Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies by Alan Dale

CHAPTER ONE: Comedy Is a Man in Trouble

I should have been a clown; it would have afforded me the widest range of expression. —Henry Miller

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, "slapstick" has been our name for popular, rather than literary, low physical comedy. The word derives from an implement—"the double paddles formerly used by circus clowns to beat each other. The loud crack of the two paddle blades as they crashed together could always be depended upon to produce the laughter and applause." The term is now often used by itself as a pejorative, meaning "merely" low physical comedy, but in part because popular comedy and literary comedy are thought of as belonging to distinct audiences, separate occasions. This was not always the case. Aristophanes, for instance, combines slapstick with literary comedy, as does Shakespeare. And if you think that the slapstick of Greek Old Comedy must have been more tasteful than what we get in the movies, read Ecclesiazusae, in which Pheidolos attempts to take a shit front and center, and you'll find that the Farrelly brothers, admirable as they are, did not invent this scene for Dumb & Dumber. The footnote may have been invisible, but it was there.

In the course of analyzing character type and story structure in Old Comedy, Kenneth McLeish, in his Theatre of Aristophanes, mentions every major male film clown I write about, and you want to keep that sense of continuity in mind when thinking about the topic. However, this book focuses on the first fifty years of slapstick in American movies, thus leaving out Aristophanes, but taking us well into the talkies. People tend to think of slapstick as something from our silent era, when it did reach a peak. Not just a heap—though men like Mack Sennett, Hal Roach, and Al Christie, who had studios specializing in short films of this genre, produced by one rough estimate forty thousand reels of comedy in the silent era—but a summit.

However, the silent era is not a lone peak. The silent comedians developed not only a style of physical clowning, which has largely disappeared, but also a means of achieving it, which has proved more adaptable. They came out of a national network of live popular theater, in existence for fifty-odd years, which included itinerant medicine shows, minstrel shows, Wild West shows, and circuses, up through the more urban modes of burlesque and vaudeville. That the theater was live was extremely important for their development because having to perform several times a day, in town after town, week after week, gave physical comedians the chance to perfect a repertoire of basic routines. It also required them at times to develop bits on the spot, in response to a new audience, other acts on the bill, or an unforeseen situation.

Experience improvising was especially important because of the other condition for the high quality of slapstick in the silent era, which was that the movie teams worked at first without scripts and then later from loose outlines, even when making features. The silent stars worked in units with their own gagmen and techies; production involved a nonstop pitch of ideas about everything from the basic setting or premise, through the details of action and accident, to the final shape of the picture. This process continued while the cameras turned, which must have been what Harold Lloyd had in mind when he said that visual comedy was more expensive than verbal. (He also cited the high salaries of the indispensable "idea-men.") Even the end of shooting didn't end the fine-tuning—Arbuckle and Lloyd are credited with instituting prerelease sneak previews after which the team would compare notes and then recut and often enough reshoot.

The movies developed out of gag committee effort and were reshaped according to preview audiences' responses, which raises the question of credit. The answer lies in the fact that the star presided over the committee; all ideas were pitched to him for his approval. Thus all material was filtered through the star's sensibility, since he had to perform nearly every bit. Keaton was clear as to who was in charge: "We [i.e., the stars] directed our own pictures, making up our own gags as we went along, saw the rushes, supervised the cutting, went to the sneak previews."

The historical irony of silent comedy is that the clowns' theatrical experience trained them for the movies, which then, of course, destroyed the network they sprang from by stealing the audience. And so purely physical, essentially silent slapstick hit a trough in the talkie era for this reason, but also because even when the silent clowns were still around, audiences quickly preferred the novelty of any sound to silence, the studio executives realized that they could exert more control over their stars and directors by concentrating on the scripts, and slapstick fell out of fashion in favor of romantic screwball comedies (which did, all the same, incorporate physical knockabout). There were still slapstick careers in the talkies, but Buster Keaton's pictures at MGM, Joe E. Brown's at Warner Brothers, Wheeler and Woolsey's pictures and Leon Errol and Lupe Velez's hit-and-miss teamings at RKO, the Three Stooges' shorts and Arthur Lake's Blondie feature series at Columbia, the Hope and Crosby Road series and the Martin and Lewis pictures Hal Wallis released through Paramount, and Donald O'Connor's Francis series at Universal were all profitable relative to low costs, and as Lloyd pointed out, visual comedy is the most expensive kind when done with care. Eddie Cantor's and Danny Kaye's extravaganzas for Goldwyn and some of Red Skelton's MGM musicals had big budgets, but the investment didn't go for improvisational shooting to make the comedy fresher. Only the insanely fertile MGM and Warner Brothers cartoon units were able to manufacture first-rate slapstick on next to no money. Yet even the low-budget live-action comedies were genuinely popular—it's clear that the appetite for slapstick remains robust regardless of the quality of what's available to satisfy it.

With this history sketched out, you still want to know what slapstick is. To start, you can look for coherence in the kinds of gags. M. Willson Disher claimed that there are only six kinds of jokes—falls, blows, surprise, knavery, mimicry, stupidity. They all play a part, but for comedy to register as slapstick, you need only the fall and its flip side, the blow. (The importance of the blow is evident in the adoption of the term "slapstick," since that's what a slapstick was for.) In their iconic form, the fall is caused by a banana peel, and the blow is translated into a pie in the face. Thus the essence of a slapstick gag is a physical assault on, or collapse of, the hero's dignity; as a corollary, the loss of dignity by itself can result in our identifying with the victim. The mishap can be heightened by the plot—it's worse if the hero's late for his wedding than if he's just out strolling—but that's a difference of degree, not of kind.

However, many of the most intriguing gags have more complex perceptual or emotional resonance. There is, for instance, the disproportion of Buster Keaton in a rowboat trying to tow an ocean liner in the 1924 feature The Navigator, a superexaggeration of the hero's obliviousness and ineffectuality, and neither fall nor blow. But a fall itself may point to something else; for instance, the hero's unawareness of a standing circumstance, as in the 1936 talkie The Milky Way when Harold Lloyd, arms spread as if embracing life, springs toward the camera over a hedge at the bottom of the frame. As he arcs up and then down, the camera reveals a pond just this side of the hedge (the framing makes us share his inattention, so that we really feel that it's something we might do). Or a blow may indicate the hero's unawareness of a changed circumstance. In the 1915 Keystone one-reeler Mabel and Fatty's Wash Day, for instance, a neighbor snaps his soapy fingers under Fatty's nose; Fatty turns away as he sneezes and then turns back to fling a wet rag at the man, who has in the meantime walked off. The rag hits Fatty's wife, who's now standing where the neighbor stood.

All these gags depend on a rupture in the expected link between physical effort and result, which the actor may exploit nonsensically, treating one object as if it were another, for instance, when Buster chalks the end of his violin bow as if it were a pool cue and bites the end off his clarinet as if it were a cigar, both in his 1921 two-reeler The Playhouse. Or it can make sense in the circumstances, as in Chaplin's 1936 feature Modern Times when Chester Conklin is pinned on his back in the machinery with only his head protruding, and Charlie, trying to feed Chester his lunch, uses a roasted chicken to funnel coffee into his mouth.

The most elaborate double-take gags are those that create false assumptions by careful camera placement, for instance in The Playhouse when we see Buster asleep on a rickety bed in a bare room and a big angry man comes in and tells him to get out. We assume we're watching an eviction melodrama until stagehands whisk the three walls away and we find Buster is a theater employee being told to get off his duff.

Such gags are elaborate yet conceptually simple compared to those that play off the conventions of narrative film syntax. The most celebrated example is undoubtedly the sequence in Keaton's 1924 feature Sherlock Jr., in which the hero's dream self walks up to a movie screen and enters the action. But every time he makes a move appropriate to the setting, the film-within-the-film jump-cuts to another setting in which the follow-through of that move is no longer appropriate and has unfortunate consequences. It's a very tricky sequence, and murder to describe, though any child would get it in a single viewing. (The only problem with it is that the jump cuts make the internal film incoherent.) My current favorite is the little scene establishing what a sleepy island Paradiso is in Harold Lloyd's 1923 feature Why Worry? A man pulls a donkey cart up in front of a building, gets out, and goes inside. In a straight-on shot, the donkey turns his head to the right, and we cut to a point-of-view shot of a man asleep; back to the straight-on shot, and the donkey turns his head to the left followed by another point-of-view shot of another man asleep. Back again to the straight-on shot of the donkey, who, corrupted by the laziness of humanity, lies down for a nap. The punchline of the donkey collapsing for some shut-eye, and the quietly logical way conventional narrative movie editing works in general, disguise the momentary substitution of donkey consciousness for human consciousness as the default mode of the movie's perception. However, once you become aware of it, it is, in its way, as effective a burlesque substitution as Chaplin's chicken-for-funnel.

Because slapstick plays on our fears of physical and social mal-adjustment, many of the typical gags slide into nightmare territory. Disproportion itself can be eerie, but often the hero acts out classic nightmares; for example, being caught onstage unprepared (Harry Langdon in the 1926 feature The Strong Man) or losing your pants at a party (Harold Lloyd in the 1925 feature The Freshman). Fatty's accidentally hitting his wife in the face with the rag is also bad-dream-like, and the movies are full of futile efforts that are gag versions of running without getting anywhere: for instance, in the 1924 feature Girl Shy when Harold Lloyd is rushing to stop the girl's wedding and he sneaks a ride on a moving car that half a block later pulls into a driveway.

There's also verbal slapstick to take into account. The term is an analogy, which generally refers to dialogue performed at a breakneck clip. As Alva Johnston said in 1941 of writer-director Preston Sturges's headlong 1940 talkie The Great McGinty, "The picture has a speed which has seldom been equaled since Mack Sennett used to achieve velocity by loosing herds of lions at the actors." Overall, Sturges has been the greatest exponent of verbal slapstick in American movies. He might have developed his style from any number of contemporary sources: the 1928 Broadway stage production of The Front Page, in which Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur specified throughout in the stage directions at which point in the middle of another character's dialogue a performer was to begin talking; the rocketing early talkies featuring such motormouth comedians as John Barrymore, Lee Tracy (star of Broadway and The Front Page's original Hildy Johnson), Robert Williams, Adolphe Menjou (Walter Burns in the original 1931 movie version of The Front Page, one of Lloyd's hired jaws in The Milky Way, and perpetrator of a rascally Barrymore parody in the 1936 Fox musical Sing, Baby, Sing—he gulps Bordeaux glasses of bay rum, and when his agent asks if he'd like a little water, he roars in scorn, "Are you suggesting that I bathe?"), and Cary Grant (Walter Burns in the 1940 romantic comedy remake of The Front Page, His Girl Friday); the Marx Brothers' Broadway shows of the twenties and movies of the thirties, in which the jokes come so thick you wish you had a court reporter making a transcript for you (as Groucho himself did, to preserve adlibs for future use); Frank Capra's direction of dialogue in Platinum Blonde (1931) and It Happened One Night (1934) and Howard Hawks's in Twentieth Century (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), and His Girl Friday.

Sturges claimed, "Dialogue consists of the bright things you would like to have said except that you didn't think of them in time"; verbal slapstick adopts the pace we'd converse at if we all thought of our brightest remarks in time. Thus it helps if the characters are witty or wised-up. They don't absolutely have to be urban, but we tend to think of it as the right speed of dialogue for people able—just—to maintain the mph demanded by big-city life, where everything is always happening at once. Finally, it can be achieved just by having them trample each other's lines—they don't have to be listening to each other, or even to be intelligible, for us to respond to the humor. Perhaps the quintessential moment of verbal slapstick is Aunt Elizabeth's arrival in Bringing Up Baby, when we laugh not because of the dialogue but because everyone is talking at once, including George the terrier. In fact, we laugh largely because we can't follow what anyone is saying.

Verbal slapstick also has characteristic gags, such as the sarcastic aside, the comeback that turns the first speaker's words around (Jean Harlow in Platinum Blonde: "Don't mind mother," Robert Williams: "I don't mind her if you don't"), insipid verbosity that turns the speaker's own words against himself, orotundity (a W. C. Fields specialty, and thus not necessarily a speedy one, though Raymond Walburn did it faster than Fields), one-liners, puns, vivid slang, out-rageous metaphors, double entendres, nonsequiturs, malapropisms, mispronunciations, getting names wrong, and foreign accents, all of which predate the movies and none of which waited for talking pictures to reach the screen. The silent title writers had gone in for wisecracks since Anita Loos started the game in 1916, and they frequently imitated vocal tricks typographically: in The Strong Man, when strapping Gertrude Astor tries to convince Harry Langdon that she's the demure young thing he's been searching for, the title reads, "Well, I'm Little Mary!" It's the firing-on-all-cylinders speed that was new to the talkies, made possible by the removal of title cards, which disrupted the pace they tried to set with wisecracks. And when the studios transfused vaudeville and stage performers into the movies, you could finally hear the verbal jokes, as well as certain voices that were entertaining in themselves.

But what really ties verbal slapstick to physical slapstick is that the comedians used them in similar ways. For instance, in the 1938 Lucille Ball vehicle Annabel Takes a Tour, Jack Oakie has a running gag mispronouncing the name of the manager of the hotel they're staying in: for "Pitcairn," he'll say something like "Spitcurl" instead. The joke is planted at regular intervals and then given a capper when Oakie calls him Pitcairn and the addled man violently corrects him, "It's Spitcurl!" In the talkies, the moviemakers instinctively developed verbal jokes in the manner of visual routines.

Thinking of the more complicated visual and verbal gags brings up the issue of structure, and by far the most common structural device in slapstick movies is the chase. It's the ultimate kinetic expression of the hero's being out of step: his wishes can't be borne, his idiosyncrasy can't be resolved; he simply has to hotfoot it out of the range of the authority or society he's run up against (cops, typically, but not exclusively) if not out of the world of the picture altogether. (As a variation, the hero will chase a man he suspects of coming on to his girl.) For the semi-improvisational Keystone units, a chase had the virtue of providing an ending whether or not they'd come up with a resolution for the vignette; that is, it was the narrative equivalent of a fade. If the cameraman could crank the camera, the clowns could provide laughs while seeming to be engaged in the story. It's still there in the top clowns' features, such as Safety Last! in which Harold's pal is chased by the cop from floor to floor on the inside of the building while Harold goes up the outside, and it's pretty much the entire plot of The General. It was also a foolproof way for animators like Tex Avery and Chuck Jones to develop their six-minute cartoons.

However, perhaps the single most useful type of humor to know is the kind that replays melodrama as camp. The impulse to parody melodrama is such a constant in slapstick that James Agee, in his landmark 1949 Life magazine appreciation of silent slapstick, "Comedy's Greatest Era," listed it as one of the two main branches of Keystone shorts—"parody laced with slapstick and plain slapstick"—further describing the parodies as "the unceremonious burial of a century of hamming, including the new hamming in serious movies." At Keystone, parody was so natural it could come into play automatically as the troupe, working on the street, spontaneously cooked up a plot to take advantage of an actual parade they could shoot for free. As Sennett recounted:

Mabel Normand could throw herself into any part instantly, even into a part that didn't exist.

"Who am I?" was all she asked when she saw we were under way.

"A mother," I said.

"I would be the last to know," Mabel commented.

"Now take this doll," I ordered. "It's your baby. Get going. Run up and down the line of march and embarrass those Shriners. Make out that—"

"—I'm a poor lorn working girl, betrayed in the big city, searching for the father of my chee-iuld." Mabel finished the sentence. "This characterization requires a shawl. Who ever heard of a poor, forlorn little mother without a shawl over her poor little head?"

Almost every major slapstick performer had experience in popular theater, and Sennett, Chaplin, Arbuckle, Lloyd, Keaton, and Laurel felt an irresistible impulse to parody the kind of low-grade theatrical they had either appeared in or shared bills with.

That cross-eyed ostrich Ben Turpin is usually cited as the silent specialist in this line, but the most thoroughgoing, and funniest, example I've come across is the 1914 Vitagraph two-reeler Goodness Gracious starring Sidney Drew and Clara Kimball Young. (The 1916 Triangle two-reeler The Mystery of Leaping Fish, starring Douglas Fairbanks as the glassy-eyed hophead detective Coke Ennyday busting a dope-smuggling ring, is a close second.) In Goodness Gracious Young plays a working-class girl who wants to live out the kind of romance she loves to read and weep over; to ensure she gets things just right, she doesn't put the book down while making her way through the world. First she takes to the streets, then becomes a rich man's secretary, typing with one hand so that she can hold her romance novel open with the other. Inevitably she falls in love with and marries her boss's son, only to have the father disown him; son and father are reconciled when the couple catches the father's attempted killer. There's no respite in the corniness of the plot or in the double-timed lampooning of it, and Young is spectacularly batty: mechanically fluttering her eyelids and flouncing in what could be a Balinese automaton's parody of coquetry; feeding pages from her novel to her starving children; trudging through a stage effects blizzard to her father-in-law's, and, when she enters his library, striking a statuesque pose and tossing one last handful of confetti snow on her own head. (It's a worthy forerunner of the Carol Burnett Show send-ups.)

Burlesques of melodrama announce a wised-up, rather than defensive, disreputability for slapstick comedies, from Goodness Gracious (which is just what sensible people might exclaim about the kind of melodrama that movie rips to shreds) to the Naked Gun series. However, though melodrama seemed ridiculous to the silent comedians, it also perversely provided them with a framework when they moved from the often freer-style shorts to features. Harold Lloyd's feature Girl Shy is much more sophisticated than Keystone shorts in terms of comic tone, performance, and photography, yet the romantic comedy plot ends up with Lloyd rescuing the girl from marriage to a sneering, villainous bigamist. And a full nine of Keaton's thirteen silent features involve melodramatic challenges to his manhood.

Chaplin alone used melodrama in his features without seeming to realize that he wasn't spinning his story lines from sheer inspiration and so doesn't benefit from the flippancy that makes comic melodrama preferable to serious melodrama. The combination of slapstick and melodrama, when slapstick had so often parodied melodrama, doesn't seem so odd when you know that the Keatons' parody of a one-act melodrama The Yellow Jacket was so popular that vaudeville theaters would book both acts on the same bill as often as possible. In his wonderful 1922 novel Merton of the Movies, Harry Leon Wilson conceives of all slapstick shorts as melodrama broadened for laughs. A self-serious director of features, worrying about the effect of these slapstick parodies on the general audience, asks another filmmaker, "What'll we do then for drama—after they've learned to laugh at the old stuff?" The other man calms him down by saying, "Don't worry; that reliable field marshal, old General Hokum, leads an unbeatable army." Slapstick romantic comedy features of the silent era enabled the audience to laugh at, and to get into, the hokey plot at the same time, and they set a pattern of storytelling that still goes over, as in all three of Jim Carrey's 1994 hits: Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, and Dumb & Dumber.

People who love slapstick usually can't resist inventorying the gags and plot devices and humor. It's a useful exercise but finally must give way to a larger question, since the gags and plot devices all come after the initial impulse to play a story for slapstick. You inevitably want a more involved abstract statement, a definition. Webster's calls slapstick "comedy that depends for its effect on fast, boisterous, and zany physical activity and horseplay (as the throwing of pies, the whacking of posteriors with a slapstick, chases, mugging) often accompanied by broad obvious rowdy verbal humor." But this is a definition in the form of an inventory; it doesn't get you nearer the motivation behind slapstick. My own attempt—that slapstick occurs anytime things go wrong physically for the hero in such a way that we know the moviemakers are inviting us to laugh—likewise takes you only so far, but it does indicate there's somewhere beyond to get to.

We need to gather more expansive ideas to get there. For instance, in her introduction to Buster Keaton's autobiography, Dilys Powell wrote of a sequence in Keaton's feature The General that "one laughs because the behaviour is an intensified reflection of universal impulses and moods: bewilderment, determination, exasperation." These three moods cover the material for almost all pure physical comedy sequences. Bewilderment and exasperation are two key emotions the hero feels when he comes up against what Frank Capra, a graduate of Mack Sennett two-reelers and Harry Langdon's feature production team, called the "intransigence of inanimate objects." (This echoes what the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga wrote, "Which of us has not repeatedly caught himself addressing some lifeless object, say a recalcitrant -collar-stud, in deadly earnest, attributing to it a perverse will, reproaching it and abusing it for its demoniacal obstinacy?" as an example of personification, which he cited as a fundamental habit of mind.) In response, the hero's determination propels him through the story, by the end of which he often enough triumphs by means of the very objects and forces that bewildered and exasperated him at the outset.

But there's more. If you think about slapstick in terms of the standard props of the silents—banana peels and pies, of course, Limburger cheese, buckets and mops, ladders, fences, revolving doors, electric fans—it can seem like a peculiar and not necessarily relevant sidestream of comedy. But the way Faulkner describes the hazards that attend human mobility in Light in August opens our eyes to a fuller, broadly applicable context:

He watches quietly the puny, unhorsed figure moving with that precarious and meretricious cleverness of animals balanced on their hinder legs; that cleverness of which the man animal is so fatuously proud and which constantly betrays him by means of natural laws like gravity and ice, and by the very extraneous objects which he has himself invented, like motor cars and furniture in the dark, and the very refuse of his own eating left upon floor or pavement.

Faulkner doesn't stage a slapstick episode; he describes slapstick as an elemental aspect of existence. He even overwrites a description of the most rudimentary comic prop, the banana peel, which becomes "the very refuse of his own eating left upon floor or pavement," to give slapstick the lurking grandeur of an existential condition. His instinct is just right—it isn't too much to say that slapstick is a fundamental, universal, and eternal response to the fact that life is physical. Of the two components, body and soul, we have empirical proof of the first alone. It's the body that we can see interacting with physical forces and objects, and our intense exasperation that this interaction doesn't run smoother—hence Faulkner's sense of betrayal—stimulates the urge to tell a story in a slapstick mode.

The word "existential" sounds too tony for slapstick but indicates its prevalence in our experience. The fact is that slapstick feels too familiar for a philosophical term because it happens to us all the time. My grandmother loved to recount how she and my aunt got wedged hip-to-hip in the closing doors of a department store elevator and started laughing so hard they couldn't pop themselves free. Likewise, and with superb fitness, on the first evening of screenings for the first slapstick seminar I taught, as I was mounting the steps to the theater with a can of film, a laser disc box, and a videotape in my arms, I raised my head to greet a student, missed the last step, and fell forward at full length on top of the slapstick treasure I was clutching.

The grotesque but demotic silent slapstick comedians, both more and less like us than any other movie stars of the era (they look less like us but are utterly unidealized), all had stories about real-life mishaps as well (which, because of my own experiences, seem believable, though the stars would have had professional reasons for inventing them). Roscoe Arbuckle's wife Minta Durfee remembered him in his vaudeville days throwing himself on a Murphy bed, his weight forcing the mattress through the bed boards, and ending up with "his hips and buttocks pinned in the bed frame, and his head under the headboard." He had to be pulled out by a passel of belly-laughing Arizona miners. You don't have to be fat to feel that this kind of thing is always happening to you. That's the appeal of the slapstick outlook, even in life—we have to laugh at the loss of our dignity, which is what makes the constant recurrence of such losses bearable. Insofar as such mishaps provide us with anecdotes, we like them to happen, in retrospect, if not while they're happening.

Slapstick clowns have the added advantage of using them as material. Buster Keaton described a train wreck he and his itinerant vaudevillian family were in:

What a pileup in that compartment! Mom and Louise on the floor, Jingles and me out of the upper berth on top of them, and then, on top of all of us, grips, boxes, valises, saxophone, typewriter. And Joe standing razor in hand and lather all over his face where he got shoved into the mirror when the freight engine bumped our Pullman.

Buster recalled for his interviewer the train company's adjuster giving his father Joe a check for damages and then added, "A hundred and fifty bucks and a new routine for free." When the comedians then act these mischances out on-screen, we are in a perfect situation: we can laugh at the kind of fiasco we know from experience but that's happening to somebody else for once, and in a more extreme form than we could perhaps survive. (Even the solicitous are morally free to laugh because nobody got hurt.) Keaton was fully aware of this transference when he said, "An audience will laugh at things happening to you, and they certainly wouldn't laugh if it happened to them."

But just how we're laughing—at the hero, with the hero, at ourselves—is an intricate matter. To enjoy slapstick, the audience has to make a basic projection. As Bert Williams said in 1918:

One of the funniest sights in the world is a man whose hat has been knocked in or ruined by being blown off—provided, of course, it be the other fellow's hat! . . . This is human nature. If you will observe your own conduct whenever you see a friend falling down on the street, you will find that nine times out of ten your first impulse is to laugh and your second is to run and help him get up. . . . The man with the real sense of humor is the man who can put himself in the spectator's place and laugh at his own misfortunes.

Williams takes Keaton's statement a little further, acknowledging the schadenfreude in seeing the other fellow's hat squashed (one of the most common incidents in all slapstick movies through the 1960s), but also understanding the wonderful possibility of identifying with the other fellow in his trouble as well. This explains Williams's last sentence, in which he encourages a fusion of actor and spectator: the "other fellow" becomes the actor we identify with, "us" in the movie.

The immediacy of slapstick makes this fusion possible. It's often considered the most outrageous of comic styles, and yet, relying as much as it does on such ineluctable forces as gravity, momentum, and bodily functions, it's the most necessarily rooted in physical actuality. As Sennett's biographer Gene Fowler wrote, Keystone comedies "caricatured earth's hourly problems, injustices and defeats in a manner that seemed peculiarly real in the midst of the unreality of the action." Even gag sessions found the writers quibbling over the literal plausibility of each other's ideas, as in Lloyd's transcription of a typical session in which a gagman carped: "And while we are on the subject of relentless realism, a model T Ford fires on a magneto, not a battery as you innocently suppose. What becomes of your battery gag now?" In the silent era, when movies were made for the masses who couldn't afford to attend the theater and opera regularly if at all, this also meant that slapstick comedies showed working- and middle-class America with naturalistic detail. Chaplin's grimy, run-down slum settings are the most obvious examples, but it's also true of the rooming houses, young marrieds' bungalows, lumber camps, firehouses, saloons, restaurant kitchens, and backstage scenes you see in all the silent comedians' pictures.

The social dimension of slapstick draws on less extreme forms of comedy—romantic comedy, for example—which I discuss at greater length in this book because critics have slighted them. But I wouldn't want to underestimate the importance of our exasperation with the natural laws that govern existence, exasperation so great it comprises responses as diverse as slapstick and Christianity. They are as different as the following legend of St. Ambrose, bishop of Milan, shows:

Once when the bishop was walking in the city, it happened that a man accidentally fell and lay prostrate on the ground. Seeing this, a passerby began to laugh at him. To this man Ambrose said: "You're standing now, but be careful you don't fall!" The words were hardly spoken when down the man went and lamented his own fall as he had laughed at the other's.

Next to Bert Williams's easygoing, secular, modern analysis of the same situation, the severity of this hieratic version stands out in hardedged relief. A Christian text couldn't tell this anecdote as a slapstick joke because slapstick sees falling as an amusing inevitability we have to live with as we can. By contrast, in Christian theology, falling has the worst possible connotations, of course. The Christian fear of falling, with the pits of hell always imagined down below, indicates a ceaseless resistance to physical existence, with our enslavement to gravity a symbol for all the animal lapses to which we're given.

Another central source of trouble for Christian thought is the body itself—the necessary precondition, for experience in general as for slapstick, that spoils everything. I don't mean to suggest that Christians, either individually or institutionally, have had no sense of humor. The medieval burlesque Feast of Fools, "when the solemn decorum of cathedral services would be suddenly turned upside down as the inferior clergy heard the glad tidings that 'He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree,'" and Chaucer and Rabelais demonstrate otherwise. My point is just that one of the central elements of the theology—the debasing effect of the body on the soul—enables Christians to overcome this discord only by denying and finally getting rid of the body, whereas slapstick achieves accord here on earth by a comic concession to the body at its most traitorous. Both of these stand in contrast to the pagan approach of the Olympic Games, in which athletes attempt to achieve a perfect union of body and will. These three ritualistic approaches form a gamut: Christianity seeks eternal triumph over physicality after life; Olympians seek by means of the body a temporal triumph that will be remembered long after the athlete's prowess has faded; slapstick seeks a temporal acceptance of physicality by a cathartic exaggeration of its very limitations. The first two have heroism in common, the second two athleticism; all three have produced figures who are revered and memorialized. But slapstick is the only one you can engage in without trying.

In addition, slapstick has its own secular sense of the soul enclosed in the body that only holds it back, symbolized most clearly by the yearning hero who's such a hapless pipsqueak he can't impress on the world (especially the girl) how much he deserves what he wants. His littleness itself often stands for how much he deserves what he can't get. The body that can't win the girl, overcome the villain, or even reliably stay right end up, is indeed a burden to him. Christian hope resides in finally shedding the body altogether in an ecstatic transport into the spiritual realm, which is what the body-centered desires threaten to deprive you of for all eternity. In slapstick the central irony is that the hero's body itself comes between him and the satisfaction of his physical desires. "Desires" is overstated for the simplest of slapstick goals, say, tying your shoe, but is right for the most developed slapstick stories, which are romantic comedies. Slapstick offers a stylized exaggeration of our frustration with the physical but turns it into high-spirited, affirmative entertainment.

The slapstick hero's skill at deploying his paradoxically acrobatic clumsiness is central to his status as an Everyman. He generally doesn't have enough definition beyond his physical characteristics for a full dramatic persona but is instead a comic martyr, suffering the compromises of dignity that we're spared for the duration of our sit in the theater (provided we don't spill our popcorn). The clown suffers in our stead everything from delay, frustration, and discomfort to humiliation and even on a few occasions death. All of which we laugh at—the worse it gets, the harder we may laugh. (And it stays with us: when I drop something, I'm equally likely to swear or to laugh, sometimes both. If I'm lucky enough to laugh, I'm usually thinking of some similar incident in a slapstick movie I've seen. And sometimes if I'm in a bad mood and swear, I remind myself of Oliver Hardy, and then I laugh.) But whereas the Messiah's martyrdom is a tragedy with a comic outcome, that is, salvation (see Dante), the slapstick clown's martyrdom is comic-as-in-funny (and often has a romantic happy ending besides). Slapstick enables the beleaguered audience to stay here on earth and have the best good time; with a perfect sense of completeness, the clown's martyrdom becomes the good time the audience is having.

This sense of martyrdom, which may sound overwrought, explains why movies about "real" people's troubles, like King Vidor's The Crowd and Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels, can use as a resolution and a climax, respectively, scenes of audiences laughing their worries away at vaudeville acrobats and a cartoon short. Also, you can hear in an audience's expectant "Oh nooooo!" when they spot the "plant" of a slapstick joke that though they know what's coming, they don't mind knowing (as they do when they can guess whodunit). As William Dean Howells wrote in 1903 in the character of a magazine contributor chatting with him about vaudeville: "For my part there are stunts I could see endlessly over again, and not weary of them. Can you say as much of any play?" Thus predictability doesn't necessarily lessen the effect, which points to the element of ritual in slapstick. It's one of our comic rituals because it's common—it happens to everyone, it's available to everyone for the price of a movie or vaudeville entrance, and everyone can readily grasp it.

Furthermore, because slapstick accidents are mainly survivable (even in cartoons, where they're as lethal as being blasted in the face with a shotgun or falling off a cliff, Daffy Duck and Wile E. Coyote always return whole), slapstick can train the comic outlook on events as grand as historical and natural calamities. This is what we mean by "comic" in the widest sense. Harpo Marx said of his impoverished childhood, and presumably the European Jewish experience behind it, "You could laugh about the Past, because you'd been lucky enough to survive it." There's something about the way we save our skins and bring forth another generation that in turn saves theirs that is deeply comic, but also funny. (We're so damned resilient—we really have some nerve despising rats and cockroaches.) As C. L. Barber wrote about Falstaff, "Whereas, in the tragedy, the reduction is to a body which can only die, here reduction is to a body which typifies our power to eat and drink our way through a shambles of intellectual and moral contradictions." Flying too low for tragedy isn't felt as a disadvantage in the resolutely middle-class world of American pop culture. Slapstick marks the death of you as a person of dignity and honor, who has to live his life just so and suffer tragically when the gods, other men, or his own drives make that impossible, and your rebirth as one of the happy, comfortable crowd not expected to uphold any impossible, vaguely aristocratic standards.

If this interpretation—which is emphatically an interpretation of the movies as experiences rather than as statements about their ostensible subjects—seems overdone, it's in part because it bestows on slapstick a kind of cultural authority it obviously doesn't require to reach its audience. Jerry Lewis wrote, "I appeal to children who know I get paid for doing what they get slapped for. . . . I flout dignity and authority, and there's nobody alive who doesn't want to do the same thing." Mack Sennett expounded even more fully about why he relished the flouting of dignity and authority he saw in burlesque in the early 1900s:

The round, fat girls in nothing much doing their bumps and grinds, the German-dialect comedians, and especially the cops and tramps with their bed slats and bladders appealed to me as being funny people. Their approach to life was earthy and understandable. They whaled the daylights out of pretension. They made fun of themselves and the human race. They reduced convention, dogma, stuffed shirts, and Authority to nonsense, and then blossomed into pandemonium.

This is as unpretentious and straightforward a statement about this aspect of slapstick that I know of; the standards that make slapstick unseemly to people who believe in a certain kind of social decorum don't faze Sennett at all. When he worked with D. W. Griffith at Biograph in Manhattan (1908Ð1912), he repeatedly tried to sell comedy scripts about policemen to the august director, to no avail. When he finally made one of them himself, with the actors in frowzy costumes because Griffith's company had all the genuine police uniforms, he knew it was a good picture not only because of the profit it made for Biograph but because of the complaints: "The Chicago police raised their hands in pious horror about that little film and let on they were insulted something awful. Well! Authority had been ridiculed! That was exactly the artistic effect I was after. I decided to make more cop pictures."

But the flouting of authority itself can be overemphasized in another respect. Chaplin (borrowing from Dickens) thinks that "authority" means unjust authority, that slapstick is necessarily on the side of the oppressed. Hugh Kenner fixed on this as the reason for

the over-estimation of Chaplin, solicited by his all-too-human persona and reinforced by the sort-of-Marxist coloration of so many Anglo-American film historians; Chaplin's encounters with the power structure—greedy monopolists and their kept cops—suggest to the man who is interested in film as a means of propaganda that a positive (i.e., revolutionary) solution to the tramp's difficulties is in sight.

But Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton don't initiate assaults on dignity and authority from a locked-out position as Chaplin does; they're much more minding-their-own-business types, trying to take their place in the ranks of society as it is. And Chaplin's later work, in which the authority is unjust, dominates summaries of his overall output, which ignore the amorality of the early Tramp, who would kick anybody and everybody's backside. (Iris Barry wrote of silent comedy, "A hero may not push a boot into anyone's face sportively, but a comedian may.") Sennett sides with the "little guy" without the political whisker licking, and even Chaplin's and Lewis's ambition and egotism get in the way of their supposed meekness. Slapstick stars right up to the present are a hard-driving bunch who take their preeminence in their movies for granted (when they aren't fighting costars to assert it), even when they're playing virtuous and pitiable.

And there are other problems that arise when people try to take a work of slapstick seriously: they usually attempt to "elevate" it by praising it either as satire, which often seems overstated or wrong, or for its pathos, which is often enough right but which is to praise a comedy for the moments when it ceases to be comic. Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, and Preston Sturges are the most common losers by the claim, usually intended as an anointment, that they are satirists. Even in a picture as obviously intended as satire as The Great Dictator, Chaplin can't really stay on this beam; it's not how he works. The Marx Brothers, among the least sententious comedians ever, are far too anarchic to be satirists, much like the Chaplin of the peerless Mutual shorts. And Sturges focuses on the twinned themes of a man's material and sexual success. He can be called a satirist only in the most general sense of someone attuned to human foibles, which he exploits as much as he satirizes. (The exception is Sullivan's Travels, which satirizes the studios' ethosÑbefore capitulating to and justifying it.)

The fact that slapstick comedians don't really make pointed satires is related to the fact that they take their place in the comic tradition only minimally by literary transmission. Gilbert Seldes said in praise of silent slapstick that "it uses still everything commonest and simplest and nearest to hand; in terror of gentility, it has refrained from using the broad farces of literature—Aristophanes and Rabelais and Moli�re—as material." And M. Willson Disher insisted with respect to styles of clowning that the persistent types "are manifestly not borrowed but spontaneously created afresh." Although nearly every familiar style of low-comedy routine will be mentioned in a study of Aristophanes (indicating something eternal in this form of comic address), slapstick movie clowns have always re-created them from more proximate sources—in their theatrical experience and personal lives, and in response to on-going conditions of existence. They're not educated men, and their comedy is probably the livelier for it—their ignorance is our bliss.

However, praising slapstick for pathos is the more disturbing way in which people try to explain its greatness. Of course, the hero's haplessness can make him seem pitiful, which makes him something less than a hero—Chaplin's flaw and Jerry Lewis's even more so after him. Jerry Lewis's statement "I do not know that I have a carefully thought-out theory on exactly what makes people laugh, but the premise of all comedy is a man in trouble, the little guy against the big guy," is more revealing perhaps than careful thinking could have made it. The idea that comedy is about getting a man into and out of trouble could be the haiku version of this whole book. The problem with what Lewis says is that he voices the common perception that the comic hero has to be a little guy—either in the sense of height and build, or in the sense of a meek, gentle, common man (what Chaplin meant when he regrettably began referring to the Tramp as "the little fellow"). Roscoe Arbuckle and the six-foot-tall Lewis himself prove that a comic hero doesn't have to be little, and Chaplin could be just as funny when he was abusive or a gent in evening dress or both.

Nevertheless, because the slapstick hero is a martyr yet the comedian is untrained in literary discipline, it does make sense that these heroes would slide toward pathos, an easier but also enduringly popular theatrical form. So it isn't a shock that many people take as their model Chaplin from his 1921 feature The Kid onward (with a few exceptions, Pay Day, his 1922 two-reeler, and Modern Times being the best). In 1929 Gilbert Seldes wrote, "The particular type of fun [slapstick shorts] made was not popular with intelligent people at the time; it was unrefined; it was vulgar; and only the multitude applauded—and rocked and roared with laughter—until the supreme genius of Chaplin proved itself by effecting a revolution in critical judgment." To get at the quality of this "supreme genius," Seldes, when describing The Pawn Shop, arguably the ripest of Chaplin's Mutual two-reelers, writes, "All of this is tremendously funny; behind it there is the flicker of a tear; it has the irony and pity, the piety and wit, of all the great Chaplin pictures." Seldes says all this even though he's just accurately described two of the moments in this thoroughly unsentimental picture when Chaplin has made fun of teariness: Charlie's "tragic appeal to be reinstated" when fired, indicating that "he has eleven children, so high, and so high, and so high—until the fourth one is about a foot taller than himself," and when "Charlie is taken in by a sob-story about a wedding ring," after which he clobbers himself on the head with a gavel. Seldes's summary of the short is smart and precise; he cops the buzz. But when he wants to expand on what makes it great, he starts hallowing his tears, as if they were the sign by which art is known.

I'm not suggesting that there's no pleasure in pathos—that's objectively wrong. The problem in Chaplin is that when he gets weepy, he seems to be inviting the audience to join in a session of mutual self-congratulation for identifying with his unappreciated soulfulness, encouraging us to whimper, We're too good for this world, too, Charlie! It's baffling to read such praise for the Chaplin movie that not only avoids pathos but ridicules it, just as it's baffling to read Otis Ferguson's complaint that Modern Times "is a feature picture made up of several one- or two-reel shorts, proposed titles being The Shop, The Jailbird, The Watchman, The Singing Waiter," when that seems to be just what enables Chaplin to work in his most expert form at feature length without relying on sentimentality to link everything up.

However, it was Chaplin himself who propagandized for prestige on the strength of his sentimentality, and by 1931 Frederick Lewis Allen could define "highbrows" as people "who looked down on the movies but revered Charlie Chaplin as a great artist." Idolizing Chaplin can blur the clearest vision. James Agee, in "Comedy's Greatest Era," praises the simultaneously narcissistic and masochistic ending of City Lights not only as the best thing Chaplin ever did but as "the greatest piece of acting and the highest moment in movies." And it's not just that Agee disagrees with me about its not being a comic moment, since he claims, "It is enough to shrivel the heart to see." The disagreement plunges to bedrock: why praise a comedy for its heart-shriveling moment?

Among these very best critics of slapstick, Walter Kerr comes closest to satisfactorily appreciating the serious bent of Chaplin's work:

Chaplin wasn't after tragedy as such, obviously, though the character he had already fashioned for himself embraced, by accident and instinct, certain of the tragic hero's qualities. He was an outcast by temperament, and he had aspirations of a sort. What Chaplin wanted to do was to dig for the seriousness of comedy's origins, knowing perfectly well that such seriousness was there and was intimately related to the prankish nose-thumbing it had provoked.

When the hungry, homeless Tramp steals a hot dog and then eludes the cop who spots him in A Dog's Life, Chaplin could be said to be thumbing his nose at a serious situation, but not in the self-regarding, earnest ending of City Lights. What it comes to is that Kerr's saying Chaplin "wasn't after tragedy as such" is simply saying as generously as possible that Chaplin didn't really understand what tragedy was. O'Neill blended comedy and authentic tragedy in Long Day's Journey into Night when he had the compulsive skinflint Tyrone turn off the extra lights after he's made a big deal about letting them burn. And in Sidney Lumet's 1962 movie version of the play, Katharine Hepburn came up with a great bit of business: when Mary hollers, "I hate doctors!" Hepburn brings her hand down on the table and flips the silverware into the air, giving us sick giggles over the theatrically phony gestures of a manipulative, emotionally remote matriarch. What Chaplin blended with his slapstick wasn't tragedy at all but pathos, a debased form of tragedy that he was familiar with from his childhood in touring theater troupes.

C. L. Barber's discussion of pathos-based storytelling gets at the problem with it:

When, through a failure of irony, the dramatist presents ritual as magically valid, the result is sentimental, since drama lacks the kind of control which in ritual comes from the auditors' being participants. Sentimental "drama," that which succeeds in being neither comedy nor tragedy, can be regarded from this vantage as theater used as a substitute for ritual, without the commitment to participation and discipline proper to ritual nor the commitment to the fullest understanding proper to comedy or tragedy.

The levelheaded Seldes also knew what was wrong with pathos in the movies; he criticizes early moviemakers because they "began by importing the whole baggage of the romantic and sentimental novel and theatre." He even praises slapstick burlesques of the perennial sentimental modes—"Our whole tradition of love is destroyed and outraged in these careless comedies; so also our tradition of heroism"—and yet goes on to praise Chaplin in blood-clotting terms for his "piety and wit," his "indescribable poignancy," his "wisdom" and "loveliness." Praising Chaplin, Seldes comes across as fraudulently as Jerry Lewis did when in promotional material for the 1951 Martin and Lewis picture That's My Boy, he praised Chaplin and himself by claiming, "I really belong to the old school which believed that screen comedy is essentially a combination of situation, sadness and gracious humility." I prefer Seldes when he generalizes that because "the genteel tradition does not operate" in slapstick, "fantasy is liberated" and "imagination is still riotous and healthy," which indicates that there must be something comedy can do as comedy and still be great.

Additionally, pathos does nothing for Chaplin even when it's central to a sequence. People have always rightly marveled at Chaplin's sticking forks into dinner rolls and making them do a little table dance in The Gold Rush (1925); he perches his head over his hands to make himself into a Mardi Gras figure with a giant head, tiny fork legs, and relatively big bread feet. What's amazing about this interlude is that Chaplin moves his head and the forks as if they were indeed members of a single body. It isn't the pathos of the situation, the fact that he's fallen asleep while waiting for New Year's Eve guests who don't show, that moves you (as Seldes claimed). As pathos, this scene overall isn't as good as the nerveracking no-show birthday party in Stella Dallas. And it isn't the "cuteness" of the idea that gets to you. This was Colleen Moore's mistake when she tried a similar kind of hand dance in Ella Cinders (1926). Lacking the physical skill to effect the illusion, she overrelied on the characters' darlingness in entertaining three moppets.

More surprisingly, it isn't even the originality of the concept that makes it stand out; Arbuckle had earlier performed this bit on film, as Chaplin acknowledged. Originality in terms of the gags themselves is almost never the correct answer in slapstick. For example, Buster Keaton's suicide attempts in the 1921 two-reeler Hard Luck seemed particularly redolent of his style to me until I began researching this book, when archival viewing revealed that Keaton didn't originate the sequence, not in the movies, anyway. Similar sequences occur in Harold Lloyd's 1920 two-reeler Haunted Spooks; Bobby Vernon's 1920 two-reeler All Jazzed Up, made by Al Christie; and Colleen Moore's 1919 Christie two-reeler Her Bridal Night-mare. Keaton's sequence is the best in itself and works especially well for a stone-faced comedian; however, it didn't sprout from Keaton's artistry but from the conventions of this group of moviemakers. You need some other handle to describe what makes a slapstick artist's work distinctive, and in the case of the dinner roll number, it's Chaplin's performance of the dance that's astounding. He moves with the eerie precision of a half-animate creature in a fairy tale while bearing the finicky and nonchalant expression of a trouper who's done the exquisite dance so many times he's achieved the look of effortlessness. We're magnetized by this inordinate and idiosyncratic physical grace that doesn't reduce easily to words or to the kinds of feelings, like satire and pathos, that so often promote complacency.

Chaplin's dance is a great moment of pantomime by any standards, but that still leaves the question of what makes the movies overall great, which leads to a bigger problem. I wouldn't hesitate to say that such recent movies as Raising Arizona, Beetlejuice, The Mask, and Kingpin contain great slapstick, and everyone agrees that the silent slapsticks are "great," but do we know what we mean by that when applied to slapstick movies? Are they great in the same way or to the same degree that Shakespeare's comedies are great? Are even the best of them, The Pawn Shop, The General, and The Kid Brother, comparable to such masterpieces as Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) or G. W. Pabst's Pandora's Box (1929), which of all silents require the least adjustment for outdated conventions? Do they even represent achievements on the order of such European movies with extended use of slapstick as Kote Mikaberidze's Soviet silent My Grandmother (1929), Luis Bu–uel and Salvador Dal’'s Un chien andalou (1929) and L'Age d'or (1930), RenŽ Clair's The Italian Straw Hat (1927) and Le Million (1931), Vittorio De Sica's Miracle in Milan (1950), Louis Malle's Zazie dans le mŽtro (1960), Bertrand Blier's Going Places (1974), or Pedro Almod—var's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Break-down (1988)? Though Europeans, particularly Max Linder and to a lesser extent Jacques Tati, have made slapstick movies of the same kind and quality as the American silents, we have little in our canon comparable to these European movies, which, with their close ties to contemporary visual art and literary movements, have graphic, narrative, and moviemaking power unmistakably more sophisticated than you find in the American movies. In his 1925 feature The Salvation Hunters, Josef von Sternberg made a muted reduction of slapstick archetypes, and in such later pictures as Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Limelight (1952), Chaplin attempted more literary kinds of irony and introspection. But none of these is up to the European pictures artistically, nor are they as funny as either the European pictures or the American slapstick classics. In fact, I can see that even Ingmar Bergman's laboriously unfunny slapstick farce All These Women (1964) is more consciously, literarily ambitious than even the best American silent slapstick.

Likewise, our best slapstick movies altogether lack the amplitude of the physical comedy in literary masterworks, for instance, this farcical moment during the battle of Borodin— in War and Peace:

Instinctively guarding against the shock—for they had been running together at full speed before they saw one another—Pierre put out his hands and seized the man (a French officer) by the shoulder with one hand and by the throat with the other. The officer, dropping his sword, seized Pierre by his collar.

For some seconds they gazed with frightened eyes at one another's unfamiliar faces and both were perplexed at what they had done and what they were to do next. "Am I taken prisoner or have I taken him prisoner?" each was thinking. . . . The Frenchman was about to say something, when just above their heads, terrible and low, a cannon ball whistled, and it seemed to Pierre that the French officer's head had been torn off, so swiftly had he ducked it.

Pierre too bent his head and let his hands fall. Without further thought as to who had taken whom prisoner, the Frenchman ran back to the battery and Pierre ran down the slope stumbling over the dead and wounded who, it seemed to him, caught at his feet.

This kind of antic collision is familiar from countless silent shorts and cartoons. As Joe Rock described the two-reelers he made with Earl Montgomery: "We always finished our comedies with a shot of us running away from a cop, a schoolteacher, or a principal, and then running smack into them again. If we'd run away from cops, we'd run back into cops." Despite the lethally chaotic setting, Pierre's running smack into the enemy officer can't help but make him buffoonish, as he is in much of the novel, because of the nonchalant way he's sauntered into a situation beyond his comprehension. But at Borodin—, unlike most of the slapstick battle scenes that were profuse in the silent era, men are maimed and killed. They suffer physically, which enables the work to arc higher.

Black physical humor found its way into slapstick fairly early on in the shorts that Roscoe Arbuckle made for Joe Schenck. In the 1918 two-reeler Good Night, Nurse! for instance, Arbuckle walks by a hospital operating room out of which comes flying first an amputated leg and then a crosscut saw. In War and Peace Tolstoy writes with grotesque humor when Anatole Kur‡gin's leg is amputated, because of wounds suffered at Borodin—, and then held aloft with the boot still on it for its former owner to see. But Tolstoy does so specifically to show Prince Andrew, also wounded and lying nearby in the same operating tent, overcoming his feelings of melodramatic vengeance against Kur‡gin for the planned abduction of Andrew's fiancŽe, Nat‡sha. What's unsettling about Anatole's begging to be shown his own leg somehow prepares you for Andrew's rapture. The grotesque comedy brought on by the massacre tells you that the settled world, in which the romantic rivalry plot makes sense, is lurching beneath you; transcendence isn't such a reach when you've lost stability anyway. M. Willson Disher wrote, "Satisfy people's desire for the ridiculous and they will accept your idea of the sublime," and it's truer of Tolstoy than of Chaplin.

By contrast, the appearance of Buster Keaton in Good Night, Nurse! as a surgeon in a bloody apron is funny because shockingly out of place. We can't take the gore seriously as a fact of medicine, or we'd no longer recognize the movie as slapstick. It could only gain in terms of a complication that these clowns weren't seeking. Whereas Pierre's buffoonery as he floats through the phases of his life with almost no satisfaction and certainly no enviable reputation has to be seen in comparison to Prince Andrew and Anatole Kur‡gin: all three men have important romantic relations with Nat‡sha. (Eventually Pierre marries her and fathers her children.) Pierre is at times laughable, but allegorically speaking, he's the character who in the end can respect himself and who survives. Prince Andrew is clearer-sighted than Pierre, but also stiffer. He has to be fatally wounded before he can transcend melodrama; Pierre does not.

Consider also the verbal slapstick of Flaubert's agricultural fair episode in Madame Bovary, which begins by alternating entire passages of civic speechifying with entire passages of Rodolphe's seduction of Emma. At the awarding of the prizes, Flaubert speeds up this device to line-by-line alternation between Rodolphe and M. Derozerays, the chairman of the jury, producing this matchless joke:

"A hundred times I was on the point of leaving, and yet I followed you and stayed with you . . ."

"For the best manures."

". . . as I'd stay with you tonight, tomorrow, every day, all my life!"

"To Monsieur Caron, of Argueil, a gold medal!"

Flaubert's double entendre achieved by overlapping dialogue is a standard verbal slapstick device of the early talkies, with words like "apple-sauce" taking the place of "manure." Laurel and Hardy's 1931 four-reeler talkie Beau Hunks is unabashed, however, opening with Ollie thinking of his fiancŽe and singing, "I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you / You are the ideal of my dreams," while Stan cuts a fertilizer ad from a newspaper. Within moments Ollie's sweetheart will dump him by telegram. Technically the opening gag in the 1941 W. C. Fields feature Never Give a Sucker an Even Break is even closer to Flaubert's joke. There, Fields stands in front of a billboard advertising his previous picture The Bank Dick when a truck farmer rolls by calling out his wares: "Raspberries!"

In Madame Bovary you get the joke that Rodolphe's sweet talk is manure, though it smells like frankincense to Emma, but you become absorbed by Flaubert's reticence in recasting what is in essence a witty direct statement on the part of the narrator as a low-down dung joke occasioned by an "accident" of construction. Both the joke and the author's reticence contribute to our ambient sense that Emma's downfall isn't as tragic as it might be in a more conventional treatment. That is, because Flaubert won't tell us to experience it as tragedy, we hesitate and stare at hackneyed material (which, Baudelaire guessed, Flaubert chose because it was hackneyed) suddenly become unfamiliar. Emma's tragedy seems to be that she is, as a type, too shallow for tragedy. Slapstick also denies the possibility of tragedy, but with no unease. All failings come out comic; in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break Fields's character, listed in the credits as "The Great Man," knocks a bottle of booze over the railing of an airplane's open-air sundeck and leaps after it, landing in a garden on top of a thousand-foot butte where he plays a kissing game with the pretty blonde girl who lives there. Slapstick is a mode of affirmation, and slapstick movies are not reticent, not even Buster Keaton's (though they are mysterious).

Educated people can appreciate the comic aspects of War and Peace or Madame Bovary but tend not to know how to let comedy be comedy when it's not as broadly ambitious as these works. To my mind, they look too hard and latch onto works such as City Lights that abandon slapstick for a less satisfying hybrid effect. But if Arthur Miller and Toni Morrison are any indication, it isn't by straining for significance that an artist of any genre is most likely to achieve it. This works against the view of Chaplin as the greatest slapstick artist because he began to strain so early and then, in his later career, so hard. I prefer to all of Chaplin's "heart-shriveling" peaks a bit of unadulterated slapstick in Keaton's feature Steamboat Bill, Jr. when Keaton's character, with his slightly fatalistic calmness and absentmindedness, is sneaking across his father's boat at night to visit his girl on her father's boat. At one point he falls about ten feet to the deck, landing on his ear, and then, upon getting up, sees a rope across his path, which he lifts to stoop under. Afterward he pauses and looks back at the rope, registering that this action was somehow inessential. Then cut and he's off. The ten-foot fall justifies this nearly subliminal gaglet—he's dazed—yet it can also be taken as an emblem of the syncopation of the body's and the mind's impulses, or of the way a man may be most distracted when he thinks he's concentrating hardest. There's always another perspective on your actions, which you don't necessarily want to be clued in to; just hurry on with what you're doing and hope the percentage of superfluous actions won't be too great. However, you can rely on others to see you as you can never see yourself, and you definitely can't ensure that you won't appear ridiculous to them. I wouldn't say these ideas I've pinched out of this momentary bit are the only or even the central ideas of slapstick. But they do suggest the unassuming concision with which slapstick can represent a cluster of notions about how we actually get through our days.

Pure physical slapstick is harder to talk about than literary uses of it precisely because it's pure, because there aren't other styles of narrative and character for it to resonate with in an overall scheme. (To enjoy talking about it, you have to enjoy struggling with the difficulty of paraphrase.) Slapstick is a genre that Tolstoy considered one tool in a vast workshop; when it becomes the main stylistic mode of a movie, you have to figure out what it means in and of itself. It is not going to be a discursive meaning, something that can be read as a theme or a statement. Among the movie genres, slapstick is probably the least literary, and the slapstick entertainers in general are not attempting to express an otherwise paraphrasable thesis in slapstick. When one of them has, as Chaplin did most obviously in his later phase from The Great Dictator through A King in New York, he got increasingly far from his best. Of course, novelists do more than merely dramatize preconceived ideas, but it's not inappropriate to say that they do suggest themes in the course of telling their stories. In War and Peace Pierre, stunned after the battle of Borodin—, dreams of a voice saying to him, "To endure war is the most difficult subordination of man's freedom to the law of God." You don't necessarily have to accept this as the novel's statement about war, but it does serve as a focal point for thinking about the meaning of the experiences the novelist has set forth.

By contrast, an all-slapstick war movie like The General, one of the rare silent slapstick pictures with a wartime setting in which men actually die, doesn't say anything about war. The war does serve as an animated historical backdrop but functions in comic terms merely as a physical obstacle to the hero's desires that by the end helps him satisfy his desires. And that it's the Civil War is a relatively arbitrary decision, free of political implications. Keaton's source book was pro-Union; he made the hero a Southerner I would guess because in this episode of the war, the Northerners lost, and Keaton felt you couldn't end a comedy with a military execution. Likewise, slapstick doesn't say anything about our condition as physical beings, though that is its one great subject. It simply nudges our feelings about this condition, with an uncloying, anxious cheerfulness that doesn't force a resolution to those feelings.

Slapstick doesn't feel profound but rather feels true to our experience very much as we live it. It's a popular phenomenon that predates modern pop culture but that in movies shares pop culture's immediate access to the audience. Agee noted the class slant of slapstick's popularity in the early silent era: "'Nice' people, who shunned all movies in the early days, condemned the Sennett comedies as vulgar and naive. But millions of less pretentious people loved their sincerity and sweetness, their wild-animal innocence and glorious vitality. They could not put these feelings into words, but they flocked to the silents." He recalled "the laughter of unrespectable people having a hell of a fine time, laughter as violent and steady and deafening as standing under a waterfall." Slapstick itself evokes these comparisons to natural phenomena; Gilbert Seldes wrote that the laughter "shook us because it was really the earth trembling beneath our feet," in defense of the commonness of the comedy that spoke to its mass audience by offending their "sense of security in dull and businesslike lives." Slapstick also suggests metaphors that bring out its democratic appeal: Gene Fowler called Sennett a "dependable barometer" of public taste because he "himself had the average man's amusement tastes," further explaining his success by calling him "the Abraham Lincoln of comedy, by, for and of the people."

The result of this culture commonly arrived at by people who could not put these feelings into words is that slapstick, like popular culture in general, is more taken up with conveying attitudes, emotions, and experiences than ideas. This is often true even of the most prodigious movies—Intolerance is masterful for many reasons, none of which has anything to do with the abstraction expressed in the title. Slapstick movies are artistically whole in an almost wholly intuitive sense. They seem repetitive to some people because slapstick is mechanical, but in a good way, I think, that gives you the satisfaction of seeing experts put together marvelous contraptions with the given pieces. The only way to appreciate slapstick as much as it deserves without paradoxically devaluing it by overrating it in inappropriate ways (the academic curse) is to understand that when a routine is more resonant than the basic slipping on a banana peel, it's not in overtly literary ways. It resonates because the makers have shaped the material according to their own experiences, and that experiential modeling makes us laugh harder or in unusual ways. Chaplin is funnier and greater as a wordless but physically eloquent slum kid in The Pawn Shop than as a grandiloquent Shaw manquŽ in Monsieur Verdoux.

Slapstick may always mean the same thing—a response to the frustration of physical existence—but it has been blended with other tones even in popular American movies. Robert Altman's M*A*S*H (1970), arguably the most aesthetically satisfying American movie with major slapstick forays, displays intriguingly off-center attitudes, is surprisingly naturalistically performed, especially well designed and shot, and nervily put together. However, as sophisticated as M*A*S*H is, especially for a service comedy, its meanings aren't discursively literary, though this doesn't stop them from getting far beyond satire of the army. M*A*S*H is certainly not about war or mortality, as much as it features very bloody scenes of surgery.

For all the naturalism of Altman's semi-improvised comic style, and of the sexual and surgical content, it's not very realistic. Rather, it's an allegory of the battle between the sane, adaptable draftees and, in a phrase taken from Richard Hooker's novel, the Regular Army Clowns. It brings to mind the contest between Sir Toby Belch and Malvolio in Twelfth Night, and the scene in which "our" side carries Elliott Gould's Trapper John in a chair while drunkenly singing "Hail to the Chief" in honor of his appointment as chief surgeon indicates that the "good" chief is indeed the movie's Lord of Misrule. M*A*S*H emanates its encouragement to swing with the flexible people who take the mind-preservingly hip attitudes toward sex, drugs, race, religion, sportsmanship, and patriotism. Flexibility is always at some level the gist of comedy, enabling as it does, for instance, the marriage of pride to prejudice once each bends toward the other. And in a slapstick picture like M*A*S*H it's nearly the entire meaning, which is why it doesn't matter that the Korean War is treated as if it were historically synonymous with the then-current Vietnam War. Altman knows how to use the sight of battle casualties to give the picture weight without ever cheaply exploiting them. But M*A*S*H says nothing about war per se except to show that the best way to conduct yourself in any situation, even the direst, and maybe especially the direst, is to know your job without taking yourself or the rules of conduct too seriously.

All this has to do with the fact that slapstick doesn't feel profound because that word ties in to the kinds of cultural prestige that slapstick is not interested in and often openly mocks. Effortlessly, slapstick makes the audience feel in with the in crowd, part of a world full of adaptable, and often enough optimistic, Everybodies. If you think of M*A*S*H as a realistic drama, it can seem smug because Hawkeye and Trapper John's values are never tested. But as a slapstick comedy, it's irresistible—unless you're a Frank Burns. Frank has to be turned out, as Malvolio does, because in the abstract, he represents opposition to the heroes' urges to be human in the comic sense that allows everyone to come together, in pairs, but also as a larger community. Finally, the meaning of slapstick as we've had it in pure form in our movies resides not in the handling of specific topics but in its conventional nature as ritual. It isn't a dramatized statement about a topic; its significance lies in the experience of the movie itself, the comic catharsis, on the part of the individual viewer within the group.

I won't have anything further to say about M*A*S*H in this book, but I think that with its football game recalling a whole line of slapstick movies, including The Freshman (1925), Horse Feathers (1932), and the Martin and Lewis picture That's My Boy (1951), it's a good example of how the tradition has remained unbroken. In this book, I've chosen to write about artists who I think show both the very wide range of expression that slapstick affords its most inspired clowns and the ongoing movie tradition over roughly fifty years. In short: Chaplin offers the purest example of the performing impulse behind slapstick. Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton developed their longer pictures as romantic comedies and in so doing reveal a nest of universal conflicts expressed by both slapstick and romantic comedy. Looking at the limited success female stars have had in slapstick tells us about the sexual slant in our responses to physical comedy. The Marx Brothers bring social material as close to the surface as it can get in slapstick without turning it into something else. They express immigrants' total skepticism of the dominant culture as a means of assimilating into it in its most frivolous mode. Preston Sturges has a literary comic sensibility but works out of deep pockets of impulse with the physical freedom and intensity of the silent comedians, offering the most sophisticated combination of high and low comedy until the movies of Paul Mazursky. And Jerry Lewis renewed slapstick clowning for the talkies. His appearance on-screen in 1949 is the Big Bang for contemporary slapstick performers; in the next fifteen years, he reformulated the tradition so indelibly that his model is still dominant.

I could also have written with pleasure at greater length about Roscoe Arbuckle, Sydney Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Harry Langdon, Raymond Griffith, Lupino Lane, Laurel and Hardy, W. C. Fields, Tex Avery, and Chuck Jones. However, this is not an encyclopedia but rather a personal critical response to those artists who have stirred me the most, written to evoke what slapstick fans come to care about most: the qualities that distinguish one artist from another. I chose subjects for my chapters to give a sense of historical coverage, but at the same time I wanted to employ a method of analysis that readers could use themselves in any case (if they had the information at hand and could clap their eyes on the movies). In addition to describing each artist's inspiration in terms of movement and subject matter and affect, which are sui generis, I develop my analysis from three major components in every case: the artist's biography, to see how personality and background informed his work; the artist's theatrical experience, with an eye for how he inflected the shared conventions; and the artist's position in the filmmaking industry, to determine how much artistic control he exerted on a given project. Above theoretical definition and historical survey I favor capturing the astonishing variety this simultaneously predictable genre offers its practitioners. To do that and make sense, you always have to know where the artists came from and under what conditions they worked.

To some people, it may seem that I'm ruining slapstick by analyzing it to this extent, or in this way. And people have a hard time talking about comedy in general because they think that once you start analyzing it, you've missed the point. I respect this hesitation because slapstick is meant to be openly enjoyed in mass company. You certainly don't need to think about it to enjoy it, and so I've tried to provide an example of how to describe the personal, nondiscursive expressiveness of slapstick as slapstick in a way that's compatible with laughing your ass off.

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