Slapstick Comedy

Tom Paulus, Rob King

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415801799
• eBook ISBN: 9781135966225
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

From Chaplin's tramp to the Bathing Beauties, from madcap chases to skyscraper perils, slapstick comedy supplied many of the most enduring icons of American cinema in the silent era. This collection of fourteen essays by prominent film scholars challenges longstanding critical dogma and offers new conceptual frameworks for thinking about silent comedy's place in film history and American culture. The contributors discuss a broad range of topics including the contested theatrical or cinematic origins of slapstick; the comic spectacle of crazy technology and trick stunts; the filmmakers who shaped the style of early slapstick; and comedy's implications for theories of film form and spectatorship.

This volume is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the origins and continued importance of a film genre at the heart of American cinema from its earliest days to today.

part one
originality and adaptation

one
the good thieves

on the origins of situation comedy in the british music hall

bryony dixon

A few years ago I took a short sabbatical to look at the British Film Institute’s (BFI) holdings of archive film material relating to the British music hall. At the back of my mind even then was a curiosity toward finding a link between British performers, trained up on the halls, and the early days of slapstick comedy emanating from Hollywood. Another year spent working on our Chaplin materials intensified this curiosity and I attempted, like many before me, somewhat clumsily to draw a link between Chaplin’s comedy and certain traditions of the music hall in nineteenth-century Britain. I was warned that we should be extremely cautious about assuming cause and effect in cases such as these; that just because one thing precedes another, as pantomime does silent film comedy, it doesn’t mean an individual such as Chaplin was influenced by it to any significant degree.

These warnings duly noted, I have recently been trying to find some trace of a link between film slapstick and the British comedy tradition in the film record as it relates to music hall. David Robinson and others have already written about the similarities between Chaplin and the clowning traditions passed down from medieval Italy through the diaspora of the commedia dell’arte to the British pantomime Harlequinade.¹ Simon Louvish, who has published studies of many individual comic performers, also makes this leap in his book on Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Discussing an 1896 review in The Era of Fred Karno’s sketch, “Jail Birds,” Louvish notes, “We are looking at the ‘missing link’ between the grotesque antics of clowns such as Grimaldi and the crazy tricks of the future silent cinema.”² But we need to add some detail to this. At the Chaplin Conference held by the BFI in 2005 there were conversations with Mike Hammond and Yuri Tsivian about the need to compile a “gag-ography” if we were ever to understand the influences of stage comedy on early film. The sources for such a study are difficult, rare, and usually inciental. Apart from tiny nuggets picked out by dedicated researchers like David Robinson, the only way to bridge the gap in our knowledge might be some kind of “experimental archaeology” in which gags or comedic business could be reproduced in performance by contemporary practitioners. It would also take the efforts of a number of researchers to pin down the ancestry of gags, approaching the challenge from different angles. All I can do is offer what information I have found in the film record in Britain and some preliminary observations.

So how do you trace a gag? I was not particularly surprised to find little mention of influences in the writings of British comedians working in early film. Slapstick performers, like other comedians, carefully guarded their comedic business: why would any performer admit that their “unique” selling point, i.e., the means by which they could earn a living, was not entirely original? Of course comedy relies on a common pot of gags and business, but performers went to great lengths to conceal the origins of their routines. Every now and then a particularly secure comedian might own up to an influence, but only if he was very well established or was looking back at his career from a safe distance. (Chaplin, the man least likely to admit that his genius was not sui generis, was happy to acknowledge some admiration for the clown Marceline and for Max Linder in his autobiography.) As a result of this inclination for silence there is very little evidence for the ancestry of slapstick gags in the memoirs of comedians; almost nothing was written down.

And lest we imply that our legendary performers were guilty of the comedic equivalent of plagiarism, we should unpack what we mean by gags, jokes, “business,” and routines. Is it possible to have an original pratfall? When does imitation or mimicry become copying? A good comedian is by nature a good mimic – it is the core of comedy, humor being essentially about recognition. But when is copying a sincere form of flattery, and when is it cashing in on another’s success? The “outing” of joke thieves is today a popular pastime for internet contributors, and a great way for people to show off or to reinforce their allegiance to a particular performer;³ but the complaints about plagiarism around the time of Chaplin’s stellar rise in 1914 had a more serious edge. The costume and gags that comprised an entertainer’s “act” were vital to his ability to promote himself – his “brand” if you like – and they relied, to an extent, on an element of novelty. As a stage performer you could get a whole season out of one gag, sketch, or routine as you traveled from one town to another (and more if you took it to another country). Once a comedian’s material was translated into films, which were exposed to audiences nationwide more or less simultaneously, that element of the novelty value of a particular piece of material was lost, and with it, its earning power.

In the mid-1910s this issue took a quantum leap, as entertainers who had been part of a centuries-old tradition on the stage were forced to confront the new reality of film versus the stage. Billie Ritchie – a Scots comedian who had played lead roles for Karno before Chaplin – was most vociferous in accusing Chaplin of having copied his tramp persona.⁴ It is hard not to feel some sympathy for the losers in these new circumstances, even if Ritchie himself was not above copying a gag or two (for example, two weeks after Chaplin released Work – released June 21, 1915 – Ritchie came out with a film titled The Curse of Work – released July 4, 1915 – on an entirely similar theme).⁵ Chaplin may have acknowledged a debt to Max Linder (albeit only in 1921), but Linder had by this time already been taken to court for plagiarizing Karno’s sketch, “A Night in an English Music Hall,” the very sketch that made Chaplin a star. Of course it only became a legal issue because Karno felt he was missing out financially. The fact is that Linder’s 1907 film, Au Music Hall, was successful because he was a great performer, just as Chaplin’s “tramp” persona was more appealing than Billie Ritchie’s. All artists are thieves; the trick to stealing the work of other comedians, as David Robinson likes to say, is to know that you are stealing the good stuff. Chaplin took from Ritchie during their Karno days, Ritchie took again from Chaplin, as did a host of others. During the course of this lively competition, everybody “upped” their game and great strides were made in the development of film comedy

There is a tendency, particularly with film historians who haven’t been exposed to the study of stage history, to assume that “everything starts with Karno.” Certainly his companies developed a particular type of ensemble play, although how much this was due to his talent or to that of individual performers is hard to say. Karno was a good businessman and evidently knew talent when he saw it, but he must have had his influences too. His comedians clearly had considerable training in physical comedy before they worked for him, and he employed writers (Sydney Chaplin for one) to help with scenarios based in particular contained settings (a music hall, a football match, a secret society’s clubroom, etc.) within which the comedians could show off their “business.” Surviving manuscripts display a marked similarity with other productions of the music hall and popular theater of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. The difference between Karno and his con temporaries was one of scale. In the 1910s he had as many as 12 separate companies touring at any one time in the major cities of Europe and the United States and, like the emerging Hollywood studios, he brought in the best talent and developed it into a successful format. Stan Laurel was one of his key performers and good enough to understudy Chaplin. He had performed in this kind of sketch or situation comedy before his time at Karno with his father’s shows, and continued to do so on the other side of the Atlantic, eventually moving in (and out) of films made in a similar vein. That this model of situation comedy was well established in American vaudeville by the 1910s is clear from a comparison of solo films made by Laurel and those of his future partner, Oliver Hardy. They are in some cases identical – or at least very close – in conception, as in, for instance, Laurel’s 1918 No Place like Jail and Hardy’s similarly prison-themed 1919 Jazz and Jail.⁶

As a starting point for thinking about how much of Hollywood’s classic silent comedy can be traced to pre-existing performance traditions, I would like to examine the evidence of the film record. Not the record of Hollywood comedies, but that of Britain, from where a significant number of slapstick practitioners originated. I’m fairly sure that early British film was not a major influence on any of the stage comedians who like Chaplin, Ritchie, or Laurel, later ended up in Hollywood. The best we can hope for, perhaps, is to trace some common elements and evidence of a comedic tradition in the surviving films made by British comedians in the early period. With this in mind I will be focusing on the origin of generic “business,” the importance of props, and situation gags.

One could choose many different types of comic scenario that appear in British music hall and early film. Sketch comedies, such as those of the Karno shows, are particularly relevant, as British practitioners trained on the music hall stage would likely have had such scenarios in their repertoire as comedians. These might include comic scenes arising from situations such as the courtroom, football matches, visits to the dentist, visits from the bailiffs or the decorators, encounters in haunted houses, a music hall show, and so on. The comedic possibilities of such various “everyday” settings have been exploited ever since the ancient Greeks. Early film comedy expanded this incrementally. If you run your eyes down the filmography of any prolific silent film comedian, the titles will reveal t recurrence of these situations, not only from one comedian to another, but also within the work of individual performers who would reuse these situations and their concomitant gags several times. For the purposes of this chapter I will trace one such “situation” – the barbershop – which occurs fairly frequently in pre-cinematic media, stage acts, and film comedy, and I will refer to a number of other examples involving dentists, paperhangers, and living statues.

In 1921 Sydney Chaplin produced a feature-length comedy film for Famous Players–Lasky called King, Queen, Joker, a fairly conventional story of the mistaken identity genre set in a mythical Ruritanian-type kingdom. The film itself – like most from this era – has not survived complete, but a significant portion still exists in the Chaplin Out-Takes collection now held at the BFI. One long edited section survives together with several sequences of Syd rehearsing on camera. Among these are several comic scenes set in a barbershop. In one, for example, Syd is castigated by the barber for an accounting error and, as he attempts to rectify the situation, takes out a pencil and proceeds to do the sums on a customer’s bald head. A further gag has a very familiar look to those who know his brother’s work well. In this scene Syd, as the barber’s assistant, is shaving a client. Armed with soap and brush, he flourishes his tools as if conducting an orchestra and applies the lather as if accompanied by energetic music with verses and refrains, suddenl...

Table of contents

• Previously published in the AFI Film Readers series
• contents
• illustrations
• acknowledgments
• introduction
• part one originality and adaptation
• part two mechanics and modernity
• part three bodies and performance
• contributors
• Index