of the newspapers here, we read of his coming,” Elisabeth Hauptmann wrote Walter Benjamin in Paris. “One has to congratulate the man who engaged the ‘genius actor.’” Hollywood extended a warm welcome to the Lorres. Invitations summoned Peter and Celia to lavish Viennese and Tyrolean dinner parties, where they mixed with old friends such as Fritz Lang, G.W. Pabst, Billy Wilder, and Franz Waxman and met new ones, among them Jean Negulesco, Delmer Daves, Paul Muni, and Olivia de Havilland. The Friedrich Hollaenders also enrolled Lorre—along with Ernst Lubitsch, Conrad Veidt, and Josef von Sternberg—for their Sunday afternoon Ping-Pong tournaments."

Monks + cowboy outfits

feat.: Daddy and Jesse Bailey, Dojo, Wuya, and Jack (with the Blind Guardian of the Treasure Chest)

The screencaps are taken from the following episodes: