This historical reprint was published in conjunction with the screening of Kings of (Silent) Comedy at Silent Winter 2013
“THAT’S the one thing that I dread,” Buster told me sadly. “I dread the day when we won’t find another new wheeze to wrap up, when all the gags will have been sprung, when we’re stumped for something new. That’s what a comedian has to guard against: running out. That is why Charlie Chaplin makes his pictures so slowly. I know as a matter of fact that he takes thousands of feet of film on every picture, only to destroy it when he sees it in the projection room. And this carefulness is just what helps to make him a great artist.”
Keaton is a master of snicker and guffaw technique. His art is to work up a situation deliberately, to build it as logically and as systematically as a carpenter builds a house. Gags, Buster told me, are natural or mechanical. “Both get laughs,” he explained, “but the natural gag is the one we lay awake nights trying to dream of.” And it is the mechanical gag that Keaton has mastered.
Take the situation in “The Boat,” where, after having built a boat, he finds that he has not made the doorway large enough, and consequently, as the boat slides to the water, it pulls the shed down with it. Take the situation in “One Week.” Buster has ordered a Sears-Roebuck bungalow for his bride-to-be. The wicked rival mixes the numerals on the various parts, and the comedy ensues when Buster attempts to assemble the jazzed sections.
This is mechanically perfect giggle material. But though one of the most adroit technicians of comedy, Buster fails to reach the heart, his pictures elude the sympathy.
It seems consistent to endow Chaplin with massive intellect, to read sermons into his capering feet. It is fairly simple to sympathize with the lovesick Harold Lloyd, upon occasion. But Keaton alone stands forth as the Trouper—unabashed, unaffected, unassuming, and—very like Shaw’s Undershaft—unashamed!
“We just wrap up a little hokum,” he will tell you. “We build up a little story on some sure-fire ideas, throw in a dozen gags, if we can think of ’em, and let ’er ride. The scenario we use is written on the correspondence end of a picture postcard. If it’s lost it’s no great matter.”
You cannot read hidden motifs into the Keaton spoolings. You cannot persuade him that there was a hint of satire concealed in his last comedy, or the one before that. You cannot coerce him into admitting that he planned an unique characterization which he has steadfastly maintained. He will take credit for nothing. Not even his make-up.
“The pancake hat and the oversized collar and the misfit suit and the slapstick shoe are my oId vaudeville stand-bys. My father rigged me out as a third of The Three Keatons, when I was too young to originate anything but a yowl. I’ve kept the same make-up ever since—guess I always will.”
Solemnity is more than a habit with Keaton; it’s ingrown. Throughout our conversation his face was stony. Nor was this an exception to his usual attitude. I have seen him in the turmoil of a comic sequence, a business of break-away ladders, swinging ropes, and trapdoor scaffoldings; I have seen him eying the proceedings at one of Manhattan’s most energizing night clubs; I have seen him purring at his baby in fatherlike fashion; I have seen him casually viewing the day’s rushes, and upon not one but all of these occasions Buster wore an expression that was infinitely more sphinxlike than the Sphinx ever thought of being. His is an entirely emotionless face, suggesting most of all, a mask. It is the ideal phiz for a droll pantaloon.
“You originated the idea of never smiling,” I supposed.
But Buster refused to take credit for it. In the days of The Three Keatons, it seems, his father taught him never to crack a smile. The habit grew on him. Now it is so deeply rooted that it is almost impossible for him to grin.
It has long been one of the beliefs of the American Credo that all comedians are, off stage, lugubrious fellows, and never was a truth more apparent than in the appearance and behavior of Buster Keaton. His countenance is little short of funereal, his speech laconic, his outlook none too sanguine.
“Next I’m going back to the Coast to do a five-reel picture. No plots, you know. Just gags. But we’ll space our laughs. If we ran five reels of the sort of stuff we cram into two, the audience would be tired before it was half over. So we’ll plant the characters more slowly, use introductory bits, and all that.
“It’ll be just as easy to make a five-reeler, because we always take about fifteen reels, anyway. Now we’ll cut to five instead of two.”
Buster thinks “One Week” his best comedy, but he admits he had hoped to make “The Playhouse” his best. In that clever picture, he essayed a dozen or more rôles. He had intended doing all of the parts, but his ego failed him at the crucial moment.
Despite the fact that he is one of the big drawing cards, often featured in the lights, and billed above the longer picture of the program, Keaton has assumed no airs, adopted no pose. He denied that he made any preparation for a picture. He denied that he planned his plots. Try as you will, you cannot convince him that he is anything more than a trouper who manages to give ’em what they like. It is useless to talk to him of psychological effects.
“It’s hokum,” said Buster definitely and positively. “And by draping it in different styles you disguise it and bring results each time.”
According to his lights, it is simply a case of old gags in new clothing. But if this were so, there would be more Keatons. Unfortunately enough, there aren’t.
Excerpted from a piece by Malcolm H. Oettinger, Picture-Play, 1923