SILENT, BUT DEADLY
Why mute performances continue to be golden in comedy
There was much excitement and astonishment recently when the scripts for two previously unpublished sketches by Buster Keaton came to light. Along with Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, Keaton was one of the three titans of the silent movie age, and arguably the boldest and most timeless.
Know that scene where the front of a house falls on top of an oblivious fellow but — thanks to a panefree top-floor window — completely fails to touch him? That’s Keaton (in 1928’s Steamboat Bill, Jr.). And it was also he who — marvellously, potentially lethally — sat deadpan on the bobbing “wheel rod” of a chugging steam train as it disappeared into a tunnel in his 1926 masterpiece The General.
The astonishment at the find, which centred on the supposed revelation that Keaton planned his jokes in minute detail, is harder to fathom, however. Yes, Keaton once told an interviewer: “As a rule, about 50 per cent you have in your mind when you start the picture, and the rest you develop as you’re making it.” And yes, both of these newly discovered sketches (written for television in the 1950s and would have had sound but no dialogue) detail every last physical nuance and prop requirement in forensic detail.
It is inconceivable that by the time Keaton came actually to perform and shoot his stunts, he hadn’t already slotted all the cogs into place with a watchmaker’s precision. That house’s facade weighed two tons; the train, dozens of times that. The slightest failure in either case could have led to his being either squashed flat or ground to mincemeat.
Any surprise at Keaton’s painstaking preparation hints, I think, at a widespread misconception. Namely, that physical comedy is somehow inherently inferior to the more obviously “clever” verbal kind.
No one could accuse the garrulous Adam Riches of being mute on stage. And yet the 2011 Edinburgh Comedy Awards winner is also one of the most physical and prop-reliant — and also audience-participatory — comedians on the circuit. After all, his award-winning show saw him at one point pretend to be Daniel Day-lewis, griping about not having won a major award “for four minutes” and then asking a few audience members to hurl him bodily at a few more.
“It’s very difficult to make an accident happen on screen, as it is on stage,” he says, “because it’s all manufactured and all has to be tested and checked. And so I think any kind of criticism of physical comedy, and silent physical comedy, being lower down the tentpole is a way-off observation: There’s a lot going on.
“Keaton did it a 100 years ago with no words whatsoever,” he continues, “and there are now those sketches detailing all of the physical ‘beats’ that he would have. You can’t argue that that isn’t writing. That’s as ‘written’ as an exchange between two people building up to a punchline.”
New Zealander Sam Wills, celebrated for his award-winning performance as mute Boy With Tape On His Face and currently riding high at Hurrah’s club in Las Vegas, agrees, “100 per cent. My closest example is I’ve got that one routine where I shake horses’ hoofs to the William Tell Overture. It’s a three-minute routine, but I spent six months on that, making sure that something was happening on every single beat. Setting up a joke, going into a punchline; setting up a joke, going into a punchline; all building toward one big joke.”
But who are the big-screen heirs of Keaton and friends? In this more mollycoddled, risk-averse, Cgi-heavy age, are audiences simply less willing to see stars put themselves in genuine physical danger in the pursuit of laughs? Riches believes there might be something in that.
“I think there’s such a potential for outcry over the moral responsibility of what you’re showing on screen,” he says, “that if you do show those haphazards, those kind of physical things, nowadays you’re just opening yourself up to a barrage of criticism.”
Both Riches and Wills do acknowledge, though, that Rowan Atkinson’s near-silent man-child Mr. Bean — immensely popular, if predictably sniffed at by comedy snobs — is very much in the silent-movie tradition, with Riches praising the character as “a clever invention for sure.” I would argue too that in the always self-performed stunts of Jackie Chan — and in individual examples such as the lyrical, anarchic physicality of Jim Carrey’s Riddler in 1995’s otherwise awful Batman Forever — you have a direct link back to Keaton and co.
Also, as Riches points out, pratfalls have seldom fallen out of fashion on television. Wills, however, quickly cites stunt-fan Johnny Knoxville’s reality TV series and spinoff feature films Jackass as a one-stop rebuttal of the risk-aversion hypothesis, “because they are essentially silent films. Johnny Knoxville has even said he’s influenced by silent films.” He is equally swift, though, to stress that this might not necessarily be a cause for celebration. “Jackass and so on would become the modern-day version of silent comedy ... God, how awful is that!”
And yet, and yet. A man in a mouse costume crawling through a field of traps toward a piece of cheese is hardly any sort of rival for Keaton’s sublime physical poetry.