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But as a comedian - he was a comedy master. Chaplin’s film direction was crude and simplistic. (And when someone derides Chaplin for being “sentimental” it tells ME something about THEM - that they haven’t seen many Chaplin films.) ALSO: this is a list of comedians, not necessarily directors (many of the folks below did not direct their own films).
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That they are among the better known and loved of Chaplin’s films tells you something about the tastes of the public.
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How many of them have pathos front and center? Scarcely more than a dozen. Educated modern people tend to pooh-pooh Chaplin’s “sentimentality”, but I did a little survey the other day. It is Chaplin who remains one of the world’s most recognized and beloved stars to this day. Essentially he quietly improved on what Chaplin invented and OWNED for decades. But Keaton came along six years after Chaplin. It’s fashionable to prefer Keaton over Chaplin these days, and technically Keaton is the better film maker and the more modern in sensibility. Now, starting at the top, and working our way down, a ranking of the top silent comedians:
LAUREL AND HARDY FILMS RANKED FULL
The career of Raymond Griffith‘s is closest to Fields’ silent career but even he spent time under Mack Sennett.Īs always, click on the links for my full biographical article on each comedian. Ultimately, he was not a creature of silent comedy as the performers below were, all of whom did some time in the trenches learning their craft in shorts.
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Fields though he starred in many silent features for Paramount and of course conquered the field of comedy during the talking era. And lastly, painful though it is, I left off W. I also left out Douglas Fairbanks, whom I hold to be extremely important to silent comedy, but ultimately his reach was wider than comedy, and though he was very physical, slapstick was not his metier (i.e., he jumped over things, he didn’t trip over them). In essence, we may say that he is ABOVE this list. But rather than include Linder in the list below and give him a middling ranking (a grave injustice to somebody so important to silent comedy) I left him out completely. Linder, of course did return and make some features in the 1920s, and they are quite enjoyable. This means that some great ones from the field’s early years have been left out, notably Max Linder and John Bunny, both of whom I worship as performers, even though the vehicles that capture them are rudimentary. It could have been anybody it happened to be Chaplin. Others may disagree, but that’s how I feel. I feel like the form of the silent comedy short doesn’t really gel until Chaplin masters it during his Mutual period. Is this Chaplin-centric? Maybe, but I do have a reason. My accounting starts at the year 1914, when Chaplin came into the picture. My criteria for placement tries to strike a balance among: 1) how funny I find them (entirely subjective) 2) how well their films are constructed 3) their standing among other critics and the public, past and present (I never disregard that completely, even when I disagree) and 4) talkies are taken into account, as are shorts.įor various reasons, I left a few of the silent comedy giants out of the running. We are talking about comedians, not Olympic athletes. I do not pretend that the order here is any sense “definitive” or “inarguable”. Ultimately, though I found even those expanded paradigms to be confining, so I’ve opened it up a lot wider. When I wrote Chain of Fools, I toyed with creating a “Big Six” or a Big “Ten”, and even shifting the usual order around some, just to be provocative. This post grew out of my conviction that the prevailing trope of there being a “Big Three” or a “Big Four” among silent film comedians is a false portrait of reality, and ultimately unhelpful to analysis.