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Why Buster's Still The King Of Comedy
by Barry Norman
In the 70 years since sound - or, more accurately, speech - was
introduced to the cinema, the art of film-making has improved immeasurably in almost every
way. Technically, for example, it is now possible to show things on screen that were
undreamt of even ten years ago, let alone in 1927.
Not, of course, that this is an unalloyed boon.
The movie industry - by which I really mean Hollywood - has allowed
itself to become so overwhelmed by special effects that far too many big-budget,
blockbuster-type pictures consist, depressingly, of very little else. And at the moment -
and again I'm really thinking about Hollywood - the standard of screenwriting has hit a
deplorable low, the dialogue being too often merely a perfunctory means of linking one
explosion/car chase/mass murder/sex scene with another.
At which stage I appear to be arguing strongly against my own original
proposition, but not so.
I believe that the best of modern cinema is as good as, and in many
ways better than, anything that has gone before except... well, except particularly in one
area - comedy. With the exception of Woody Allen (all right, I know he's an acquired taste
and a lot of you haven't acquired it yet) there's nobody around today who can compare with
the giants of the past.
Jim Carrey? Oh, please! I'll admit he's funnier than Jerry Lewis but
that's as far as I'm prepared to go.
But think of now and think of then and tell me who bears comparison
with Harold Lloyd or Laurel and Hardy. You can't, can you? So OK, here's another one:
where is the modern equivalent of WC Fields, a savagely unsentimental comedian so far
ahead of his time that I don't think he's properly appreciated to this day. For that
matter, where's the latterday Charlie Chaplin?
To tell you the truth I'm on dangerous ground here because, except in
his short films which were hilarious, I don't think all that much of Charlie Chaplin. He
was too sentimental, too manipulative, for my taste, but even so at his best he was pretty
nearly peerless. Pretty nearly - but not quite because Buster Keaton, though an entirely
different kind of comedian, was certainly his equal.
Keaton was a superb clown, a brilliant acrobat and a master of comic
timing and what, for me, gives him the edge over Chaplin is that he never sought our pity.
He may, like Chaplin, have represented the little fellow: continually beset by a cruel
world, but unlike Chaplin he never made a fuss about it.
With that remarkable deadpan face, on which the twitch of an eyebrow
was, for him, the equivalent of an emotional explosion, he just got on with things, taking
every setback in his stride and gradually, subtly, showing us the absurdity of life.
Keaton didn't enjoy the professional longevity of Chaplin. At the
height of his fame he wrecked his own career, first by accepting an ill-advised contract
with MGM, under which he signed away the right of total control over his work, and then by
plunging into alcoholism.
For many years he was practically forgotten. But in the late forties a
series of personal appearances at the Cirque Medrano in Paris revived his reputation and
with it, belatedly, his career.
Today, quite rightly, he is still revered as one of the greats and, of
course, there's nobody around whose name deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as
his. Maybe the trouble is that modern comics strive too hard to be sophisticated and
knowing. What we've lost over the years is innocence and, as Keaton and company prove,
innocence is an integral part of comedy.
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