Harry Langdon is the forgotten superstar of slapstick, whose popularity rivaled Charlie Chaplin’s, Harold Lloyd’s and Buster Keaton’s in the 1920s. He frequently evoked an overgrown child in his mannerisms, cherubic yet pre-moral. Many consider his best films to be The Strong Man (1926), Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926), and Long Pants (1927). PS, The Strong Man was also Frank Capra’s directorial debut. I cite a hilarious Harry Langdon scene in the opening of my chapter on slapstick in Tricking Power into Performing Acts of Love…excerpted here.

Until the law of gravity is repealed, the pratfall will never be replaced.

—Alan Dale[1]

[Mack] Sennett[2] used to hire a “wild man” to sit in on his gag conferences, whose whole job was to think up “wildies.” Usually he was an all but brainless speechless man, scarcely able to communicate his idea; but he had a totally uninhibited imagination. He might say nothing for an hour; then he’d mutter “You take . . .” and all the relatively rational others shut up and wait. “You take this cloud . . .” he would get out, sketching vague shapes in the air. Often he could get no further; but thanks to some kind of thought-transference, saner men would take the cloud and make something of it. The wild man seems in fact to have functioned as the group’s subconscious mind, the source of all creative energy. His ideas were so weird and amorphous that Sennett can no longer remember a one of them, or even how it turned out after rational processing. But a fair equivalent might be one of the best comic sequences in a Laurel and Hardy picture. It is simple enough—simple and real, in fact, as a nightmare. Laurel and Hardy are trying to move a piano across a narrow suspension bridge. The bridge is slung over a sickening chasm, between a couple of Alps. Midway they meet a gorilla.

—James Agee[3]

 

On the western front in World War I, Belgian Private Paul Bergot can’t shoot straight. Firing several rounds per second from a mounted machine gun, he can’t even graze the targeted tin can. Played by Harry Langdon in the 1926 film The Strong Man, the frustrated Bergot pulls out his slingshot. Now his native marksmanship comes to the fore, and he obliterates the can on the first volley. Great, but there are German soldiers to contend with, and one in particular is taking shots at the private, ripping at his uniform with near misses. Once again raising his slingshot, Bergot befuddles his enemy with pieces of biscuit so hard they hurt and then he completely overwhelms the Boche by sling shooting chunks of raw onion at his face, making him tear up, put on his gas mask, and flee. It’s a tour de force of disruptive play that mocks power and the instruments of war—playfulness in the face of conflict, defusing the fight, the game, and replacing the bitter pains of war with the playfulness of the child. It’s not who’s gonna win? It’s wouldn’t it be funny if . . .?

Of all the grown-ups, the slapstick artist may most resemble the playful child and thus be the most susceptible to the blessings of the Trickster. The retention of childlikeness (not to be confused with immaturity) invites the Trickster archetype in.

Slapstick segues abstract play into narrative. Though plot is often the weakest part of slapstick films, that is their virtue. Too much plot would distract us from the more concise snap of the synapse that makes us laugh when Harold Lloyd, for example, dangles from a clock above a busy Los Angeles street in 1923’s Safety Last! or as Charlie Chaplin turns a passed-out drunk into a puppet (A Dog’s Life, 1918). Groucho and Harpo Marx do sidesplitting imitations as each other’s mirror, a routine famously reprised by Lucille Ball with Harpo himself. The genesis of physical humor in film is even embodied in Buster Keaton’s first name, synonymous in vaudeville with a “fall.”

Consider original play, the play of animals and infant humans—the giggly, noncompetitive frolic on offer to all life forms. If you make the leap of faith to a cerebral version of original play, then phenomena as disparate as dada, Anonymous, the Yes Men, Yippies, Andy Kaufman, and Burning Man become exemplars of disruptive play. These historic sparks take childlike playfulness—abstract, nonverbal, and physical—and introduce it into the grownup world of conflict and contest, oft mediated by language.

I should like to suggest that slapstick functions as a missing link, a bridge from the abstract fun an infant has in nonverbal playfulness, frolic, and laughter, to the grown-up playfulness that projects that fun into the narrative idiom. It’s not an easy concept, its paradox a bit like moving a piano across a narrow suspension bridge and running into a gorilla.

Read more in Tricking Power into Performing Acts of Love: How Tricksters through History have Changed the World.

[1] Alan Dale, Comedy Is a Man in Trouble (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 219.

[2] Mack Sennett was one of the first great studio heads. Known as the King of Comedy, his productions originated much of slapstick. He claimed that the only gag he really invented was pie throwing.

[3] James Agee, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” in James Agee: Film Writing and Selected Journalism (New York: The Library of America, 2005), 16. The essay first appeared in the September 3, 1949, issue of LIFE magazine.