What Chaplin has noticed, and used his camera to reveal, is that the two unrelated actions – crying and mixing a drink – appear identical when seen from the rear. A reverse shot shows that we are mistaken: What the alcoholic is doing is making a martini, hence his posture and bodily motion. At one point, when the alcoholic’s wife has announced that she is leaving him, the camera shows him in a medium shot from behind in which he appears to be crying: his shoulders are hunched, his head is tilted downwards, and his body seems to be shaking with sobs. Chaplin plays two roles in this film: his usual role as the Tramp but also the more unusual role for him of a rich alcoholic. One memorable example occurs in Chaplin’s The Idle Class. Over the years, the great film comedians – Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, to name the three masters of the genre – refined these gags. In part, no doubt, this was because those theorists were concerned to elevate film to the level of an art form from its humble beginnings as a form of popular culture.Įarly silent films were distinguished by their ability to elicit laughter through gags such as the one I just mentioned. But in the debates between early film theorists about film’s distinctive nature – Realism or Fantasy? – film’s potential for comedy was neglected. Among the earliest films screened by the Lumière Brothers was a film, L’Arroseur arros (1895), in which a gardener is the victim of a young boy’s prank and winds up getting sprayed in the face as he peers into a hose the boy has been holding shut. Let me explain.Ĭomedy is as old as film itself. Rather, I think it betrays a fact about the evolution of film comedy that has structured the preferences of the Institute members who voted. Of the earlier pioneers of film comedy, including the great female comic Mabel Normand, the list bears no trace.Ĭlearly, the AFI list of top film comedies is biased in favor of the present But I don’t think it is simply a case of historical amnesia. In all, by my count, only 7 of the 100 films are silent and, of those, 2 are actually sound films Chaplin made without speaking ( Modern Times and City Lights ). Harold Lloyd’s sole appearance is at #79 with The Freshman. Charlie Chaplin’s first entry on the list is The Gold Rush (#25), certainly a classic but in many ways less funny, more maudlin than many of his earlier shorter features. The first silent film on the list is Buster Keaton’s The General (#18), certainly one of the great American film comedies. (The list is available at Topping the list are two films involving cross-dressing: Some Like It Hot and Tootsie. I was reminded of this critical judgment as I perused the American Film Institutes list of the 100 greatest American film comedies, for there were very few silent films on it. In a brilliant essay entitled, ‘Comedy’s Greatest Era’, James Agee bemoaned sound comedy’s inability to deliver the raucous laughter he found so appealing in silent comedy. SUBSCRIBE NOW Films Film Comedy What became of the raucous laughter and inspired slapstick anarchism of the early silent comedies? Our regular film commentator Thomas Wartenberg traces the trajectory of film comedy from laughter to romance.
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