Swallowed By a Sea of Slapstick

 

The Hot Fudge Cake That Is Short Comedy --- Part One

“Binging” is not a welcome word to me, whether food or movies, but I suppose it’s apt where you look at four dozen short comedies in a two-week space. Call it research, object to determine how many two-reelers it takes to become sick of two-reelers. Again is reminder of Glenn’s Tastee-Freez and hot fudge cake fabulous beyond reckoning, a plateful eaten every day for … yes, I think two weeks … shunned since 1978 and for all time. Could too much of similarly good things happen also with short comedy? Moderation in all aspect of life, so say the mature. What to these is difference between slapstick and hot fudge cake? Both are better had by reasoned portion. Time I back from the table then, but not before recounting an odyssey, if random, through thickets of sight humor from creators prominent in their epoch, if recalled less, or altogether forgot, today.

Early-bred fans, after fifty, sixty, years, still demand we “discover” Harry Langdon, Charlie Chase, neglected others. Fact is we've clung to these from first glimpse courtesy Robert Youngson, or glow from an 8mm projector. Langdon and Chase are still world-famed beside some of faces I saw of late. How’s for sampling of Malcolm “Big Boy” Sebastian, Billy Franey, Clyde Cook? Don’t imagine old comedy is buried or lost. Yes, I know much of it is dust, but who of us will live long enough to look at even part of what is so far on DVD, or spinning off You Tube, numbers increased by the week to make keeping up a full-time occupation. I’m no authority, am obtuse enough in fact to be fooled into thinking Billy West really is Charlie Chaplin, so deft is his impression at times. Happy status of slapstick is its being the most democratic of screen categories. We don’t have to “understand” it to have a good time watching (though a Langdon takes adjusting, let alone Musty Suffer). As with so much in life, I’d say die is best cast when young, most fans I know being lifelong ones. Many have been encounters with those who tripped over Buster Keaton or Laurel and Hardy at age eight, or five, pick your date. There is no love like that engendered for banana skins, seltzer bottles, bottomless rain gutters, mustard plasters … wait, stop on that last. What were mustard plasters and why did people use them? For chest congestion, I’m told. Mustard powder and flour that turns to a thick paste when combined with water, which you then put on fabric and apply to your chest. It sticks there and makes for painful removal, especially where comics engage in tit-for-tat. Like stuck-on flypaper they say, and by the way, what the heck’s flypaper, asks anyone born since 1920, save those raised on antique comedy. Apparently mustard plasters are still used. Search me by who. My avoidance of them goes back to seeing Blotto a first time in 1969. It is safe to say that slapstick followers will never resort to mustard plaster, however congested their chests become.

I watch these shorts alone and laugh. Really laugh, having come to realization that I am easier to please now than in youth. Must we forever challenge movies to amuse us? Someone promises their selection is funny, a cue to bow up and show them that no it’s not. People can be cruel this way. I’d rather look at comedy by myself and avoid doubters who think I’ll yuck-yuck at anything, laughter harder won from smart folks after all. Humor being therapeutic is obvious enough. A latest Andy Hardy promises to “Pack Up Your Troubles!” when it’s “Time Out For Laughs!” There was a war then, and everyone had troubles. They needed humor more than ever, which is why Abbott-Costello hit big, and even lesser Laurel-Hardy made the grade. There will always be need for comedy, sometimes a desperate one. The Harold Lloyd estate lately uploaded a clutch of his shorts and features to You Tube for free viewing, all HD. There are oodles here, all terrific, more added each week (latest: Dr. Jack, A Sailor Made Man, Grandma’s Boy). I don’t see how anyone could watch Lloyd and not be boosted. He always surprises me for being funnier than I remember from the last time. Granddaughter Suzanne Lloyd, owner/curator of the lot, has found the key to push Harold back up a pyramid from which he surveyed all of the twenties. Are five-and-eight-year-olds coming upon these at You Tube who will someday keep Lloyd and other comedy torches lit? YT has become the library at Alexandria for vintage humor, a well that is bottomless because it is replenished every day.

I watch Lloyd and am astonished how he strung such pearls a hundred years ago. And so many. I’ll not look up the total number for wanting the supply to be infinite, as if Harold and Snub and Bebe were still back there making these things and uploading them from 1919 to You Tube 2021. I could believe it for image quality alone. Lloyd seems very postmodern, if that senseless term meant ultra-motivated, aggressive, ruthless where necessary. Found out from Annette Lloyd’s book that he and crew did a short each week, Sunday/holidays just part of ongoing blur. Graduation to two-reels made the job marginally easier, then Harold got fingers blown off by what was supposed to be a prop bomb. Don’t let anyone tell you these comics didn’t earn every dime of what they got. I like reading just how rich Lloyd was. Here’s what I sort of wonder, remarkable that it matters considering all of years passed: How did Harold Lloyd and Bebe Daniels lose each other? They seem to me a couple that should have stayed together, or am I too romantic? Word is she wanted a feature career, and he wasn’t ready to commit. Not that Harold would have been a model mate, maybe not Bebe either. Impression from books is that they never fully got over each other, passing only eight days apart during March 1971. Lost love lends shading to what seems knockabout on a surface, part-reason why those conversant on Lloyd’s life enjoy him best.

Comedy excavation is hopscotch played with clowns known by many ... precious few ... or nobody. I sampled some from each category. Lloyd Hamilton was lumpen and prissy, odd but not freaky. Guess if I looked for a Lloyd Hamilton in latter-day midst, there would emerge a few. In fact, there was one I saw yesterday, him grown up in my neighborhood, now walking to-from town slower than a snail, and wouldn’t speak if you told him he was on fire. Could this be a “Lloyd Hamilton”? You wouldn’t figure Hamilton for funny considering hardship he had, but the man was plenty funny. I looked at Careful Please and Breezing Along, both deserving not to be so obscure as they are. LH starts off repossessing furniture in one, winds up with three other guys suspended in a car hung five stories up on a wire. I cannot recall how one led to the other, my viewing days crowded after all. Suffice to say there were laughs, and Hamilton was inventive. He’s another where prints or negatives are mostly gone. Then there was Billy Franey hauling a fire hydrant about town to shake down parking cars (The Water Plug, 1920), a notion not gone stale for lasting but twelve minutes. Franey to me looks like Billy Bevan, who could as easily be Chester Conklin, who might in a next short become Snub Pollard. To think they could all go together into a restaurant, sit down for a meal, and be unrecognized, so long as not mustachioed. Did sameness make them less funny? Depends on gags they were given. My impression is standards were high based on what I've seen.

Robert Benchley is a discovery I have made, not really, because he was familiar all along, but now, and sudden, he is my humorist hero. Is it arrival to stage-of-life where I finally get him? How-ever … he is wonderful and I’m thankful to be in proper receipt. How many more are out there that I may look forward to finding for a first appreciative time? I read Wes Gehring’s splendid bio and bibliography, which has columns Benchley wrote, plus letters to family, various asides. Good as are comic shorts he made (many for MGM from the mid-thirties on, and some for Paramount), it is Benchley’s writing that serves him best, but what a screen personality he became. A boon to features (China Seas, Foreign Correspondent, many more), the buck stopped with Benchley so far as words his screen persona spoke, such leeway a given since no one understood “Benchley” like Benchley. They wanted him as much for his singular outlook developed over years of humor pieces, column presence as in both his own and being quoted often by friends and writer colleagues, plus free-wheeling Broadway reviews he did. Benchley's family would confirm that he was, in "Everyman" observations, much the same person they knew at home. His first single reel for Metro, How To Sleep, won an Academy Award for Best Short of 1935. It plays truthful today as what audiences got then. Son Nathaniel Benchley wrote a biography, also compiled a "Best Of " his father’s writings.

Larry Semon and Stan Laurel are chased by separate grizzlies in 1918’s Bears and Bad Men. They are incidentally members of a feuding hillbilly family. There is no indication of why they feud. People assume all of us in the South feud, and so leave well enough alone. Thing I like is real bears being used, except when one climbs up a chimney or jumps off a roof. Semon was built to take punishment. That and a nervous breakdown plus tuberculosis finished him in 1928. Cloudy prints are for most part his legacy, us caring less for Larry than his giving support to Laurel, or later, Hardy. Several of these shorts turn up in a recent Blu-Ray set of L or H comedy made prior to teaming. Like Clyde Cook? I watched him not three nights ago, but could not tell you what he looks like. Cook is The Misfit (1924) in a way Chaplin was The Tramp, as in always so for purpose of clowning. Cook begins as beleaguered hubby with shrew wife who tells him to “paint the bathroom floor,” which he does, muffs the job, then goes and joins the Marines, good a way as any to occupy a second half of one reel. Edgar Kennedy in Baby Daze (1939) thinks wife Vivien Oakland has given birth when she is actually out for groceries. Someone else’s infant prolongs the misunderstanding. This one was sillier than I could forbear. For a while anyway, the Kennedys will be on probation in this house.

Part Two of Comedy's Caravan is HERE.