All you have to do to get people my age to splutter with laughter is to name one of the great slapstick acts of the old days, and to give them a tricky job to do. So then: “Moe, Larry, and Shemp are going to cater a party,” and of course it’s going to be an utter disaster, and with an edge to it, because the people at the party have to be rich snobs. Or: “Joe E. Lewis is driving a bulldozer over a long wooden bridge,” and you know it’s going to be falling away behind him without his noticing it. Or: “Harold Lloyd is trying out as a freshman for the college football team.” What could possibly go wrong?
What’s funny about slapstick? Red Skelton had a great routine, coming home as Willie Lump-Lump, a husband who drinks too much, and this time his long-suffering wife has had a carpenter fasten all the furniture in his living room at 90 degrees from where it ought to be, so that she seems to him to be walking on the wall — and imagine how hard it is to seat yourself at a desk that actually is on the wall! Jackie Gleason’s “Poor Soul” tries to get a drink from a water fountain in a park, and one thing or another makes it impossible. Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance get jobs at a candy factory, wrapping candies that come their way on a conveyor belt — and the belt runs faster and faster till the ladies can’t keep up with it and end up stuffing most of the candies in their mouths. Then there’s Harold Lloyd, trying to extract an aching tooth from the mouth of a giant — the actor John Aasen, whose height is recorded as 7 feet 2 inches (at the least), to 8 feet 11 inches (at the most). How’s he going to do that? It’s an Androcles and the Lion moment, in one of the most brilliant comedies ever, Why Worry?
It seems to me that slapstick strikes us as funny not because we’re cruel (though we can be), and not only because it often is accompanied by some zany surprise (like little Charlie Chaplin getting caught in the clockwork gears of an immense machine, in Modern Times). In slapstick, the human body being is reduced, incongruously, to a body, lumpy or skinny or flimsy or awkward, as the case may be. It’s the incongruity that is ridiculous — and it’s no accident that a lot of the great slapstick artists had odd bodies, even though plenty of them were really athletic: the little guy Buster Keaton, who was all muscle; bespectacled Harold Lloyd, who played a nebbish, but who was a wiry iron-sinewed daredevil; Jackie Gleason, an elephant of a man with small hands and small feet; Fatty Arbuckle; Chaplin, walking pigeon-toed all the time, and looking for all the world like a strong wind would blow him away; and then we have the duo for our Film of the Week, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.
I’ll bet that some of our readers know a lot more about Laurel and Hardy than I know. Like a lot of the comedians in those days, they had starred on the vaudeville boards before they ever got to the silver screen — at least, Stan Laurel had. Laurel was the brains of the outfit, quite different from the dopey slow-speaking character in their films; while Hardy, whose character was fussy and bossy, was in real life an easy-going man. It’s said that Stan Laurel actually did the directing for their films, because whatever he said, that’s what was done, while Oliver Hardy laid back and let him do that. After all, he said he took the brunt of most of the mishaps in their films, so he figured that he earned his pay. Those were the days, anyhow, when somebody like Red Skelton could drop out of school at age 13 and begin a career that brought him into millions of homes, for almost 40 years.
In Dirty Work, the boys are chimney sweepers. Need I say more? Again, what could possibly go wrong? It isn’t as if they have to carry a piano up five flights of stairs, as in The Music Box. All they have to do is to clean a chimney. Of course, it has to be in a fancy house, with antiques, and even a dour-faced butler. And the roof has to be pitched at 40 degrees, right? And the shingles up there have to be slate, for slipping and sliding. And Stan has to be downstairs, with Ollie on the roof — a chubby guy who is built, ahem, to roll.
Silly enough? Add this: the owner of the house is a mad scientist who has concocted a potion to reverse the clock for living creatures — a mere drop, mixed in a whole bathtub of water, turns a full-grown duck into a duckling, and then the duckling into — well, you will have to see it! But let’s here open a discussion about those short comedies, and your own favorites. Dick Van Dyke, by the way, who impersonated Stan Laurel in one of the best episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, thought of Laurel as his main inspiration, and the two comics became very good friends. Stan Laurel died in 1965, so he surely saw that episode, which aired in 1963, a Laurel and Hardy skit, with Henry Calvin as Ollie; the boys are at a restaurant, with one dollar between them, and they’re going to order dinner. Again — what could possibly go wrong?
Word & Song is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymn, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. To support this project, please join us as a subscriber.
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