Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies, From Nickelodeons to Youtube

Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to YouTube

© 2013 Trav SD. All Rights Reserved.

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On the Cover: A still from the 1918 film The Rogue, featuring Oliver Hardy and Billy West. Photo courtesy King Bee Studios/Photofest.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Before the Cameras Rolled

2. The French Revolution

3. Comedy in the Age of Melodrama

4. Keystone

5. First Among Equals: Chaplin at Keystone

6. Perfecting the Comedy Short

7. Competition

8. A Clockwork Colonus

9. Messing with The Kid

10. They Were Dependable

11. Phaetons of the Features

12. Big Things, Small Packages

13. The Dialogue Diaspora

14. Slapstick in its Decadence

15. The Neo-Classical Era

16. A Thousand Clowns

Thanks

Sources

About the Author

For my Brothers Three.

Introduction

When I was five years old, my father dressed me as a tramp for the town Halloween parade, with oversized pants, shoes, and coat, a rope for a belt, a floppy hat, and clown make-up. He coached me to shake my leg every so often as I walked, and I recall that as I did so, I got laughs. I had no way of knowing really what I was supposed to be doing, but it was fun.

A couple of years later, Chaplin’s The Gold Rush was shown to us at a school assembly. It was, I think, one of the formative experiences of my life. Though it would be over a decade before I saw the film again, its images stuck with me. In the intervening years I had no trouble conjuring practically every scene in the film: the shoe-eating episode, the dance with the rolls, Big Jim’s hallucination of the Tramp as a giant chicken. But even without those dream-like touches, the film would have spoken to me. I came from an old-fashioned family, with deep American roots. I had been raised to romanticize that older world, the world of cabins and kerosene lanterns and pot-bellied stoves. I had often heard it spoken of and read about it in stories. Now here it was, palpably represented in scratchy sepia-toned moving images. How disconcerting to realize that at the time, the film was only about forty-seven years old. That’s how old I am now.

At thirteen, I first saw clips of Harold Lloyd on a television special, scrambling precariously across girders in his straw boater, high above the streets of Los Angeles. I heard my elders speak about him with amuse ment and awe: That’s not faked, you know. He really did that stuff.

As economists tell us, scarcity creates value. As a youth of nineteen I used to skip my college classes and spend all of my time in the library, where I would thumb through the pages of books like Walter Kerr’s The Silent Clowns, a literary encomium to the legendary comic masterpieces of Chaplin, Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Harry Langdon. Page after page of kicks in the pants, smashed crockery, careening automobiles, fist fights and pratfalls, all lovingly chronicled in words and still photographs. The pull of this particular book was greater than today’s nineteen-year-olds can possibly imagine: it was my only way to experience the films Kerr was writing about, barring the rare occasional screening or television showing. Not just the lost films, or the obscure ones — all of them. Thus, for the most part I first came to know the ultimate kinetic art form second hand. Imagine trying to experience a chocolate éclair solely through the adjectives of a food critic.

In the early 80s, my friends chided me one Christmas Eve when I declined to attend midnight mass so I could stay home and catch a Buster Keaton festival on TV, at the time a rare opportunity. While church bells tolled across town, I watched Keaton outrun an avalanche of boulders in Seven Chances. There are rituals and there are rituals. My ability to steep myself in The Three Ages rather than the Three Wise Men that Christmas was thanks to a relatively new blessing — cable television, which vastly increased the viewing options available in my small town beyond the previous four or five channels. Then came the home video revolution, and the widespread availability of the major works of Chaplin and Keaton for rent or purchase, another breakthrough. As the years went on, the catalog of available works and the means of distributing them (DVDs, the Internet) increased exponentially, until we reached a condition that my younger self would have considered a state of Nirvana: near-universal access.

The result? Silent comedy lives more vigorously now than at any time since it passed out of favor over eighty years ago. Ironically today’s film buffs are in the enviable position of being far closer to the great silent comedians than were the audiences in the immediate wake of silence’s demise in the late 1920s. Today, you can see The Gold Rush as often as you like — 1,000 times, if that is your perverse fancy. More importantly, you can steep yourself in the work of artists far more obscure: Charlie Bowers, say, or Bobby Vernon, if you are sufficiently obsessed.

Not everyone is. I recently curated a night of silent films for a friend’s monthly movie-watching party and encountered a cross section of Ugly Americans, many of whom were indignant at the very notion of being subjected to a menu of films devoid of sound, color or familiar stars. Say, what is this, Shakespeare?

Well, these were the wrong Americans. As de Toqueville observed, America is the land of 10,000 associations. While there may be millions of our countrymen who can’t think beyond first-run releases at the Cineplex, a significant portion of the population has developed a real appreciation for — not just an acquaintance with — the pioneers who laid the foundations of American cinema. Turner Classic Movies (TCM) regularly shows silent comedy classics alongside talkies, a reasonable barometer of interest on the part of better educated movie audiences. (That they do so periodically, not just as one-off experiments, may be taken as evidence of their popularity with viewers.)

A growing subculture has made a passion for silent comedy a serious study and even a lifestyle. From New York to Seattle most major U.S. cities have thriving clown scenes where heirs apparent to Grimaldi and Chaplin entertain theatre audiences with artistically presented broad, physical comedy. In Washington DC a group of aficionados from all over the country meet annually for a four-day, Trekker-style convocation called Slapsticon. Go on YouTube and do a search for silent comedy. Like as not, the first several videos that pop up will have been created during the past year.

Still one might hope, or even assume, there would be more wide spread appreciation for a form of entertainment that was so universally beloved only a short time ago as the historical crow flies. There is an unfortunate tendency among fans and detractors alike to treat silent comedy as an alien form, as ossified, dead and strange as hieroglyphs in a tomb, as history. Among fans, much of the blame can be laid at the feet of the aforementioned Kerr, whose poetic tome presented us with a small pantheon of mythologized Supermen whose stories start with the whirring of the cameras and end with roll sound! Kerr is not the only one — the view of silent film as a self-contained anomaly like nothing else on earth is near universal, as though silent cinema had been dropped to earth from a spaceship, and then taken back a few years later, leaving nothing behind.

In reality, the silent era — like every historical epoch — was part of a continuum. The actors, clowns, and vaudeville comedians who acted in it were the product of innumerable generations of similar performers who had come before. The parents of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton had also been troupers, the only difference being the absence in their day of motion picture photography. Similarly, after the sound revolution, virtually every component of what had been the silent comedy industry continued to thrive. Clowns kept clowning (not just the silent era ones, but descendants like Red Skelton, Jerry Lewis, and Steve Martin). Producers like Mack Sennett and Hal Roach kept producing. Directors kept directing. Some, like Frank Capra, George Stevens, Victor Fleming, and Norman Taurog went on to even greater success. Most important, the art of the physical gag still thrives. Less vigorously than in 1915 perhaps, but I’ll lay odds that if you go to your local cinema, one of the features will contain something on the order of a waiter dropping a food tray on someone’s head, or a mischievous boy releasing mice at a school assembly. More than this, the whole story structure and cinematic grammar of the modern Hollywood film (action films, in particular) owes much to the silent pioneers. As a matter of fact, it happens to be the same art form, with enhancements.

Historically speaking, the era of silent comedy was a blip. From Keystone’s founding in 1912 until silent cinema’s last big year, 1928, is just sixteen years. If you want to be expansive and include the nickelodeon era split-reels that preceded Keystone in the reckoning, you might stretch it out to a little over two decades. But, broadly speaking, a baby born the same year silent screen comedy first started to blossom would still be in high school when it bit the dust.

And yet, in an alternate universe, it might have gone on in definitely longer.

In 1936, Charlie Chaplin released Modern Times, widely regarded as the last of the silent films. It had been nearly a decade since The Jazz Singer had made talkies popular with audiences, and five years since the release of the previous last silent film, Chaplin’s own City Lights. In the nine years since The Jazz Singer exploded on the scene, the Marx Brothers, Joe E. Brown, Mae West, Eddie Cantor, Laurel and Hardy, Wheeler and Woolsey, Clark and McCullough, Jimmy Durante, and countless others had convulsed audiences by gabbing, quipping, barking, shouting, hooting, punning, whining, and otherwise mollifying the tyrannical human ear. Many have speculated about Chaplin’s motives for holding out for such an absurdly long time, when all of his peers had capitulated years ago. Was it stubbornness on Chaplin’s part? Fear?

Perhaps. But it’s also simple logic. The hard truth of the matter (a truth undiminished by all that has passed since Jolson sang Mammy) is that cinematic storytelling does not require dialogue and never has. Chaplin knew this, as did (and do) many others, but he was in the rare financial position to be able to stick to his guns for as long as he chose. That he finally gave in to the lure of talk with 1940’s The Great Dictator seems more because, at age 50, the veteran clown was no longer willing, ready or able to take dawn-to-dusk pratfalls, and perhaps also because the historical moment called for a little Henry V style speechifying in the face of the Nazi menace. But City Lights and Modern Times had been hits. Had Chaplin been as spry and limber as he had been at 24 and continued to crank out funny silents, there is no reason to think that they would not have been successes too. Chaplin realized as few others have that silence can be a deliberate artistic choice, one as valid (perhaps more so) in film than the talkie alternative.

As Chaplin remarked at the time, pantomime is one of man’s oldest art forms, possibly even predating language. It has its own integrity, and is more accessible to more people than spoken drama. By some measures it should have continued to exist alongside the talkies at your local movie house. And, while their influence has been demonstrably strong even to our own times, the fact that silents themselves did not persist is, with reflection, a little surprising. (As Walter Kerr wrote in The Silent Clowns, various forms of sound cinema had been available right from cinema’s outset, but the audience appears to have actually chosen silence.)

In fact, the name silent cinema is a misnomer, and not just because the films always had live accompaniment and sometimes live sound effects, but because the phrase is inaccurate and even subtly and unnecessarily pejorative. The term, which was retroactively coined after the advent of sound, defines the form according to the absence of something it doesn’t need — speech. But you don’t go to the ballet or to the pantomime and call it wordless theatre. The reason you don’t do that is because those forms are not about the lack of words, but about the art of movement. This is true of all the best silent cinema. I say the best because there were plenty of silent filmmakers who didn’t grasp that, quixotically filling their films with conversations the audience couldn’t hear, leaning on titles to tell their stories. Such people understood the medium no better than a lot of modern people do, and though they were surprisingly prevalent, they will at best form a countermelody to our main theme. Conversely, the makers of today’s action movies understand the principle better than some silent movie makers had. Pure cinema consists of telling a story through pure motion: men, beasts, matter, and machines moving through the frame with all the beauty and inevitable perfection of the orbits of the heavenly spheres. Therefore a better descriptor for silent film would be something like action film or pure cinema or cinema of dramatic and comical motion — but, of course, no one is ever going to call it by those names.

The business of America is business. This is the land of Poor Richard, Horatio Alger, Andrew Carnegie, and Creflo Dollar. It should not be surprising that a storytelling form would develop here that was all essentials. You pay your money, you get your belly laughs, your thrills, and as Chaplin had added in The Kid, perhaps a tear. In silent comedy (and the later slapstick tradition it informed) you get these palliatives in concentrate. The absence of audible chatter that predominated for over two decades meant a telescoping of the action — an aesthetic of muscle and bone and no fat. This predilection carried over into the talking era, and in fact remains to this day. To quote David Mamet in American Buffalo: Action talks, bullshit walks. We are a nation of doers. We are frustrated with discussion, speculation, and dithering, in spite of our invention of a form of government more dependent on such speed bumps than any other in the world. (But of course we are also a nation of government haters.) In the cinema, words are anathema to some. We like our movies to move.

Yet when one leaps without looking, he may often find to his distress that there is no water in the swimming pool. Silent and slapstick comedy are about the chaos that results from rash, naïve, arrogant or just plain clumsy impulses. Despite the fact that the great majority of such comedy films never had any greater ambition than generating laughter, one can distill from them a kind of affectionate critique of the national character. America is a nation in a great hurry — in a world full of potentially lethal banana peels.

Ironically, it is this very practical aesthetic of ours — a need for art to be accessible, instantly digestible — that today alienates a lot of people from silent comedies. I would suspect that many modern people find silent films inaccessible for a wide variety of reasons beyond the silence. The universe depicted is different in many ways: morally, socially, technologically. What are we to make of a world characterized by chaperones and courtships, parlors, street cars, hand-cranked automobiles and telephones, and the consumption of limburger cheese?

Yet appreciating these films can merely be a matter of cultivation. These movies are not important because they were silent or historical. Rather than thinking of them as beautiful fossils, we should be taught to recognize them for what they are: the foundation of much that we already know and love. Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and others created the grammar and the storytelling template that still informs Hollywood films today, not just comedies, but action and suspense films as well. Cinematic violence (fistfights, car chases, explosions) — the mainstays of modern action films — were first worked out in silent comedy. The requisite comedy saloon brawl in so many westerns is essentially a holdover from silent comedy. In this way, silence remains embedded in talkies.

At the same time, silent films are an amazing record of a fascinating time. Revolutionary changes were roiling through society. In the early twentieth century, most of America was still rural, much of it still unelectrified and unmotorized. It is the last time you would commonly see depicted as contemporaneous facts of life such things as horses, wagons, dirt roads, and certain manners, customs, and social attitudes that have their origins in the Medieval era. Silent films catch that universe just as it is being invaded by telephones, automobiles, trains, bi-planes, flappers, booze, and jazz. The nineteenth century melodrama gives way to the car chase.

As the early 21st century is proving to be equally revolutionary by the same measures (social, technological) we can find much to relate to in the clumsy stumbles of the clowns of the silent era. Meant to reflect their own times, their comedies can still speak (though silently) to ours.

1. Before the Cameras Rolled

In the beginning was The Whoops.

The Bible says it was The Word, but the Bible is a book, so it would say it was The Word now, wouldn’t it? Human experience tells us it was The Whoops.

Much is unprecedented in the quintessential twentieth century medium of film; much is older than the cave paintings of Lascaux. While cars, trains, planes, ocean liners, skyscrapers, and the motion picture camera itself were all still in their infancy when the comic cinema was born, the creature in the midst of all those devices, the one in the center of the frame, has remained the same in most essentials for hundreds of millennia. We laugh, we cry, we worry about getting food and a roof over our heads, we try to catch a mate, and (this is very important) we fall down and hit each other a lot. And for as long as we have been experiencing it we have been expressing it. And before we did so through words, we did it through movement. Dance and ritual performance must certainly pre-date language. Some primatologists claim that even apes have a sense of humor. The Blue Collar Comedy Tour is possible proof.

Without the assistance of a Way Back Machine, such speculations will always remain academic. The facts as we have them point to a physical comedy tradition in the West at least 27 centuries old, one that lays the groundwork for the unprecedented new art form that will transform the world in the twentieth century.

Theatre (broadly defined as certain people giving shows to certain other people) is vastly older than the written drama. As early as three centuries before Aeschylus, Greek audiences were already being entertained by clowns and acrobats known as mimes. The word in this case does not imply silence, as in modern pantomime, but rather mimesis, in the sense of copying, impersonating or doing impressions (mimeograph comes from the same root). These mimes enacted short improvised comedy sketches which were broad and buffoonish in nature — that is, if the depictions of funny masks, padded bodies, and swinging phalluses we see in fine art of the time are any indication. The short farces these mimes enacted employed an array of stock characters still familiar to us today: tricky servants, idiotic messengers, doddering old men, stern fathers, boastful soldiers, pompous doctors. The plots, drawn both from real life and from parodies of mythology, involved the characters in the usual contretemps: schemes, thefts, mistaken identities, swindles, infidelities, and reprisals.

Interestingly, this sort of performance evolved completely outside the tradition of the Dionysian rites, and weren’t even allowed on the same premises as the tragedies until about 300 B.C. (four centuries after they had become popular). But there is some cross fertilization between the mime and the written drama. The ancient written comedies that have come down to us (those of Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus, and Terence) all seem to show the influence of the rich culture of comic mime during those times. The latter two authors, of course, are a by-product of the fact that Greater Rome had evolved its own mimes by the third century B.C. You have a good sense of the writing of Plautus and Terence if you’ve ever seen A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which is largely based on it. The Roman mimes who influenced them were a fact of life until they (along with all theatre) were quashed by Christian leaders midway through the fifth century A.D. That’s something like a twelve hundred year run for Greco-Roman comic mime — not too shabby.

And yet there’s more. For the next thousand years or so we read accounts of roving bands of minstrels, jongleurs, and mountebanks (along with their feeble-minded sidekicks the zannis, from whence we get the modern word zany). These performers (tumbling, singing, juggling, clowning, doing magic tricks) would pop up in marketplaces, fairs, and annual festivals, forever on the lam for fear of persecution by local authorities.

Then, in the 1500s, once more a theatrical form starts to emerge: the commedia dell’arte. The commedia shares so much in common with what we know of the ancient mime that it’s hard not to believe that on some level it is its continuation. The use of masks, broad slapstick, bawdiness (sometimes crossing the line into obscenity), improvised dialogue, and very similar archetypes and plots are all shared in common between the two forms. It’s tempting to think that under the cover of darkness ancient traditions were lovingly preserved, and this certainly seems more likely than a case of convergent evolution, or the whole thing being reincarnated from scratch, but with so little documentary evidence it seems impossible to ever know the extent to which this is true. A useful metaphor for this history might be an unbroken chain that starts around 700 B.C. and extends all the way to the present day. The chain looks very much battered between 500 and 1500 A.D.

Historical commedia [1] is naturally much better documented and understood than its ancient counterpart, thanks to written contemporary accounts, company records, published scenarios, and its influence on subsequent theatrical forms. Its most famous recurring characters are still well known to most moderately well-educated modern people, if only as names: Harlequin (Arlecchino), Pantaloon (Pantalone), Pierrot (Pedrolino), Columbine, Pulcinella (better known to us as the puppet he inspired, Punch, spouse of the unfortunate Judy), Scaramouche (Scaramuccia), Pagliaccio (immortalized by the eponymous opera), Scapino, Brighella, and numerous others.

The types too are familiar: the two earnest young lovers who must overcome obstacles and opposition before they can be together; the clownish servants who assist them in their aims (the zannis); Dottore, the gibberish-spouting expert who seems (like the zanni) to have evolved from the mountebankery of medieval medicine shows; and Capitan, directly descended from his Roman forerunner Miles Gloriosus, the swaggering soldier. Performers had a finite canon of set scenarios, brief thumbnail descriptions of the events of the plot to guide them through their performances. The dialogue of the show would be mostly improvised and interspersed with lots of physical business of the knockabout variety. Frequent beatings were administered with the batacchio, or slap stick, a wooden device rigged to make an impressive sound when struck against another object: say, the skull of one’s comedy partner. A language of stylized movements and gestures became part of the ritual, and additional skills like tumbling, dancing, and singing would be employed as needed.

While occasionally invited to perform in indoor theatres and the courts of the nobility, the commedia companies, like their medieval forbears, were primarily street performers, playing on temporary open air stages: the post-Renaissance equivalent of the back of a pick-up truck. For about two centuries they traversed the length and breadth of Europe, extending their influence wherever they went. In dramatic literature their influence is most marked on Goldoni, Gozzi and Moliere, although one can detect their imprint on Shakespeare and his fellow Elizabethans as well.

The commedia’s most enduring descendant in England was the harlequinade, a mostly silent playlet that employed five stock characters: Harlequin, Columbine, Pantaloon, Pierrot, and somebody named…Clown.

Don’t be misled by the seemingly generic nature of the last named character. He was not a supernumerary, a la Spear Carrier #1. We moderns have muddied up the discourse by using the term clown for almost any comical performer who engages in broad, physical business and/or wears grotesque costumes and make-up. For simplicity’s sake I’ve already resorted to the use of the word in that sense more than once, and will do so again. But the term began with a much more specific usage. It originated in the sixteenth century (in other words, quite recently) and is etymologically related to clod. The type is also traditionally known as a rustic. A contemporary American might get the idea a little better if we use the epithets hick or hayseed. Clown is an ignorant farmer or country bumpkin. As an English comic type, this kind of clown dates back to Medieval mystery plays. The Shepherds at the Nativity, for example, were represented this way, although those early characters were not yet called by the name Clown (they were precursors).

Shakespeare makes copious use of Clown characters in as many as a third of his plays. Note that this is distinct from his Fool characters, which are a phenomenon with a separate history. Fools or court jesters were private comedians for monarchs and the nobility, a tradition dating back to Medieval times. Sometimes deformed, insane or mentally challenged, they could as often as not be the butt of jokes as the maker of them. Naturally, such performers had previously only been seen by the nobles who employed them before Shakespeare began imagining fictional ones for the public stage.

During the Restoration, such low comedy types as Clowns and Fools were no longer in fashion in stage plays, and the number of theatres licensed to present plays were artificially restricted. The slapstick vacuum was filled in fairgrounds, taverns, and theatres that got around the law by presenting other sorts of entertainment. The Harlequinade began among the great unwashed, but eventually came indoors to be employed as an entr’acte or an afterpiece during operas and ballets. From here in the early eighteenth century it expanded into its own form of entertainment familiarly known as the pantomime. This name was initially meant to suggest a connection to the old Greek and Roman entertainments, but the form was in fact something entirely new.

The opening scene of these pantomimes was the element that would still be recognizable to contemporary audiences of the English panto, a U.K. Christmas tradition to this day: a setting or situation drawn from a fairy tale or classical mythology. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the characters in this opening portion would be magically transformed into the characters of the Harlequinade, who would then proceed to enact their comedy. By the late nineteenth century the Harlequinade began to be dropped, and by midway through the next century, the opening fairy tale scene had taken over completely. But the Harlequinade hung on long enough for us to be able to say that it and its commedia-derived characters, along with the rest of the panto and several other new forms, would influence the motion picture industry in the early twentieth century.

The most famous and popular of all the pantomime clowns was Joseph Grimaldi (1779-1837). He is considered by many to be the progenitor of all modern day clowns, who still refer to themselves occasionally as Joeys in his honor. Merging the idea of Shakespeare’s clowns with the commedia tradition he stole the show in wordless productions like Harlequin and Mother Goose, where he would pilfer pies and oysters, burn his hands on a red-hot poker, and paddle people’s bums. In Grimaldi we are getting within spitting distance of the performance technique that will be tailor-made for motion pictures a century later.

One of the great Harlequins of the succeeding era was George Lupino (1820-1902). Lupino’s birth name was actually Hook; he took the new surname after trouping for many years with members of the famous Lupino family of puppet artists, a common practice at the time. [2]

Two of George’s grandsons, Lupino Lane and Wallace Lupino, would come to be significant stars of silent film comedy. (Their even better known cousin was actor/director Ida Lupino.)

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the increased specialization that characterizes the Industrial Age, the number of kinds of arenas and performing styles multiplied, as circuses, music hall, and vaudeville nourished the arts of clowning, pantomime, and acrobatics, providing a breeding ground for future motion picture talent.

Of these, the circus came first and is in many ways the lynchpin. Originating in the late eighteenth century as equestrian entertainment, early circuses added clowns, acrobats, and other such performers to their bills to provide variety. Early circus clowns were either of the traditional bumpkin sort, or characters from commedia. Usually they were also skilled as trick riders, tumblers, and/or acrobats, too. In time they evolved into the specialized performers we know today. Given the nature of the venue (early circuses were presented outdoors), circus clowns had to work with unprecedented broadness: leaping, falling, and hitting each other in such a big and noisy fashion that they could be seen from a grandstand.

It didn’t take long for the aesthetics and techniques of the circus ring to make their way into other types of venues. Among the most influential figures in this evolution were the Hanlon Brothers, an English troupe whose nucleus originally consisted of six acrobatic siblings. Three of them had started as tumblers in their childhood, apprenticed to one Professor John Lees. As such they made their performing debut in 1847. (For this reason, the troupe is sometimes referred to as the Hanlon-Lees.) In time, the act would include three more brothers plus various others, and would add the then-new spectacle of aerial acrobatics (i.e., trapeze), which they called by the catchy name zampillaërostation.

In 1878, at the urging of one of their members, a French juggler named Henri Agoust, the brothers began to present original pantomimes that enlarged upon the tradition of startling stage effects (trap doors and the like) by incorporating the Hanlons’ acrobatic abilities. Their original spectacles were a sui generis; they rapidly deviated from the usual commedia cast of characters, but continued to be referred to as pantomimes for lack of a better term. Various incarnations of the troupe performed these full-length stage shows in England, France, and America through 1911, after which they played stripped-down excerpts in American vaudeville. The last iteration of the troupe was playing in Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus as late as 1945. The Hanlons were extremely influential; numerous other comedy-acrobatic acts adapted their surprising techniques. Echoes of their work would make it to the silver screen most markedly in the films of Buster Keaton, many of whose gags, such as the balancing ladder stunt in Cops (1922) and the leap through a window with a quick-change of costume in midair from Sherlock, Jr. (1924), were lifted whole-cloth from the Hanlons.

In the mid-nineteenth century, parallel phenomena occurred on both sides of the Atlantic: the music hall (in England) and the concert saloon (in the U.S.). Both began by featuring mostly songs and music for their bibulous patrons but gradually began adding other variety acts from the circus and the theatre: clowns, acrobats, jugglers, and such like.

In America, the minstrel show was a strong influence on the variety scene of the day. The classic three-part minstrel show dates to the 1840s, although blackface had been popular on the American stage since T.D. Daddy Rice introduced it (along with his song Jump Jim Crow) in 1829. According to John Towsen in his seminal book Clowns: Like the circus, the minstrel show was noted for its physicality and high energy level. Most of the minstrel skits produced after 1850 were slapstick farces whose performers relied on such time-honored devices as hitting one another with inflated bladders or throwing cream pies at each other’s faces.

The early variety stage was rife with these singing, dancing, banjo-playing blackface minstrels. But the profile of the nation was changing, especially in cities like New York. The first waves of immigrants (mostly Irish and German) were flooding in, and comedy in the concert saloons reflected that influx. Performers who did blackface routines, many of whom were Irish themselves, began to also include stereotyped Irish characters in their repertoire. These routines were a kind of mash-up of a couple of potent elements. One was the then-popular convention of the stereotyped stage paddy of the legitimate stage, an image of the drinking, fighting, swearing Irishman perpetuated by Irish and Anglo playwrights alike since the seventeenth century at least, though some claim earlier. In the hands of the Irish, of course, the stereotype is affectionate; in the hands of the Anglo, it is more malicious. It became Americanized as fodder for the Irish-American Bowery B’hoys, in stage vehicles like A Glance at New York (1848), the hero of which, the mythical Mose the Fireman, is a plain-spoken brawler with a heart of gold. Later works, like those of Dion Boucicault and Edward Ned Harrigan also feature the much-loved type. At the same time, Irish performers were taking to the variety stage. The venues were literally saloons. Among the entertainments offered were bare-knuckle boxing and rat-baiting. Traditional Irish comical songs were sung, such as Finnegan’s Wake, written in the 1850s, which contains a couple of slapstick moments indicative of the audience’s sense of humor. Early in the song:

One morning Tim got rather full,

His head felt heavy which made him shake,

Fell from a ladder and he broke his skull,

And they carried him home his corpse to wake…

Then, a few verses later, the big payoff:

Mickey Maloney ducked his head,

When a bucket of whiskey flew at him.

It missed, and falling on the bed,

The liquor scattered over Tim.

Bedad he revives, see how he rises,

Timothy rising from the bed,

Saying "Whittle your whiskey around like blazes,

T’underin’ Jaysus, do ye think I’m dead?"

Or then there’s the climax to John W. Kelly’s Throw Him Down, McClosky:

The friends of both the fighters that instant did begin

To fight, and ate each other — the whole party started in.

You couldn’t tell the dif’rence in fighters if you’d try,

McCracken lost his upper lip. McCloskey lost an eye.

Soon after the Civil War, Irish comedy teams sprouted up which seem to have been the fruit of all these influences: circus and minstrelsy with their knockabout, Bowery melodrama, and the whiskey-soaked, blood-and-ballads culture of the concert saloon. Prominent acts of the day included McNulty and Murray, the Boys from Limerick; Needham and Kelly; Clooney and Ryan; Kelly and Ryan, the Bards of Tara; the Russell Brothers (who did their act as dames); the 4 Shamrocks; and the 4 Emeralds. The gents would sing and dance, do comedy crosstalk, and usually climax by beating the bejesus out of each other.

Interestingly, though, the most famous and influential knockabout comedy team of the American stage wasn’t Irish at all, although the duo included Irish among their ethnic specialties and studied the Hibernian teams closely. Joe Weber and Lew Fields began performing in Lower East Side saloons and dime museums in the late 1870s when they were merely boys of ten. Their burgeoning careers had them also learning their trade in circuses and minstrel and burlesque shows, portraying blackface and Irish characters, as well as the other major type of the day, the Dutch (i.e., German) specialty. By the mid-1880s they had assimilated their myriad influences and honed their act into something specific, taking the knockabout from the Irish acts, but employing German characters (heavy on the dialect humor) and broad, clown-like costumes. The sight of these mismatched boys (Lew was 5’11, Joe was 5’4) in heavy padding beating the tar out of each other with machinelike rhythm must have been delightful.

In their classic routines, Fields would typically present himself as an expert at some faddish American recreation and attempt to teach it to Weber. Along the way, he would mangle the game’s already-confusing terminology, compounding Weber’s confusion, which in turn compounded Fields’s frustration. The situation would escalate like a cyclone until the two were hitting each other in the stomach, braining each other with canes, and otherwise expressing themselves through violence. Part of the charm was that Fields the expert really knew no more than Weber did to begin with.

Weber and Fields were to be America’s greatest comedy stars; ironically they broke up in 1904 just before cinema would enter the picture to become America’s primary platform for slapstick. Anyway, by that time, Weber and Fields had been writing, producing, and starring in their own Broadway shows for several years. They were important men. The brief length of early film comedies (five minutes or less), combined with the fact that they were silent (and Weber and Fields’s comedy was partially verbal) caused them to give the new form a pass, although they did later reunite to make about a dozen shorts for Mack Sennett starting in 1915. Weber and Fields’s physical mayhem was linked to their verbal comedy; the rhythm of their slaps and kicks and eye gouges was punctuation for spoken lines. Their influence would indeed make it to film comedy, but not really until the sound era, where it can most assuredly be seen in the work of the Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, and Abbott and Costello.

The silent screen would require comedians well-schooled in the art of wordless clowning. One of the great wellsprings of this type of performance was the English music hall. In 1887, a day laborer and sometime gymnast and acrobat named Fred Westcott learned of a performance opportunity. An acrobatic act called The Three Carnoes had cancelled at the Metropolitan Music Hall. So the enterprising Westcott recruited two friends and filled in for them. This is how Fred Westcott became Fred Karno. In 1895 his threesome hit it big with a sketch called Hilarity and over the next several years, the act went from a trio to an enormous troupe of Speechless Comedians. Fred Karno’s Army as they were also affectionately nicknamed were the cream of British physical comedy, subjected to hours of daily drills until they knew their parts backwards and forwards and could interact like a machine. It was said that a Karno comedian wasn’t considered up to snuff until he’d been with the company for six months, but it took at least a year to get him properly seasoned. Karno demanded that his comedians be in total physical control of themselves even when they seemed to be out of control. His Fun Factory as he called it was headquartered in two separate buildings, full of rehearsal studios and scenery and costume shops. When the troupe went on the road, their convoy looked like that of