Silent comedy, although so often associated with the stars of its ‘golden era’ such as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, was, in fact, one of cinema’s earliest and most popular genres. From cinema’s very beginning a handful of films, such as L’Arroseur arrosé directed by Louis Lumière, where a gardener has a series of mishaps with his garden hose. These early experiments were a great success, but many performers who were very popular in the silent era are now largely forgotten or exist in the shadow of both Chaplin and Keaton. Harold Lloyd’s daring performance in Safety Last! and Raymond Griffith’s in Hands Up! are typical examples of well-crafted comic routines and also reminders of the way in which iconic performers can fade from public view.
In the early silent period, it was in Europe that comedy began to develop the logic and form that would take it well into the 1920s, with comic actors such as André Deed and most notably the hugely popular Max Linder making early headway in the field. However, it was Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios that developed the tropes that would come to define silent comedy and began to produce comic films on an industrial scale, with his ‘Keystone Kops’ proving a favourite with audiences after the founding of the studio in 1912. Kop’s films which were often made in a matter of days and which varied immensely in quality, usually consisted of manic chase sequences featuring a series of crazed physical stunts and a cast of people humorously mismatched in size. Sennett was crucial in developing a form of on-screen comedy that relied upon a series of sight gags, reality-defying scenarios and the use of unconventional-looking character actors. Keystone films were designed to be brief, with new shorts appearing on a weekly basis, often playing upon topical themes or mimicking famous films of the day. It was Sennett, too, who developed Hollywood’s first comedy stars, with performers such as Mack Swain, Ford Sterling, Mabel Normand, Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle, Harry Langdon and Charlie Chaplin all rising to fame making Keystone films.
Chaplin went on to graduate from Keystone’s simple knockabout fare and become the pre-eminent comedy star of the era, eventually commanding a weekly salary in 1915 of US $1250. Crucial to Chaplin’s success was the control that his fame allowed him to exert over his material. As such he increasingly moved away from the broad brushstrokes and overtly slapstick comedies of Keystone and refined his comic alter ego, a down-at-heel but kind-hearted tramp with a bowler hat, walking cane and ill-fitting clothes. Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, was one of the top-grossing films of the silent era and like many of his films, such as The Kid, it explored themes that were close to his heart-not least the effects of poverty, something that resonated with Chaplin’s impoverished background. The film is best known, however, for the ‘roll dance where Chaplin’s tramp performs an artful dance with two forks stuck into two bread rolls. This was typical of Chaplin’s comedy, a canny mix of skillful, balletic physical comedy and thoughtful, situation-based gags.
Keaton, a former acrobat and vaudeville child performer, differed from Chaplin in that his comedy tended to derive from the contrast between his perpetually deadpan face and the absurdly athletic acts his characters had to perform to avoid injury. With Keaton, physical comedy was almost poetic in the thoughtful and skillful performance of increasingly elaborate set pieces that were as dangerous as they were spectacular.
The coming of sound radically changed the careers of many silent comedy performers. Chaplin resisted films with dialogue until as late as 1940 and The Great Dictator, preferring instead to use sound effects in films such as Modern Times. Keaton found it hard to adjust to dialogue-based comedy and performers such as Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon lost much of their comic Verve and appeal. W.C Fields, who had featured witty repartee as part of his stage career, was able to move from silent hits to a successful career in talkies. Similarly, Laurel and Hardy began working at the end of the silent period, and adapted to the changing medium and initiated the next generation of comic geniuses.
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