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Simulated Scotch
A novel comedy routine showed up on theater screens in 1955. Oddly, the routine was featured in two unrelated films, which happened to be released only two weeks apart. In You're Never Too Young...
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The Tramp and the Black Boxer
Film critic Matthew Dessem recently wrote that Buster Keaton's The Playhouse (1921) is "not particularly beloved today" because it features Keaton performing in blackface for a minstrel act. Click...
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The Ultimate Cutaway Set Guide
I have discussed the cutaway set in three separate articles, which can be found here, here and here. I have gotten new information on this topic from an article by A. D. Jameson called "Jerry Lewis’s...
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The Horror of High-Definition Television
A highlight of a 2009 30 Rock episode, "Dealbreakers Talk Show # 0001," was a spoof of high-definition television. A high-definition camera, which can capture a person's slightest physical flaws,...
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Life After Moving
I moved last month. There has never been a funny film about moving because moving is a miserable experience. Chaplin could have gotten a great deal of pathos out of the subject. A picture with...
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1979: A Funny Year
Film comedy has had exceptionally productive years: 1925 (The Freshman, The Gold Rush and Seven Chances), 1927 (The Kid Brother and The General) and 1933 (Duck Soup and Sons of the Desert). But the...
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Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang: The Misguided Love Affair of a Double-Crossin' Bobcat...
Melodrama is funny. This is something that is well understood by the satirist. Melodrama is drama that winds so far around the bend that it meets up with comedy on the opposite side. An example of...
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"Rock me, ya big bum!"
I am happy to report that The Mishaps of Musty Suffer DVD collection is now available on Amazon. The title of today's article comes from a funny intertitle that appears in the collection. I cannot...
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A Salute to John Cumpson
John Cumpson was one of the first American film comedy stars. He was featured in the "Mr. Jones" series for Biograph from 1908 to 1909 and the "Bumptious" series for Edison from 1910 to 1911. The...
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Salt and Pepper (1968): The Cartable Corpse
Little did Sammy Davis, Jr. and Peter Lawford know that, one day, the producers of Weekend at Bernie's (1989) would get an entire film out of this one simple routine. Salt and Pepper (1968)
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Doubles
I wrote in Eighteen Comedians of Silent Film about a 1915 Pathé Frères comedy, Max's Double (released originally in France as Le Sosie). The film involves Max Linder struggling to outdo a lookalike...
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Baby Doll Abuse Part 3
I have come to the conclusion that a comedian tossing around a faux baby is a British thing. I wrote about this subject twice before. Click here and here for those articles. An unidentified British...
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Stuck Again!
Alan Bunce and Peg Lynch, Ethel and Albert (1953) Yes, I have found more "stuck" routines! (See my earlier article at this link.) Ethel and Albert was a television series about an amiable married...
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Early Max
My favorite resource for information on silent films is The Moving Picture World. The other day, I was skimming through early issues of the magazine when I came across reviews and summaries for the...
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Can Such Things Be?: Marcel Perez's Wild and Surreal Antics Draw Criticism
Marcel PerezCarl H. Claudy, a writer with The Moving Picture World, expressed open disgust of foreign comedies in a 1911 article, "Foibles of the Photoplay." Claudy said that the films of André Deed...
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Lloyd's Hamilton's Mom
Lloyd Hamilton had a close relationship with his mother, Mary. This is something that came out clearly during the research that I conducted for Hamilton's biography. Take, for instance, the following...
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Lloyd Hamilton Scrapbook
I was pleased to have recently acquired additional plot details for Lloyd Hamilton's No Luck (1923) from newly digitized issues of The Film Daily and Exhibitors Herald. A critic wrote in The Film...
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The Surreal and the Satirical: Early European Comedy Cinema
Today, let us examine a number of early European film comedies. A fine tutorial on this subject is provided by Richard Abel's The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896-1914, which has served as the...
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The 100th Anniversary of Ham and Bud
This month marks the 100th anniversary of Ham and Bud (Lloyd Hamilton and Bud Duncan), who began their partnership playing inept janitors in Lizzie the Life Saver (1914). Ham and Bud had a...
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The Case of the Laughing Flappers
Too often we find that lying behind a comedian's benignly silly grin is a deeply troubled and unhappy individual. News accounts indicate that goofy, rubber-legged comedian Billy Dooley had problems...
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