Slapstick Comedy

Desde el nacimiento entre bastidores y los violentos años del vodevil hasta el encuentro con Arbuckle y el nacimiento de una estrella.

Recorrido por su años en los escenarios, el estrellato infantil, los problemas con la Gerry Society, el tour por el Reino Unido y el descenso del Big Time al Small Time.

Chaplin nació en el seno de una familia de artistas profundamente ligados a las tradiciones del vodevil y el music hall el 16 de Abril 1889. Su trayecto por los escenarios a los dieciséis años, Chaplin se convertía en actor del West End londinense.

La Fred Karno´s Speechless Comedians sería su nuevo destino

Karno era el más famoso de los empresarios de los sketchs para el music hall, poseía diez compañías de sketchs que estaban en gira de forma permanente.Tal y como señala David Robinson (1996, 22): “Karno era un hombre rudo, ineducado y con frecuencia desagradable, pero era un genio en la creación de situaciones cómicas. Poseía un talento extraordinario para la invención de gags así como para el “timing”; al margen de esto había descubierto que la comedia podía ser, con frecuencia, mucho más efectiva cuando surgía con un toque de sentimiento o pathos: ésta fue una lección que iba a resultar de una importancia suprema para el más famoso de sus alumnos, Charles Chaplin.

En el otoño de 1910, fue elegido para realizar un tour de 21 meses por los Estados Unidos con la compañía de Fred Karno. Fue allí donde Mack Sennett vio actuar al joven Chaplin y le realizó una oferta para unirse a la Keystone Film Company, iniciando la carrera más meteórica de la Historia del Cine.

In its history, production, plots and gestures, slapstick comedy was tied to the rise of modern labor in terms of both Taylorist theory and Fordist practice. Comic heroes ranging from live action comedians Chaplin or Keaton to animated animals Felix or Mickey worked against work through the playful excesses of their obediences and transgressions within an increasingly rationalized, industrial world. The digital animation studio Pixar summoned slapstick and its specifically Fordist resonances in its 2008 feature, WALL-E, yet offered a twist in humanizing a figure of perfected Fordism itself with its title character, a robot repetitively working in a post-apocalyptic earth devoid of human life. Explicitly modeled after Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, WALL-E contrasts with the film’s humans, who are entirely liberated from labor through automation in a satirical reflection of both post-Fordist accounts of the ‘end of work’ as well as broader critiques of a distracting digital culture. This article focuses on the film’s revitalization of slapstick traditions within the context of recent debates about post-Fordism, the future of automated labor and the transformation of working human bodies. Just as slapstick’s relationship to modern labor touched on the playful mode of its cinematic production as well as their form as indexical montage so too does Pixar’s corporate reputation as ‘Creativity, Inc’ suggest a complex relationship between its slapstick hero and the digital labor animating his movement. The same will be argued of Pixar’s vaunted techniques with both digital image-making and commodity generation, both of which suggest a nostalgic animation of slapstick’s antinomies as much as a disavowal of the post-Fordist production of which Pixar is vanguard.

This article examines slapstick comedies about moviemaking produced by the Mack Sennett Comedies studio (1917–33) and studies the model of filmmaking that these metamovies advance. Mack Sennett Comedies’ movies on moviemaking, this essay suggests, repeat founding facts, icons, and technology associated with the Keystone era and, through their constant replay, elevate those motifs to the status of myth. In so doing, Mack Sennett Comedies not only built its corporate identity as a slapstick universe of play, leisure, and fun but also contributed to the imagination of Hollywood filmmaking, advancing slapstick practices as a model for the way in which the film industry represented its early years. As an addendum, this essay also reprints and examines the postcard series “Making the ‘Movies’: A Peep into Filmland” issued by the California Postcard Company in 1922.

Atollo K è l'unico film della coppia Laurel & Hardy con esplicite pretese politiche - se si eccettuano le altre produzioni degli anni Quaranta realizzate durante il Secondo conflitto mondiale. Amalgama di sentimenti anti-imperialisti e anti-nucleari, rivela un atteggiamento quanto mai pessimista nei confronti della società post-bellica, aspetto che talora fa a pugni con il "materiale comico" di Stanlio e Ollio.

This article seeks to identify the underlying historiographical discourses advanced by the programming choices of the Cinémathèque Française’s recent Buster Keaton retrospective. In light of his wide ranging sound era output, the actor-director’s status as a “silent” comic is called into question in order to point toward unexplored approaches to his career and to propose new ways of familiarizing audiences with his work.

This essay formulates the concept of a slapstick modernism in order to designate
a cultural mutation that occurred in the US and elsewhere in the world from the
1950s through the 1970s. It was during this period that Beat Generation artists
committed to formal innovation (in literature and film) looked back to the
heritage of silent screen comedy for aesthetic inspiration. After briefly
describing the parameters of a slapstick modernism, the essay applies the
category in question to two radicalised cinematic ventures: Ken Jacobs’ seven hour
epic of dissent, Star Spangled to Death and Vera Chytilova’s Daises, the
latter a product of the Czech New Wave. From the perspective of cultural
history, the essay contests the notion of a postmodern break in favour of an
understanding of the genealogical continuities extending across the twentieth
century.

The work aims to re-read Lunario del paradiso through the essay Su Beckett, l'interpololazione e il gag, included in Finzioni occidentali (1975). Comparing the comic techniques adopted in Beckett's writing and slapstick comedy (i.e. the themes of permutation and expulsion, the idea of "wandering") with those adopted by Celati in Lunario, we will try to show how the novel constitutes its extreme attempt to transform the written page into a sort of mimicry performance. An attempt that, if on one hand it can be considered "failed", on the other it opens up Celati's writing to new perspectives.

Saps at Sea (1940), italianizzato "C'era una volta un piccolo naviglio", dalla celebre canzoncina popolare cantata dal Trio Lescano, costituisce il "canto del cigno" della coppia comica Laurel e Hardy, un film brillante ed importante, supportato da un cast e da una regia d'eccezione, come non sarebbe mai più accaduto nella loro carriera cinematografica.

Roach, noto anche per la serie televisiva statunitense Topper-sitcom a sfondo fantastico, rivaleggiò col pioniere delle prime comiche Mack Sennett; e ciò che sostenne le sue produzioni, mentre la popolarità delle altre comiche andava scemando, fu il modo in cui esse erano strutturate.

The Dislexicon of Slapstick Humor, Funny Cinematography, and Very Special Effects is a richly illustrated glossary containing 138 witty words used in Mack Sennett's comedy studios between 1912 and 1933. It comprises clever concepts connected to slapstick comedy, gag strategies, funny pratfalls, dangerous stuntwork, and secrets of the filmmaking trade.
In a mishmash of slapstick facts and fictions, the Dislexicon fully accepts small talk, tall tales, filmspeak, jokes, and gossip as historical sources. Hopping from "gag" to "laugh" to "trick," the dictionary presents a slapstick universe in which everything makes perfect sense - as only a fictional construction can.

UPDATE JUNE 2016: we are down to the very, very last copies of this book, contact me in case you still want to buy one. Thanks, Hilde

In this course, students will examine several film genres from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives (e.g. auteurism, structuralism, feminism, psychoanalysis, etc.). Attention will be paid to the historical "evolution" of selected genres, as they develop from an experimental stage to a classical stage before undergoing further refinements at the levels of content and form. By the end of the semester, students will have gained a deeper understanding of those genres' cultural, social, and political significance. ATTENDANCE AT SCREENINGS IS REQUIRED.

This article studies surviving film prints, shooting scripts, and press material to examine Mack Sennett's exploration of natural color film, from his use of the Technicolor process in 1926-1928, to his release of one short in Multicolor in 1929, culminating in the launch of a two-color process, aptly called Sennett-Color in 1930. In addition, a filmography listing all the released Sennett shorts containing color film including the identification of the color process, is added as an appendix.

The idea behind this videoessay is that actor Paolo Villaggio has been gradually “swallowed” by his most famous character, the humble accountant Ugo Fantozzi, of which Villaggio, in his television debut, told the misadventures using third person narration. In 1975, when Fantozzi became a movie character, Villaggio decided to assume in first person the main role. But the intensive exploitation of the character, coupled with the rapid exhaustion of his creative vein, have forced the author-actor to a draining repetition of the same gags. While Fantozzi gradually loses its satirical characteristics to become a more childish and cartoonesque figure, Villaggio’s body, on the contrary, becomes visibly older and weaker, physically unable to support the role. Following the transformations of the character and its creator-interpreter, our work intends to propose a journey through the Fantozzi’s saga. An audiovisual essay built as a sort of medieval polyptych, in which each chapter can be considered autonomously and, at the same time, as a stage in a wider discourse around one of the most popular figures of postwar Italian cinema.

Se il ricordo dell'ultimo film di Stanlio e Ollio -  Atollo K, diretto nel 1951 da Leo Joannon e John Berry -  rimane legato presso gli
appassionati soprattutto alla
malinconia che accompagna le loro gag anarchiche, ad uno sguardo più attento in esso si nota anche un coraggioso
tentativo dei due di rinnovare la loro comicità,
puntando più sulla satira e su raffinate gag
mute che sul classico repertorio burlesco.

Edited by Paul Duncan
Taschen Books, July 2015

With unrestricted access to his archives, this book offers insight into the process behind the Chaplin genius, from the impromptu spontaneity of his early shorts to the meticulous retakes and reworking of scenes and gags in his classic movies. With 900 images, including stills, memos, storyboards and on-set photos, as well as interviews with Chaplin and his closest collaborators, we see how Chaplin turned his caricature of the Tramp into a living character. The Tramp is the ultimate underdog, an everyman trying to survive economic depression, two World Wars, and the Cold War. Whatever crises life threw at him, the Tramp, and Chaplin, shrugged it off, straightened his shoulders, and walked off into a brighter future.

The entire Chaplin life history in words and pictures

900 images including many previously unseen stills, on-set photos, memos, documents, storyboards, posters, and designs, plus scripts and images for unmade films

An oral history, told from the point of view of Chaplin himself, drawing upon his extensive writings, many of which have never been reprinted before.

Supplementary interviews with some of his closest collaborators.

Material from over 150 books of press clippings in Chaplin’s archives, which range from his early days in music halls to his death

I wrote three chapters on Chaplin's childhood and UK theatre career, his first year in Hollywood at Keystone and his time with Essanay.