Clyde Bruckman: The Gag Man

[post 383]

Today is the 120th birthday of Clyde Bruckman.

Clyde who?

You've probably never heard of him because, even in his heyday, he was never actually famous. He was for many years a gag writer for Buster Keaton who also directed for Harold Lloyd, Laurel & Hardy, and W.C. Fields, and wrote for Abbot & Costello and the Three Stooges. In the silent film era and beyond, when the gags often came first in the creative process and the story second, "gag writer" was a recognizable job description.

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One joke of the time was that Keaton's employment application consisted of two questions: “Are you a good actor?” and “Are you a good baseball player?” and a passing grade was 50 percent. Brand ran into Bruckman, realized he was a natural fit for Keaton’s studio, arranged a lunch, and Bruckman started the next Monday, in a dual role as “outfielder and writer.”  — Matthew Dessem

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Being a gag writer also got him into trouble, because when a decade later he recycled Harold Lloyd gags for Three Stooges movies — certainly a common practice at the time — Lloyd sued Columbia Pictures for $1.7 million and "won." Well, won, but only won $40,000, perhaps enough to pay his lawyers. As somewhat of a physical comedy historian, I'd have to take Bruckman's side on this one. So many of the gags of that era were lifted from earlier movies, films that it was assumed would never be seen again. And in any case, you can find references to many of these same gags being performed on the variety stage long before the advent of film. Nothing new under the sun. T'ain't what ya do, it's the way hows ya do it.

I mention Bruckman today not only because it's his birthday but as an excuse to encourage you to check out an excellent article on him which sheds some light on how gag writers worked in the 20s and 30s. And all you have to do is click here to read The Gag Man by Matthew Dessem.

Your Physical Comedy Easter Basket

[post 377]

If you excitedly ripped open your physical comedy Christmas stocking, if you quickly devoured your physical comedy Valentine's Day chocolates, if you got all giddy over this spring's Premio de Primavera, then you'll be hopping like crazy over the dozen goodies the Easter Bunny just brought you. One hundred percent recycled from my private collection and from links that came by way of such usual suspects as Drew Richardson, Lee Faulkner, Greg DeSanto, and no doubt other folks who I am forgetting. As usual, click on any image to enlarge.

Gahan Wilson

Gahan Wilson

On the Shoulders of Giants: The Oblivious Gag (or, Channeling Harold Lloyd)

[post 260]


Installment #2

Picasso once said, "good artists borrow, great artists steal."

No he didn't. Or if he did, he probably stole it from T.S. Elliot, who supposedly said the same thing about poets.


Supposedly, because what he really wrote was: "One of the surest tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion."

Ditto physical comedians. Depending on how you look at it, they either avail themselves of a time-honored tradition of gags and techniques — or they "steal" like crazy. As Joe Killian and I used to joke about a bit we liked: "Consider it stolen!"

But as the two Toms (Stearns and Leabhart) said, it tain't what ya do, it's da way dat ya do it. Wit dat in mind, we get to have a little fun standing on the shoulders of that physical comedy giant, Harold Lloyd.... and in this case those shoulders are high off the ground.

While many of the gags seen in silent film comedy can be traced to the variety stage, taking a movie camera outdoors and letting it follow the action opened up new possibilities, the car chase being an obvious example. But the camera could also track vertically, taking advantage of that era's skyscraper boom to create thrills formerly reserved to displays of high-wire walking in the town square.

[ASIDE #1: Native Americans, specifically Mohawks, were used in large numbers in the building of the early skyscrapers. They gained a reputation for "walking iron" and were credited with superior balance and no fear of heights. Likewise, my friend Pat Judd, who like me has a bit of Cherokee blood, comments "let's hear it for my Cherokee / Choctaw ancestors who stood on top of the Mackinac Bridge arches when no one else wanted to go up there to finish that expansion project!" In more modern times, Mohawks were heavily involved in the construction of the World Trade Center. Go here and here and here for more on this cultural phenomenon and listen to this NPR All Things Considered report.]

[ASIDE #2:  Georges Mélies did a 74-second rooftop action film more than two decades earlier in 1897, Sur les Toits (On the Roof), but it's shot on a stage set and is pretty lame. Likewise Alice Guy's rooftop chase, Les Cambrioleurs (The Burglars) from 1898.]

Camera angles and other tricks ensured that enough of these stunts were less dangerous than they seemed. Note, for example, the absence of high-angle shots that would reveal any safety precautions. All this made possible a whole new genre of thrill comedy, with Harold Lloyd climbing to and dangling from that clock in Safety Last being the most iconic example. But this piece is not about Safety Last, but rather another Lloyd skyscraper sequence — and above all his refinement of what I am hereby dubbing the "oblivious gag."

Left: Lloyd in Safety Last;
Right: Safety mattress for Lloyd's Feet First 

First, however, a few popular photographs showing the public's fascination with this dangerous new world being created in the skies above them.

The Waldorf (1930)

You've probably seen this well-known Lunch Atop A Skyscraper by Charles Ebbets, taken in 1932:

But this Smithsonian exhibit on the Mohawk says the year is 1928 and that the photo was taken by Lewis Hine. Hmm... anyway, the caption does identify several Mohawk ironworkers.

And a current photo from the One World Trade Center construction:

Back in the day, they didn't just pose for pictures up there, they did entire acrobatic acts. Here's a video of the same guys from the photo above:



Even more spectacular is this clip of the vaudeville acrobat Joseph Späh, who performed his daredevil drunk act under the name of "Ben Dova" (get it?). This is from 1933, a bit after Lloyd's heyday, but I suspect Späh was not the first to be doing stunts like this.

Lloyd didn't invent aerial movie thrills, but he had the foresight to see the comic potential and the talent to take advantage of it. As one Lloyd title card reads, "In a Certain City, each crowded skyscraper holds a budding romance." An early example of this is in High and Dizzy, his 1920 short. [Note that this is a decade before the above photos.] Harold, a new doctor in love with a new sleepwalking patient, somehow manages to find himself on the same hotel ledge as her. At this point in the story, she has already taken one oblivious stroll on the ledge.

Notice that the sleepwalking mindset even carries over to Harold, who is so concerned with the girl that he is out the window and walking along the ledge before he realizes where he is and can even register fear. He continues this theme a year later in Never Weaken, his last short film and favorite 3-reeler. In this one, Harold has of course gotten his facts wrong, mistakenly assuming he's lost the love of his life to a tall, handsome stranger. Suicide is the only option. Blindfolded, he soon finds himself skywalking without realizing it, and again gets his facts wrong, thinking he's in heaven.

Lloyd sure knew how to get the most out of a gag. I love that the oblivious theme is reprised at the end of the sequence, with him on the ground, frightened out of his mind.

If this skywalking sequence looks familiar to you, that's because it's been replicated many times, with and without the "oblivious" aspect. An early case in point is from Liberty (1929), a late silent film by Laurel & Hardy. This is not bad, but they don't do anything new with it, so please don't feel obligated to watch all 11 minutes. I just include it to make my point!

Not surprisingly, this comic business shows up in numerous cartoons — much easier to draw than to stage! — but of course the thrill is not quite the same. First up is A Dream Walking, a Popeye cartoon from 1934.



And then there's this sequence from Bugs Bunny's Homeless Hare (1950).

A character who was totally unmindful became the trademark of Mr. Magoo (voiced by Jim Backus), star of animated movies and a long-running tv show. Near-sighted in the extreme, Magoo stumbles through a hostile environment unaware of the perils he is skirting. The opening titles to his Saturday morning tv series capture this m.o. pretty well, and include the kind of high-elevation gags popularized by Lloyd:



Babies are also liable to be unaware of grave dangers, thus Tot Watchers, a Tom & Jerry cartoon in which our heroes save a baby from — you guessed it — yet another construction site.



And we come full circle, from cartoon back to live action, with the otherwise forgettable Baby's Day Out (1994), in which the incompetent bad guys learn that kidnapping is not as easy as it's cracked up to be. Again with the construction site!

The Oblivious Gag
So we actually have two things going on here. One is simply the thrill comedy of the skyscraper, interesting enough in its own right. But more significant because it's more useful to your average feet-on-the-ground comedy creator is this particular genre of gag that could take place anywhere and only depends on our comic hero being spectacularly unaware and even more spectacularly lucky. And for my money, it's usually funnier if the unawareness is more of a (comic) character flaw than being simply caused by sleepwalking or blindness.

While your classic gag structure relies on some initial unawareness on the character's part, he or she usually pays the price and we get to see their reaction to the outcome. We see the banana peel, they don't. They slip, they fall, they react, we laugh. Conventional wisdom has it that this is funnier if the character is wearing a top hat, or at least acting haughty, because the greater the assumed dignity, the more satisfying the fall.

With the oblivious gag, there is no price to pay and the joke is that such characters have no idea how close they have come to harm. With no payoff required, structurally it's more likely to be a running gag rather than a three-parter.

Sometimes they eventually learn — cue the double-take — but sometimes they are never the wiser. Peter Handke wrote a play called The Ride Across Lake Constance and, if memory serves, the title references a folk expression meaning "you just escaped great danger without even knowing it." A man walks across frozen Lake Constance. When he successfully reaches the other side he is informed that the ice is too thin to support human weight. He immediately dies of a heart attack. Thus the saying, "you took a ride across Lake Constance."

Another expression tells us it's better to be lucky than good, and that's certainly true of our old friend Harold Lloyd in the aptly titled Why Worry? (1923). A hypochondriac millionaire, he is seeking peace and quiet in what he thinks is a quaint island paradise, only to find himself in the middle of a revolution — not that he notices:

Buster Keaton's The General (1926) features an army reject who becomes a war hero through a combination of courage, resourcefulness, and plain luck. The intertwining of several oblivious gags over the course of the movie makes the sum greater than the parts and shows why Keaton's storytelling so often rose to the level of art. Here's a short example in which Keaton, infiltrating behind enemy lines, is so busy with firewood that he fails to notice two entire armies passing by. If you're going to be oblivious, might as well go big with it!

And here his inability to get control over his pesky sword pays off big time:



In some of these scenarios, we do eventually get to see the character's reaction to a rather perplexing reality. In another short sequence from The General, Keaton is trying to derail a box car that is impeding his progress. His first reaction comes when he discovers that it has somehow gotten back on the track; his second, when it magically disappears. Both are to be savored!

In more recent times, the Peter Sellers character of Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther movies solves every crime thanks to incredible luck and despite being oblivious to pretty much everything going on around him. In this selection from A Shot in the Dark (1964), our inspector's charmed life is not even mildly ruffled by multiple assassination attempts. [Spoiler Alert: the would-be assassin turns out to be his boss, Chief Inspector Dreyfus, seen berating him at the end.]

And of course we love Clouseau and root for him no matter what!



Thanks to Ben Model, Drew Richardson, Riley Kellogg, and Jeff Seal for their suggestions for this article.

Book Report: "Silent Comedy" by Paul Merton

[post 224]

There are a ton of books about silent film comedy, many of them excellent, but they're not written by performers. Paul Merton, author of Silent Comedy, is on the other hand a popular British comedian — mostly improv and stand-up, rarely silent  —with a love for the heyday of slapstick. He has even done several lecture tours on the subject, bringing screenings with live music to theatre festivals and other venues throughout the U.K. In the past two years he has produced two documentaries on early film (not just comedy) for television: Paul Merton's Weird and Wonderful World of Early Cinema (BBC Bristol, 2010) and The Birth of Hollywood (BBC2, 2011). He has also done an interactive presentation on early British film comedy for the British Film Institute, which you can view online here.

Merton is, first of all, a good writer! The problem I have with most historical works is that they're too thorough. I know the impulse: you've done all that research, naturally you don't want it to go to waste — "I suffered for my art; now it's your turn!" — but the result is more info than the reader needs. You can't see the forest for the trees. Merton's chronicle is full of fascinating tidbits and anecdotes, but he marshalls those facts to make a point. They all contribute juice to the narrative flow and actually tell us something significant about the performer. The result is a rich and entertaining read, 329 mass-paperback pages, though obviously you'll get a lot more out of it if you can view some of the films he's talking about, easy enough with YouTube and a basic DVD collection. Think of it as a companion volume to the actual movies.

Merton chooses to limit his study to Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and Laurel & Hardy. He is dismissive of Harry Langdon; other comedians such as Fatty Arbuckle and Charley Chase play only minor roles, and there's no mention at all of Lupino Lane or Charley Bowers. Instead of separate sections on each comedian, the approach is chronological, which might sound boring and unimaginative, but isn't because he switches back and forth between these powerhouses every year or two to show how they continually tried to outdo one another. This works very well, bringing fresh insights into their working methods; for example, how Lloyd's success with the thrill comedy Safety Last spurred Keaton and Chaplin to create similar moments in Three Ages and The Gold Rush, respectively.

As a performer, Merton is always thinking from a performer's point of view, getting inside their heads better than most silent film historians. To his credit, he notices what stunts are real, and very much appreciates the virtuoso skill and hours and hours of practice required. However, not being a physical performer, he's not as sharply attuned to physical comedy vocabulary. It does not occur to him, for example, that the topmounter in the running 4-high in the elopement scene from Keaton's Neighbors is — in most of the shots — very likely a rag-doll dummy, and not Virginia Fox.

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"Slapstick comedy has a format, but it is hard to detect in its early stages unless you are one of those who can create it. The unexpected was our staple product, the unusual our object, and the unique was the ideal we were always hoping to achieve." — Buster Keaton

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As much as he admires the creativity of this golden age of cinema, Merton is not afraid to address its uglier aspects, specifically negative racial and gender stereotypes widely prevalent in those days. But he is also quick to point out progress made during the 20s in both areas, for example in Keaton 's The Paleface (1922) and The Cameraman (1928).

Keaton and Chaplin in Limelight (1952)

With his successful silent film tours offering solid evidence, Merton is bully on the appeal of silent film comedy when presented in the right circumstances, a point I was emphasizing in my recent Revenge of the Silents post.  Here are just a couple of examples Merton offers:

In January 2007 at the Colston Hall, Bristol, I presented Steamboat Bill Junior to over 1,500 people on a big screen with superb musical accompaniment from Neil Brand and Gunther Buchwald. The house front falling towards Buster is a tiny moment in a cyclone sequence that runs for nearly fifteen minutes, but when the stunt happened the audience cheered and applauded spontaneously. A few days after this ecstatic response I heard the playwright Mark Ravenhill extolling the virtues of Steamboat Bill Junior on a BBC Radio 4 arts programme. I seem to remember that he had seen the film on a big screen at an open-air festival many years before. 

The other people in the studio, who sounded like professional critics, had each been given a DVD of the film to take home and watch. Their verdict was unanimous: it simply wasn't funny because in their view humour dates very quickly, and black and white silent comedy couldn't be more dated if it tried. How could they get it so wrong? Well, watching a silent film on a small television screen with inappropriate music as accompaniment can destroy the magic. It's easy to see nothing….

Laurel and Hardy's last silent film release before their first talkie has often been considered their best ever. I've watched Big Business more than thirty times with a live audience, and the responses have been remarkably uniform. They always laugh in the same places with the same regular rhythm. Stan and Leo [Mc Carey] previewed their films in exactly the same way as Harold, Buster and Charlie, and the films were recut according to the audiences' reactions. That's one of the reasons they still work so well today.

A page from Merton's book, above, and a few more short selections below....

He [Keaton] was always proud that he didn't use a stuntman. Larry Semon's films are chockfull of stuntmen all pretending to be him, but it was Buster's belief that stuntmen didn't fall in a comical way.
[NOTE: Keaton did have a stuntman pole-vault into the dorm window for him in College, which I believe was the only time he was doubled, at least in the silent era. —jt]


The tiresomely idiotic debate on Keaton versus Chaplin is, in my experience, overwhelmingly used by proponents of Buster to attempt to rubbish Charlie… It’s an appealing mind-set for some people, who say: "We’ve all heard that Charlie Chaplin was meant to be the greatest comedian in the world, but my preference for Buster Keaton demonstrates my ability to think for myself. Chaplin was overly sentimental, but Keaton’s coolness and cynical eye chime exactly with our Modern Times...." Well, the good news is that they are both fantastic. There’s no need to choose between them. Enjoy them both! That’s one of the main aims in my book. I shall examine the films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, not in isolation, as has been the usual practice, but showing how they influenced each other in a creative rivalry that also featured Harold Lloyd. This rivalry and desire to make better and better comedies ensured a stream of high-quality pictures. Great works of art were created.

As much as he [Keaton] liked Roscoe [Arbuckle], he was trying to get away from unmotivated slapstick. In all the years they worked together, the only disagreement Buster had with Roscoe was over Roscoe's assertion that the average mental age of an audience was twelve and that you should pitch your comedy at that level.

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As for Paul Merton the comic, he is hardly silent, known instead for his surreal rants, often delivered dead pan, though he denies mimicking the Great Stone Face, Buster Keaton: "It comes from one of the first things I did as a stand-up in the early 80s called A Policeman on Acid, which was basically this policeman recounting in court the time someone gave him some acid and describing his trip. And I realized then it was much funnier if the policeman himself didn't find anything he was saying funny, so the deadpan approach came from there, and I suppose that kind of set a style. I wasn't deliberately copying Keaton at that point."

Here's the clip:



Merton is returning to touring his own comedy in 2012 in a "night of sketches, music, magic, variety, and dancing girls (two of them aren’t girls)." Click here for more information.

32+ Hours of Laurel & Hardy on DVD

[post 209]

It hasn't been hard to find something approaching the complete works of Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd, and Langdon on DVD in recent years, but when I wanted to purchase the Laurel & Hardy opus, I had to order a 21-disc box set available only in the UK and deal with all the region and formatting conflicts. All that has now changed with the release of a 10-disc box set suitable for the region 1, NTSC market, Laurel & Hardy: The Essential Collection. True, this has only 32+ hours of footage, as opposed to 68+ on the British set, but then who's counting?

I haven't reviewed the British box set because, not surprisingly, I haven't found the time to plow through it, and I haven't seen this one yet either, but there's a big article on it in today's New York Times, which you can read here. Here's a brief excerpt from the review:

Maturity remains a fluid and frequently elusive concept in Laurel and Hardy, which is certainly one of the reasons they appeal so much to children and remain a favorite of adults, who know how thin such facades can be. But what remains constant at every phase is the unbreakable bond of affection between the two friends, who seem at first so radically mismatched, both physically and temperamentally, but are ultimately inconceivable without each other. Among many other things “Laurel and Hardy: The Essential Collection” contains one of the most beautiful love stories the movies have ever told.

The list price is $100, but Amazon is selling it for $65.