COMEDY'S GREATEST ERA
This essay, by James Agee, is not only a seminal (influential) text, but a model of writing (it can be taught in a composition class to show how effectively to use "commonplaces," such as analogy, comparison, division, definition, etc. to develop ideas). Agee defines laughter by dividing it up into the titter, the yow, the belly laugh, and the boffo. These terms are no longer current and are subjective anyway; but readers at that time would have been familiar with such laughter.
Agee then describes early silent comedy, calling it a visual "poem," in this model of descriptive writing. Of the silent comic, he writes:
The least he might do was to straighten up stiff as a plank and fall over backward with such skill that his whole length seemed to slap the floor at the same instant. Or he might make a cadenza of it--look vague, smile like an angel, roll up his eyes, lace his fingers, thrust his hands palms downward as far as they would go, hunch his shoulders, rise on tiptoe, prance ecstatically in narrowing circles until, with tallow knees, he sank down the vortex of his dizziness to the floor and there signified nirvana by kicking his heels twice, like a swimming frog. (483)
Note above the vivid analogies ("stiff as a plank," "make a cadenza of it" [in music a cadenza is a part of a concerto or aria made up by the artist during performance in order to show off her or his skills], "smile like an angel," "signified nirvana," and "like a swimming frog." [Nirvana is a term from Buddhism meaning "blowout," or total nonsconsciousness.] Also note the strong verbs: "slap," "lace," "thrust," "hunch," "prance." Then there are those vivid descriptive phrases, such as "with tallow knees" (soft as wax) or "the vortex [whirl] of his dizziness."
Agee informs us how common comedies were in the silent era, though less so "now" (483; the essay was written in 1949). He refers to the two types of comedies that Mack Sennett made: slapstick and parodies.
(Slapstick refers to the physical comedy of tumbling and battering, usually with a stick named for that purpose: hence, a "slapstick." Parodies made fun of serious movies: one wonders, with glee, what these comics would have done with Titanic.)
Then we get another wonderful descriptive sentence:
"All these people zipped and caromed about the pristine world of the screen as jazzily as a convention of water bugs" (484).
You can't write better (or more vividly) than that. Note, the words are not long or uncommon, just precisely chosen to do the work of evoking an image: "zipped," "caromed," "pristine," "jazzily"; and all ending in another vivid analogy: "as a convention of water bugs."
Adverbs are wasted by poor writers, but Agee calls the comic gestures "ferociously emphatic" (485); here the adverb is not just a filler, but vividly descriptive. Using contradiction (saying what something is by what it's not), Agee assures us that "not a line or motion of the body was wasted or inarticulate" (485).
Another great descriptive passage follows:
The reader may remember how splendidly upright wandlike old Ben Turpin could stand . . . , with his lampshade mustache twittering and his sparrowy chest stuck out and his head flung back like Paderewski assaulting a climax and the long babyish back hair trying to look lionlike, while his Adam's apple, an orange in a Christmas stocking, pumped with noble emotion. (485)
A model of vivid prose! Who does not see Turpin "wandlike" (stiff) with his "lampshade mustache" and his "sparrowy chest" sticking out?
Agee again uses an analogy to compare Turpin to the famous Polish classical violinist, Paderewski: the "climax" refers to the emotional high point of the melody, while "assaulting" is a comically chosen verb for "playing" music.
Turpin's Adam's apple is compared to "an orange in a Christmas stocking." Even without seeing Turpin, the reader gets a vivid idea of him. Or of James Finlayson, as if he's "eternally tasting a spoiled pickle" (485).
Students need not worry about these names; they fall outside the concerns of our class. But it's important to remember that the "Big Four" emerged out of a tradition, as all artists do.
Then Agee adds an evaluation:
"The early silent comedians never strove for or consciously thought of anything which could be called artistic 'form,' but they achieved it" (485).
Cause and effect and testimony are combined to explain the use of comic fast motion (one of our students had trouble understanding this, so this may help):
According to legend (and according to Sennett) he discovered the tempo proper to screen comedy when a green cameraman, trying to save money, cranked too slow. Realizing the tremendous drumlike power of mere motion to exhilarate, he gave inanimate objects a mischievous life of their own . . . and made the screen dance like a witches Sabbath." (486)
By cranking slow, the "green" [=untrained] cameraman thought he would save money despite speeding up the images when projected at normal speed. "Cranking" refers to the mechanical (not electric) means of turning the film spool. "Witches' Sabbath" refers to belief in the devil's mock worship. Note the phrases, "drumlike power" and "mischievous life."
Then we get a vivid description of the chases that usually ended a Sennett comedy and continued to finish many of Keaton's comedy shorts and features, such as Cops (where Keaton is chased by an army of police) or Seven Chances (where Keaton is chased by a regiment of irate women). In the Sennett chase,
". . . bathing girls, cops, comics, dogs, cats, babies, automobiles, locomotives, innocent bystanders, sometimes what seemed like a whole city, an entire civilization, were hauled along . . . in the wake of that energy like dry leaves following an express train" (486).
"Like dry leaves following an express train"! Agee then points out that this kind of comedy goes back at least to the time of ancient Greece, though without celluloid. Grease paint is as old as Greece (bad pun). (Actors use grease paint to make their faces darker.) Agee quotes Sennett for assurance: "Anyone who tells you he has discovered something new is a fool or a liar or both" (486).
Agee then uses cause and effect to describe how Sennett's comedies developed, a concise description of much early cinema:
"Mainly Sennett's men thrashed out a few primary ideas and carried them in their heads, sure that better stuff would turn up while they were shooting, in the heat of physical action" (487).
This is what I call "heuristics": discovery, a part of all creativity. In fact the original meaning of the word "invention" is "discovery" ("inventio").
We learn that Sennett gave a start to three of the Big Four comics (I'm not saying whom). Then he describes and evaluates the Big Four.
His praise for Chaplin is as unlimited as was that of Chaplin's peers or rivals. As Sennett says, "Oh, well, he's just the greatest artist that ever lived" (488). Sennett apparently never heard of Shakespeare, Mozart, or Michelangelo; but early cinema (often dismissed as mere entertainment) deserves such compensation.
For ESL students, two proper nouns are Lazy Susan and Murphy bed (the second is also an epoynym, or something named after a person). The one is a revolving tray of dishes; the other is a bed that folds into a closet, to save space during daytime (488).
On p. 490, Agee mentions "inflection." This can best be seen in Chaplin's many facial reactions when he's inside the lion's cage in The Circus (1928).
However, I am puzzled by what seems to be Agee's misunderstanding of the famous final scene in City Lights. I would disagree with Agee here on two points. First, that "it has never seriously occurred to [the Tramp] that he is inadequate" (490); this seems an odd comment, since Chaplin's comedy may be based on arrogance towards men, but a shyness and sense of inferiority towards women. Besides, the ending would then be comic, not tragic or tragicomic (we would laugh, not cry).
Then Agee says that the girl "recognizes who [the Tramp] must be by his shy, confident, shining joy as he comes silently toward her" (490). This too seems like an odd statement, since the girl evidently doesn't imagine who the Tramp is until she uses her sensitive fingertips (she had been previously blind) to recognize his hand. Regardless (and Agee may be relying on memory in days when there were no DVD's), Agee recognizes this scene as "the greatest piece of acting and the highest moment in movies" (490). Few would disagree with this estimate.
As for Lloyd, Agee remarks that "he had an expertly expressive body and even more expressive teeth," which Agee calls, in another well-chosen phrase, "a thesaurus of smiles" (491). Referring to Grandma's Boy, he describes one of Lloyd's "most uprorarious Gethsemenes" (Gethsemene was where Jesus suffered solitary agony before his death).
Of Safety Last Agee writes that "Each new floor is like a new stanza in a poem" (491). He sums up Lloyd's talent as "his ability to do more than merely milk a gag, but to top it" (491).
Agee again uses cause and effect to explain two types of gags: "A proper delaying of the ultrapredictable can of course be just as funny as a properly timed explosion of the unexpected" (492). ("Ultrapredictable" simply means "very expected.")
Agee also explains how Lloyd learned that he should "Never try to get 'above' the audience" (492), and gives an example. Finally, Agee's illustration of Lloyd in the final sequence of Safety Last, with "his bottom stuck well out, his shoulders hunched, his hands and feet skidding over perdition," is another example of vivid descriptive prose. A final evaluation of Lloyd's comedy (494) follows.
Using analogy again, Agee then neatly sums up Harry Langdon's limits and talents: "Langdon had one queerly toned, unique little reed. But out of it he could get incredible melodies" (494).
It's hard to beat Agee's verbal fixing of Langdon's facial quirks:
"Twitchings of his face were signals of tiny discomforts too slowly registered by a tinier brain; quick, squirty little smiles showed his almost prehuman pleasures, his incurably premature trustfulness" (494).
Langdon "was a virtuoso of hesitations" and, to show this, Agee quotes the scene from The Strong Man when Langdon unknowingly rubs his chest with Limburger cheese (494).
The "metaphysics" of Langdon's comedy was nicely summed up by director, Frank Capra: "His only ally was God. Langdon might be saved by the brick falling on the cop, but it was verboten [forbidden] that he in any way motivate the brick's fall" (496).
Keaton, "the most deeply 'silent' of the silent comedians," follows (497ff.). Again, Agee captures the essence of Keaton's comedy, where "it seems that the whole universe is in exquisite flying motion and the one point of repose is the juggler's effortless, uninterested face" (497).
Most critics would agree with Agee that "[f]or plain hard laughter," Keaton's short comedies were his best (499).
The descriptive passages on the great comics are a pleasure to read, but we cannot repeat them all here.
Agee ends his essay with an eulogy of the lost art of silent comedy and a comparison between a Keaton silent comedy and a Bob Hope talking comedy (Pale Face), giving due respect to Hope but greater praise to Keaton and the art he helped develop.
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