What were "comedy" and "laughter" like 100+ years ago?

Cafe Society
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I recently watched an excellent documentary, “The Real Charlie Chaplin”. There was a lot about Chaplin that I hadn’t known. He certainly had his flaws. But he was universally acclaimed as a towering genius of a movie comedian.

I’m no expert on his films. But the few I’ve seen draw me in. They’re fascinating as a window into what moviemaking and life were like over a hundred years ago. And there’s no denying his influence on the future of movies, and the range of his talents: he wrote, directed, starred in, produced, distributed, and (sometimes) wrote the music for his pictures.

But here’s the thing: I’ve never seen anything in Chaplin’s movies that made me actually laugh.

In contrast, the earliest Three Stooges films are only a few decades more recent, but they still break me up. So do the Marx Brothers, and Laurel and Hardy, to a lesser extent.

I think that taste in humor is very personal, and doesn’t travel well across time and cultures, at least compared to other forms of expression.

To me, Chaplin’s ‘Little Tramp’ seems like more of a sad, dramatic character than comedic. Albeit, a compelling one.

Was comedy more aligned with pathos back then?

If there are passages from Chaplin’s films that make you laugh, could you please list them here? TIA.

Mods, I wasn’t sure whether to post this here, or in IMHO. Feel free to move as you see fit.

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Some comedy is contextual. But some is universal. I once saw a showing of the 1926 Buster Keaton silent film The General. Slapstick, but brilliantly done slapstick, and still hilarious (if you ignore that the hero is a Confederate soldier).

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I assume that means you were watching with an audience? In my experience it’s a lot easier to see something as funny if you’re with a bunch of other people who are laughing at it.

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I don’t think you can assume that Chaplin is totally representative of all humor back in the day. Some of Mark Twain has me laughing out loud. His critique of James Fenimore Cooper, for instance.

https://www.online-literature.com/twain/1317/

I also LOL at some of the Marx Brothers.

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Chaplin played a number of characters, some of them funny, some dramatic. But don’t forget, his medium was silent movies, which depended on physical comedy, mainly slapstick (and without the funny sound effects the Three Stooges used.) If you don’t care for that kind of comedy, you won’t find Chaplin funny.

In addition to Buster Keaton, take a look at the work of Harold Lloyd. There’s some great physicality and stunt work there, reflected later in everything from the Indiana Jones movies to It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Do you find it funny? (Since YouTube won’t let me link, I’ll have to break up the address.

https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=zqzWurPE01Y

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I mean, plenty of folks think the jokes in Shakespeare plays are still funny. I sure do. Sure the wording is different, but the core of the jokes are the same.

Modernized, that might be something like:

And here’s a pen from ancient Rome that’s a gag gift - the inscription basically says “I went to Rome and all I got you was this cheap pen.”

All of which is to say that while some humor is situational or culturally particular, some things are as close to universal as matters.

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I’ve showed some classic comedy to my daughters, currently 9 and 12.

Chaplin generally makes them grin in delight, but rarely laugh. There are occasional exceptions, like the business in Gold Rush where the cabin is teetering on the precipice; that had them howling.

The Marx Brothers make them laugh more often, sometimes uproariously (the stateroom in Opera). But more often they stare with open mouthed smiles, not quite laughing but enjoying themselves, but also in a state of perpetual surprise that they’re getting to watch these lunatics bounce off a confused world. Their attitude while watching is almost like they’re conspiring with something naughty.

Keaton, now, Keaton puts them on the floor. They love him. They have specifically requested to rewatch his movies, Sherlock Jr especially, and to watch more of his work, and they bounce and guffaw the whole way through.

Laurel and Hardy are okay, but not favorites. The Music Box bit getting the piano up and down the stairs killed, though.

Three Stooges did not play at all. They went from puzzled to annoyed to stone-faced inside five minutes. Haven’t repeated it.

The only Abbott and Costello I’ve shared is the baseball sketch, and that worked pretty well. They listened carefully, grinning, then asked a bunch of questions, then asked to watch it again immediately. And they keep bringing it up randomly in the months since, so it made an impression.

So I dunno. There’s all kinds of comedy; it all plays differently, and the good stuff still plays.

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If you want to laugh at Chaplin, I suggest The Great Dictator. If you laugh at the Downfall parodies on Youtube, you’ll love it. Jack Oakie does a fabulous Mussolini.

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Yep. It was a showing at the Fox Theater, with an organist playing accompaniment on the theater’s antique Wurlitzer organ. And yes, the atmosphere helped. But Buster Keaton was an undeniably brilliant physical comedian.

Funny that you chose that scene - I read that in tenth-grade English class, and when I realized what was going on - and I interpreted it exactly the way you modernized it - that’s when I first began to understand Shakespeare.

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Speaking of literary humorists–I still find The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce published in 1910 to be hilarious.

Some examples:

Air (n.) A nutricious substance supplied by a bountiful providence for the fattening of the poor.

Cannon(n.) An instrument employed in the rectification of national boundaries.

Conservative(n.) A statesman who is enamoured of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

Cynic(n.) A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic’s eyes to improve his vision.

Egotist (n.) A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.

Faith (n.) Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

Lawyer (n.) One skilled in circumvention of the law.

Love (n.) A temporary insanity curable by marriage…

Marriage (n.) A household consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.

Positive (a.) Mistaken at the top of one’s voice.

Religion (n.) A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

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There’s Chaplin, Chaplin, and Chaplin.

He started out of vaudeville, as did all the old-time comedians. (Even Mae West.) That meant broad humor that played to the back of the theater. The slapstick humor of the Keystone Kops was vaudeville in the wide-open spaces. Every bit of Chaplin’s act was shaped by Vaudeville. But he was among the first to realize that the camera was intimate, that some nuance could be put into physical movement. An audience trained to watch in theaters marveled at those subtleties. We probably don’t see them or realize what they are.

Then Chaplin topped himself by adding a sympathetic character to the slapstick. The Little Tramp was the little guy beset by the world, reveling in tiny victories. Are there any of today’s movie comics who are little guys? They’re all loud, brash, and stomp through the world. They may be idiots but they’re not the dregs living on the streets. Can we even imagine a tramp as the hero of a $100 million Hollywood movie?

The full-length silent Chaplin is hard to watch. We’re trained by words. The two-reelers had to move quickly. He thought to slow them down. We’re watching classical instead of rock. Lovers of classical music think that all they have to do is play the music for a youngster and they will instantly get the magic. Doesn’t often happen. Years of listening develops understanding and appreciation.

We live in a world of verbal entertainment, except for action sequences. We respond to the words but we also pick up cues from tone and tempo and then from the responses, whether looks or eye rolls or takes or pauses. Our ears and eyes supplement one another.

My deep, dark shame is that I never much liked Chaplin. I started with the Marx Brothers, the kings of verbal humor. What about Harpo? Everybody says he was a genius clown. He was. But notice that almost all his scenes are with Chico, who talks the audience through his pantomime. We’re given the cues. And Groucho is a brash, loud, stomper, hardly a little guy. He peaked in Duck Soup, when he was president of a country. That flopped completely in 1933 and is hailed as a comic masterpiece today. I’m not surprised. Modern Times was a huge masterpiece in 1936 and mostly forgotten today. I’m also not surprised.

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My great grandfather may have had some mainstream humor in 1940. He turned their house into a haunted house where all the pranks were set off from their cellar. The lights would turn off, window shades would start going up and down, flashlights would shine outside the window, the piano would start playing on its own and firecrackers were set off with a toaster in the basement. That kind of humor wouldn’t work now because visitors would have to know ahead of time and the humor would be lost. But my grandmother with dementia would be just enthralled in telling the story six times in a row seventy years later so the comedy was totally worth it.

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Who and what were the topics of their questions?

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I first heard joke #6 on the Benny Hill show. If that list is accurate, nothing new is under the sun.

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This is one sketch every aspiring comedy duo seems to know, and it never gets old. I accompanied my daughter to her high school orientation, and the program closed with two Theatre students doing “Who’s on First?” I honestly didn’t think an auditorium of hip millennials would appreciate it, but they all laughed heartily.

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National Lampoon parodied this in a fake letter to the editor from some drunk celeb (Larry Hagman?):

  1. When I wake up, I’m so hung over I can’t stand up
  2. By noon, I can get up on my feet
  3. But by evening, I’m so drunk, I can’t count
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I have a deep admiration for Chaplin and Keaton, but when it comes to the Big 3 Silent Film Comedians, no one tickles my funny bone more than Harold Lloyd. His portrayal of the “glasses character” is absolutely brilliant, and the humor in his films remains timeless. If you’re looking for a good laugh, I highly recommend heading over to YouTube and immersing yourself in his extensive collection of around 200 films. A great starting point would be “The Freshman” (1925).

The Big 3 comedians truly mastered their craft, pouring their hearts and souls into their work. If you’re curious to delve deeper into their world, I suggest reading the book “Harold Lloyd: Magic in a Pair of Horn-Rimmed Glasses.”

It’s amusing how a comedy from just a decade ago can feel hopelessly outdated upon rewatching, whereas films from the Big 3 Comedians, despite being a century old, still manage to resonate as if they were released yesterday.

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Much of older humor seems to revolve around electrocuting people. See that and more in this catalogue.

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I never found Chaplin funny. He seems to me to be unwilling to ever be the guy who slips on a banana peel; he’d rather throw it under the feet of somebody who his audiences recognize as unsympathetic. When he roller skates near the edge of a chasm, do you ever for an instant believe he’s going to fall? When he chews on boiled shoelaces because he’s starving, do you ever for an instant believe he’s really eating shoelaces? To my eyes, he’s just demonstrating his pantomime skills to impress his audience. Probably in his day, the skinny little guy making fun of the big fat aristocrat “got to” audiences in a way that I don’t think it does anymore. Keaton and Harold Lloyd can still get laughs by being the guys who slip on banana peels – as is Lou Costello, verbally, in the Who’s On First routine.