Here is a nice selection of quick gags from silent slapstick.
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Veterans Day
Grock (Adrien Wettach), remembered as the “King of Clowns” tells of entertaining maimed and crippled soldiers from World War 1.
“All my desire was to enable them to forget the terrible reality of their state… little by little {I} succeeded in conjuring up that deeply human and tragi-comic world of absurdity… nonsense… and at the same time profound wisdom. Blind eyes were raised, making the smile more eloquent… these young men … clapped their stumps together for lack of hands, stamped, shouted and laughed; laughed with all their hearts.”
America has plenty of wounded warriors returning home every day. Today is the day to thank them for their service, and maybe tell them a joke.
Youtube calling
I really like this stop motion animation, inspired by Basil Wolverton
It’s quick and fun, and nicely done. The animator was Thomas R. Smith
I also noticed two other things about it. It has 16 million views, and no advertising. I recently read that popular youtube videos with advertising earn about $5000 for every million views. By that number, “Ugly Girl” could have pulled in $80,000. I wonder if Mr. Smith intentionally declined, or was just unaware of the potential. UPDATE: On further thought, perhaps Smith doesn’t legally own the piece.
I know the people behind “Kozo, the Dancing Hippo” On youtube it has been duplicated and remixed so many times I haven’t bothered to count. The views on all of them runs into the tens of millions. I imagine if they had worked the system, they could have profited from each of them. I need to learn more.
A quote about Mack Sennett
Mack Sennett was the producer of the Keystone Cops, and the man who brought Charlie Chaplin to Hollywood. There is an old biography of him, called Father Goose: The Story of Mack Sennett. It was written by Gene Fowler and published in 1934. For obvious reasons, I particularly like this quote:
“The advent of sound and the collapse of the world’s economic structure found Sennett with his back to the wall, but still full of fight. Then came the thrust from nowhere, a sudden and unexpected stab which Sennett, like Caesar in the Forum, accepted as the unkindest cut of all.
The animated cartoon was a new and popular toy – especially to a world in despair. It preserved and accentuated a thousand-fold all the illusions of slap-stick. The pen was mightier than the bed-slat. By the exercise of a few thousand strokes of a cartoonist’s quill, a whole animal kingdom of stars came into being and had an immortal existence in an inkwell.
These charming imps cost but little, were not given to fits of temper and knew not the weaknesses of the flesh. They worked for no salary, and for the sheer fun of it; they would never grow old.
What did a horde of prankish animals care about censorship? In a Sennett comedy, if anyone tied a tin can to a dog’s tail, an irate humane society would release it’s furies. In an animated cartoon, India-ink dogs could be stung by bees, have turpentine applied to traditionally tender spots, be flattened by steam- rollers, reproduce their kind with strangers and otherwise defy the conventions.
A nimble rodent has become the world’s hero. In the eyes of Mack Sennett, he must always remain a scraggly mustachioed villian whose mischief will never be undone.
Who killed Cock Robin?
‘I did,’ said Mickey Mouse.”