Rules of Keystone Comedies (deduced after watching a dozen or more Fatty Arbuckle shorts in one sitting with my daughter)
1. One does not take aim to fire a gun. One throws them around in one's hands, spraying bullets everywhere.
2. One does not run out of ammunition or need to reload. One only runs out of ammo once the quarry is captured and cornered. Once the quarry has escaped, one is able to fire unlimited rounds as before.
3. The only place where anyone gets shot is in the butt. This is the cause of only momentary discomfort, no worse than a mosquito bite.
4. Officials of law enforcement are either totally useless or facistic. The facistic cops invariably continue to commit the crimes (loitering, drinking in a public place, etc.) which they just have discouraged others from engaging in.
5. All methods of transportation are unpredictable, and there is no real way to maintain control of an automobile. Policemen will load up a car with as many of their number as they can cram inside, arms and legs sticking out, usually with somebody trying to hang on from behind.
Many readers will no doubt take these rules in stride, as they have seen a Keystone comedy or two and knows that they consist of crazy slapstick that is only hung onto the barest outline of a story. My daughter though, has to be explained why they are funny - police, guns, fighting, brutality, slapping, hitting, running someone over with a car, etc. are all things that are definitely NOT funny by standards of today's kids.
Fatty Arbuckle, though, she finds very funny. Wrongly accused (and acquitted, in three seperate proceedings) of a crime he didn't commit in his personal life, Fatty was
the unmentionable among silent comics for decades, and his films were buried or regarded as curiosities. What Remy likes about Fatty (or, more properly, Roscoe) is that for such a big guy he has such grace and athletic ability. He's also cute, and doesn't do mean-spirited things, just thoughtless and stupid ones. He could flip a pancake off anything - his shoes, his ankles, knees, surfaces - you name it, he could flip a panacke off it. He could literally "fly," through propelling his bulk from a curtain pole, using it like a parallel bar, out of a window and up into the window of the floor above. Kids are amazed by these things.
Remy even made the observation, which I frankly hadn't thought of myself, that the reason Roscoe Arbucke may have been so strong was that his "fat" mostly to had to have been muscle.
I recount this mainly in that it shows how generational evaluations of things do change. To me the Keystone Cops were just "funny" - funny the first time I saw them, and still today - I didn't ask the reason why or really know. They don't do anything for my daughter. But Fatty Arbuckle, whom to my generation was sort of a question mark associated with a sleazy scandal covered for several pages in "Hollywood Babylon," is really funny to her. I'll admit he's funny to me too, and I'm glad that his films are finally being revived so that we can see them - they were good.
I just wish I could explain to Remy why Charlie Chaplin is funny. She doesn't like him at all. To Remy he's a mean-spirited little squirt who looks like Hitler.
Uncle Dave Lewis