Keeping Quiet: Visual Comedy in the Age of Sound

407 Pages·2015·8.406 MB·English

by  Julian Dutton

Contents
Publisher Information ii
Dedication iii
Foreword iv
Introduction vi
Origins: From Ritual to Film 1
Keeping Still: the Coming of Sound 20
Slowing Down: Laurel and Hardy 27
Swansong of a Pantomimist: Chaplin 47
Out and Down: Buster Keaton 59
Long Live Vaudeville – Harpo Marx 74
Diehards: Visual Comedy on Stage & Screen 1930-45 87
At Odds with the World - Jacques Tati 98
The Kid: Norman Wisdom 137
The Nebbish: Jerry Lewis 159
Diehards II: Visual Comedy on Stage & Screen 1945-1960 175
Television’s First Genius: Ernie Kovacs 190
Kid in a Sweet-Shop - Benny Hill 211
Diehards III: Visual Comedy on Stage & Screen 1960 to 1970 229
Rhubarb Rhubarb - Eric Sykes and the Spoken Silents 256
Chameleon Boy: Peter Sellers 274
Another Outsider: Marty Feldman 287
Ronnie Barker: The Grumble & Grunt Comedies 301
Diehards IV: Visual Comedy 1970 to present 320
The Alien: Rowan Atkinson 360
The Human Cartoon: Matt Lucas and Pompidou! 374
Acknowledgements 384
Bibliography 385
Film Magazines & Journals Consulted 389
Also Available 390
Keeping Quiet
Visual Comedy in the Age of Sound
Julian Dutton
Publisher Information
First published in 2015 by
Chaplin Books
1 Eliza Place
Gosport PO12 4UN
www chaplinbooks co uk
Digital edition converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www andrewsuk com
Copyright © Julian Dutton
All rights reserved No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of
the copyright holder for which application should be addressed in
the first instance to the publishers No liability shall be attached
to the author, the copyright holder or the publishers for loss or
damage of any nature suffered as a result of the reliance on the
reproduction of any of the contents of this publication or any
errors or omissions in the contents
For Jack & Florence – my inspirations
Foreword
Ah! Julian, I completely misunderstood I had thought when
agreeing on the phone to write a Foreword to this brand new (and
admittedly impressively definitive) history of visual comedy that
I merely had to come up with four words In which case I was
deliberating between ‘Hello I am Matt’ and ‘Arsenal 5 Spurs 0’
Now you tell me more is expected I feel a bit of a fraud,
though Pompidou, the series that you, me and Ashley Blaker
have co-created and co-written is far from silent The eponymous
Pompidou jabbers away a good deal more than the characters
in most sitcoms However, the words that come from his big fat
mouth are in a gibberish language hitherto unspoken, which
is why you are crowbarring Pompidou into this book After all,
we’ve always thought of the show as a visual comedy, a ‘live-action
cartoon’ if you will, and it was certainly created with the intention
of being something that audiences from all nations could despise
equally
Nonetheless I do think it’s a bit rich that I’m expected not only
to read this bloody book but write a so-called Foreword about it
In asking me to give up my precious time to write this, did you
not stop to consider for one moment all the other things a man
of my importance actually has to do in a day? There are beds to
lie in until 3pm, crisps to eat, reality shows on Five to watch, and
abusive tweets to read
And though it pains me to say it, surely this Foreword would
have been better written by popular entertainer David Walliams?
After all, isn’t he now the best-selling author in the bloody world
or something? Or was he too busy swimming across another
puddle?
No I will not write a Foreword to this (pretty flipping
authoritative) brand new history of visual comedy since sound
arrived in the late 1920s Not a word, do you hear? Nothing! And
if you dare print this I will sue you In fact I won’t just stop there
I’ll sue your wife, your kids, your cousins, your friends Hell, I’ll
even sue myself, just for the association
Go write your own Foreword, you lazy git
Matt Lucas
Introduction
On Easter Day in 1956 ageing comic Buster Keaton was cruising
through the Hollywood hills in his dark blue Cadillac He passed
Charlie Chaplin’s old estate, wound his way along the dry hot
avenue by Harold Lloyd’s mansion ‘Greenacres’, and headed along
Summit Drive in San Ysidro Canyon towards Mary Pickford’s
decaying manor, ‘Pickfair ’ Pickford had been one of the greatest
stars of the silent era and, now in her mid-sixties, was throwing a
reunion party for everyone she’d known, on and off-screen, from
those lost decades
According to Keaton the gathering was a melancholy affair
– a reunion of phantoms, a regrouping of the old guard whose
careers had been brought to a juddering halt when Al Jolson
first squeaked out ‘you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!’ in The Jazz Singer
Pickford’s mansion was full of shadows and memories, drifting
butlers, a sense of lost time But one thing Mary said to Keaton
that day stuck in his mind He recalls her saying, ‘It would have
been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talkie
instead of the other way round ’
It is a commonly held belief that on October 6 1927 when
Jolson belted out those pioneering songs in The Jazz Singer he
was sounding the death knell of silent film – and with it, visual
comedy
This is a myth Certainly the careers of many silent comedians
were damaged, if not ruined, by the microphone, and many had
completed their best work anyway by the end of the 1920s and
had already hung up their comedy hats, such as Harry Langdon
But just as many continued to make films throughout the 1930s
and beyond, including the Big Four – Charlie Chaplin, Laurel &
Hardy, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd – all of whom released
pictures throughout the first decade of the sound era but
whose principal laughs still came from purely visual routines
In addition, new film comedians were appearing on the scene
Voted by TV viewers as ‘Britain’s Funniest Ever Television Moment,’
David Jason’s stunt from John Sullivan’s sitcom Only Fools and Horses
is more than mere pratfall The toppling of the South London market
trader as he attempts to impress a woman with his ‘cool’ is a joke
that stretches back centuries, right to Ancient Rome via Shakespeare’s
Malvolio in Twelfth Night with his yellow cross-gartering – and is a
sublime demonstration of the perennial puncturing of the male ego
who were making talkies but whose schtick was nevertheless
firmly rooted in the visual tradition of clowning, mime, routine-
building, sight-gag and facial reaction – supreme comics like the
Marx Brothers, W C Fields and Will Hay These comedians didn’t
abandon visual comedy with the arrival of talkies; they simply
bent the sound picture to their will Later – in the 1940s and
beyond – they would be joined by Jacques Tati, Norman Wisdom,
Jerry Lewis, Ernie Kovacs, Eric Sykes and many more
This book, then, is a history and celebration of visual comedy
from after the appearance of sound in 1927 to the present day
– a chronicle of non-verbal humour in the age of dialogue Its
primary raison d’être is to tell the stories of the lives and work of
the great pantomimic clowns of the last eighty years, but it also
aims to argue that visual comedy is a genre in its own right Of
course, there is one genre of TV and film that never abandoned
visual comedy at all, and that is animation Because of the wealth
of existing books and studies on cartoon history, however, I have
chosen in this book to focus solely on live-action humour
Pickford’s observation that ‘It would have been more logical
if silent pictures had grown out of the talkie instead of the other
way round,’ was not simply that of an unemployed actress
bitter at having been cast aside by her industry after a seismic
technological innovation – it was an astute assessment of the
aesthetic of film Sound technology was, despite what we may
think, not an advance in the cinematic art – it was actually a
setback It is only because silent comedy predates verbal comedy
in the history of film technology that we view spoken comedy as
a progression The coming of sound occurred at the point where
cinema was approaching a peak of artistic excellence: just as
the aesthetic of free-flowing cinematic drama and comedy was
exploding onscreen in the mid to late 20s, along came dialogue
– and suddenly both camera and actor were bolted ruthlessly to
the floor Comedy became the static fast-talking two-shot, and the
endlessly inventive long-shot visual routines of the silent decades
– made possible by not having to record any actor’s dialogue –
became suddenly ‘old-fashioned’
Ever since, visual comedy has been perceived as an act of
nostalgia, looked down on as a childish, almost idiot cousin
to its more refined and literate elders, satire and observational
humour Indeed, the very word ‘slapstick’ conjures up images
of crude violence, the comedy of the unsophisticated: the Three
Stooges, the Chuckle Brothers, Futtock’s End, The Plank We may
have laughed at that kind of stuff when were kids, but well, we’ve
grown out of it now …
Yet in one of those recent ubiquitous TV chart-shows, The
Greatest TV Comedy Moments of all Time, many of the top clips
turned out to be sight-gags: Cleese’s silly walks, Fawlty’s goose-
step, Dawn French collapsing into a puddle in The Vicar of Dibley,