BUSTER KEATON

SLAPSTICK BELLY LAUGHTER DEVELOPED DURING LIFE IN ENTERTAINMENT

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The most famous of slapstick comedians had years of experience during his childhood playing vaudeville and bit parts on stage in a traveling medicine show before making his way to Hollywood during the silent era of filmmaking.

Buster Keaton ever thereafter only needed a beginning and an end because with his skills he was able to design the middle as he went along in front of a rolling camera.

Keaton learned to crave the attention while spending his early days on the planet in a wardrobe trunk that his mother used as a crib while she worked the crowd from the vaudeville stage.

That stone faced physical comedian eventually kind of recklessly wandered from the make-shift crib into his parents’ stage routines in Kansas.

Keaton gradually built a complete character around a stone face delivery that he had developed when his dad would literally drop him on his head in front of an audience. The film star would later as an adult only make the slight modification of wearing a pork pot pie hat.

The child vaudeville star learned through experience that timing was everything on stage. And that same method of synchronizing actions applied as much to silent films as to the action sequences and emotive dialogue in the modern era.

Off the vaudeville stage and into the ether created by the magic of motion pictures, the comedian could create more realistic slapstick delivery by relying more and more on machines and the impromptu reactions of the characters to the kinetic energy produced on set.

Keaton found a wooden plank added to a backyard fence between feuding neighbors created as opportune a moment for a laugh as a runaway locomotive during the American Civil War.

In The Butcher Boy (1917) Buster accidently drops a silver quarter inside a small pot of molasses which then becomes the influencing element behind a whole sequence of events involving molasses being dumped on his head, him getting his feet stuck in molasses that had fallen on the floor and generally being unsuccessful and embarrassed by the sudden stickiness inside a small shop.

The pratfalls and acrobatics transferred from stage to the film short were soon not enough with the extended runtime available in front of an audience as Hollywood developed feature length films.

In The General (1926) Keaton adapted a true to life military event that had become known as the Great Locomotive Chase.

Keaton combined his intuitive sense of seamless timing around movement in front of the camera with the kinetic energy of an unstoppable machine.

The film flopped at the box office but the movie was later revered for the advanced degree of filmmaking and storytelling during the early development of cinema.

In the film, Keaton explored the use of special effects by destroying a bridge in the most expensive scene in cinematic history at the time, with the characters, Johnnie Gray and the love interest Annabelle Lee, repeatedly doubling back for additional time on the screen. Marion Mack played the love interest equally involved in slapstick and various forms of comedic invention along the railway tracks.

The studios punished Keaton for the financial losses by taking away ownership and creative control of future film projects from the talented creative. This loss of independence ended a long run of creativity that had begun in 1917.

The miserable film character Keaton developed by using bewildered intent for just a few laughs at a time now became a real life actor on contract with little freedom to enjoy his own comedic creations.

The studio machine had taken over Keaton’s movie career.

Keaton became the young filmmaker in the Cameraman (1928) working hard for work but not being accepted and always missing out by just enough of a bit despite creating a lot of laughs along the way.

The movies offered a greater illusion than the theater stage with real trains instead of a picture of a train. This realism allowed for a greater suspension of disbelief and the consequential longer lasting, deeper laughter from the audience.

One of Keaton’s best stunts involves the façade of a house collapsing on top of him, with him surviving standing up through an open second story window in Steamboat Bill, Jr (1927). The gag was like a machine that had been developed over the years into bigger and more elaborate building collapses until the stunt was used for the film.

In One Week (1919) the characters assemble a kit home shipped by the numbers and put together by connecting the numbers. The love birds attempt to roll the newly assembled matrimonial home to the property, but they get everything stuck on the train tracks.

An oncoming train is set to destroy the house but ends up streaming by on a parallel track. A brief celebration of relief ensues just before a train coming in the opposite direction destroys the house.

These narratives underscore Keaton’s knack for merging comic invention with the technological advances in American society. Trains and houses are common devices manipulated to create emotive responses and a deep belly laugh.

This theme of overlapping reality with fantasy is made extra obvious with Keaton the actor intervening with the on-screen fantasy in which his character becomes involved in Sherlock Jr (1924).

The stone face character often suffers through a quiet tragedy just as the audience of the time has already endured first hand in their own lives.

These imaginative creations were instrumental techniques used in the development of early cinema as entertainment transitioned from the stage to the movie house and from silent film to sound.

Buster: A Legend in Laughter, by Larry Edwards, Bradenton, McGuinn and McGuire Publishing Inc, 1995.

Buster Keaton: My Wonderful World of Slapstick, by Buster Keaton, London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1967.