Posted 6:12 PM by Gene

Today in perusing About Last Night I came across Terry Teachout's comments on THE LAFF RIOT OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, the LEGENDARY CHARLIE CHAPLIN. Seems Mr. Teachout tried watching his IMMORTAL comedy Gold Rush on Turner [sic] Classic Movies, and he "didn't laugh ONCE." It's only natural for Chaplin's rep to take a shellacing. First, he starred in silent films, many to our modern eyes so coarse and amateur-looking as to be unwatchable. Second, silent comedy is by nature MIME, and MIME has a stench of its own. Third, he inspired Lucille Ball, who also specialized in MIME (not to mention mugging) and more than occasionally appeared on the air imitating Chaplin with derby, moustache and cane, and who was spectacularly unfunny in her own right. And fourth, let us face it, a man who MIMES, who MUGS, and who wrote weepy theme songs for his own movies, can only be UNFUNNY.

I think of the famous screed Mark Twain wrote to his lawyer not long before he died blasting a "humor" anthology bearing his name, featuring such "celebrated" "humorists" as "Artemus Ward" and "Petroleum V. Nasby", most of it from Twain's time, all of it unfunny. (Perhaps he was staring himself in the mirror; nearly all of Twain's short pieces are today unfunny.) It will not do to say humor has a short shelf life, or that it's a child of its times; Sheridan's best comedies sparkle now as they did two centuries ago; and we still laugh at the sage wit of THE MASTER, who invited Sheridan into his own Literary Club. No, too much of big-name reps (especially big-name MEDIA reps) depends solely on groupthink, and something as fragile as comedy especially relies on it, and the groupthink had it from early on that CHARLIE CHAPLIN was a LAFF RIOT. And the bigger they are, the harder they fall, until nothing remains of Chaplin's rep but his grotesqueries, public and private.

I can't believe this blog gets less than 30,000 hits a month on average. Oh well, we fans can applaud ourselves.