Man, I love this site. I love Charley Chase and Charley Bowers and Charlie Murray and, leaving the Charlies, Al St. John and Fin and Edgar Kennedy and Lloyd Hamilton and Louise Fazenda and Mabel Normand and Larry Semon and Paul Parrott and Lupino Lane and all those guys. I can't think of one I don't like. Except for Jimmy Aubrey.

But let's face it: the Gods got to be Gods for a reason. They were way, way better, over the long haul, than the run of silent comedians. No one denies a Fay Tincher or Ben Turpin a place in the pantheon. But the film comedy pecking order is pretty well set.

The cliché, like most clichés, is true: comedy is like music. If you watch enough comedy you get to know who has the chops and who doesn't. Silent comedy cannot be measured objectively but I believe it can be evaluated comparatively on the basis of collective experiences of silent comedy viewing.

Here are the categories in ascending order:

1. The Basics: mugging, takes, pratfalls, prop comedy.

2. Gags.

3. Filmmaking/Performance.

4. Sustained excellence of 1-3.

5. Influence, contemporary and enduring.

As I discuss the categories I'll spot comedians who I think top out in that particular category. Comedians 'top out' in the same sense that people 'top out' in income tax brackets ~ this is the highest bracket they reach [again, and for the last time, in my opinion].

The ranking of comedians in a particular category is cumulative. In other words, it's based on the comedian's entire silent career, not individual films or performances. A cumulative approach is problematic. I have not seen every single film of each comedian; and obviously missing films deprive us of the opportunity of gauging fully the comedian's accomplishments and talents. But I feel that enough films of most silent comedians, and certainly the best-known comedians, survive for an evaluation for the purposes of ranking to be made.

LEVEL ONE: THE BASICS

Level One consists of the basics: mugging or facial expressions, pratfalls and other stunts, takes, and use of props.

I think most of the silent comedians fall in Level One.

Lowest on the totem pole are what I call the Moustache Brigade. Ben Turpin. Billy West in his Chaplin impersonation period. Hank Mann. Chester Conklin. Heinie Conklin. Ford Sterling. Paul Parrott, Charley Chase's brother. Snub Pollard. Billy Bevan. Some of these guys had brilliant moments in films.

Some, like Mann and Turpin, worked very effectively with Chaplin. But on their own they were no better than hacks. Their mid-'20s films are not much different from their late 'teens films. They slapped on a moustache, did whatever the gagmen thought up for that day, got involved with the obligatory pretty girl and cop, and toddled off. There's a sameness to their work which doesn't wear well on repeated viewings. For the most part they seemed content to fill the exhibitors' quotas for short-reelers.

Next in Level One are the experts in a particular aspect of the basics. Lupino Lane was an acrobat and stunt artist second only to Keaton. But when you seen a run of Lane films you realize that the stunts are the highlights of his work.

The most memorable of the experts were the facial expression guys, the muggers. James Finlayson, who was to the double take and fade-away what Michael Jordan was to the lay-up; Harry Gribbon, who could convulse an audience by wandering on to the scene and, for no particular reason, scrunching up his face; Mack Swain, a lovable bear with woeful eyes; Max Davidson, the Jewish silent comic; Edgar Kennedy, master of the 'slow burn' take. These guys are charter members in the Muggers' Hall of Fame.

Mabel Normand and most of the comediennes are Level Ones. I love Mabel. She was a pioneer in the industry. She was a beautiful, spirited gamine. She stunted. She directed for Sennett. She had a good instinct for comedy, persuading Sennett to retain Arbuckle and Chaplin when Sennett wanted to let them go. She was a talented mugger, specializing in minute changes in facial expression to communicate her thoughts and emotions. But most of the comediennes were not given a chance to develop beyond level one because they didn't have the control over their productions that the male comedians had. Their feature film work was much more a matter of ensemble work, relatively restrained, semi-comedic scenarios with touches of melodrama rather than slapstick-based humor.

Other Level Ones:

*Our Gang/The Little Rascals: I know a lot of comedy fans love the kids. But let's be honest: the Gang was 80% the gagmen and 20% facial expressions, Pete the Pup shtick and, in the talkies, catchphrases.

*In the talkie era, the Three Stooges. Curly was a mugger of genius on par with Finlayson, Kennedy, et al. And Shemp had his moments as a mugger and take artist. After that, it's tiresome mayhem with gags recycled from 'teens/'20s films and vaudeville.

LEVEL TWO: GAGS

Gags are sustained bits of business resulting in some comedic pay-off. They usually involve some elaboration of plot, character or situation beyond mere mugging, takes, stunts and props, although mugging, takes, stunts and props are incorporated within the gag [each category discussed here is incorporated within the ascending categories]. Gags could be as straightforward as the structure of a joke, with a buildup and a punchline. Gags could consist of camera tricks involving the audience's perception of what's happening onscreen.

Some classic gags:

*Chaplin and Mack Swain are trapped in a cabin in THE GOLD RUSH. They're starving. Chaplin prepares a dinner out of a boiled shoe. They eat the shoe. Chaplin makes a gourmand out of his character by twirling the the laces like spaghetti and sucking on the hobnails as if they were bones. Here prop comedy [the boiled shoe being eaten] and performance [Chaplin's finesse in eating the shoe] are the bases for the gag to play itself out.

*In THE GENERAL Keaton is on the cowcatcher of the train. A railroad tie is lying across the track. Keaton picks up another railway tie and strikes at the end of the obstructive tie, causing it to teeter over and out of the way of Keaton's train. All of this is done in one take. Here Keaton's ingenuity in dislodging the tie and the camera technique of tracking his progress as he does so are the bases of the gag.

Some may wonder why the category of gags is placed at Level Two and not at a higher level. That's because I believe that gags are over-rated as an aspect of silent comedy. Gags are the next level beyond the basics of delivering humorous effects through gesture and props but gags are not the end result of silent comedy. There's a level beyond gags for gags' sake which I'll discuss next. Gags are generic, lifted from comedian to comedian with the regularity of the passing of the common cold, often the result of largely anonymous gagmen, and are usually, in the hands of the moustache brigade, no more than a bit of business thrown in to fill out a short-reeler.

Even the top echelon of silent comedy ~ Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Laurel & Hardy ~ lifted gags from others and employed gagmen. Harold Lloyd was, and in some silent comedy aficionado circles still is, notorious for the number of gagmen he employed, but Keaton employed a smaller but no less loyal stable of gagmen for his short and feature work; and even Chaplin was known to have employed gagmen and scenario writers, especially fellow English Music Hall alumni, on his films.

Occasionally a comedian rises above the same tired old variations on gags and gaglifting to become an original gag artist. Larry Semon may or may not make you laugh but he was an original gag creator who specialized in the more cartoonish, bizarre gags we've come to associate with classic comic strips of the 1900s-'20s and animated cartoons. Charley Chase was much more of situational comedian, placing his character in a relatively sophisticated farcical situation and working his way out of it with slapstick bits of business. Chase was a director and gagman in his own right and deserves credit for most of the success of his films. Lloyd Hamilton was a more erratic comedian due largely to his unfortunate bouts with alcoholism which seriously impaired his career. However when he was engaged in his work he was an original comedian with a gift for bizarre, witty, poetic gags of a high order. No less an authority than Keaton declared Hamilton to be one of the best silent comedians of them all. Max Linder, perhaps the first true international film comedy star, was also an inspired gag artist years before Mack Sennett and company opened shop in California. Raymond Griffith, a suave boulevardier in his '20s films, proves in his surviving work that he was an expert gag artist with a fine sense of the absurd. Charley Bowers made only a handful of combination live action/stop-motion animation films during the mid-'20s but anyone who has seen them knows that they are in the presence of an artist of genius. Bowers was an expert stop-motion animation filmmaker and a gag creator on par with Keaton and great cartoon animation directors such as Tex Avery, Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones. Had his work not fallen between the genres of animation and live action silent film, chances are he would be a lot less obscure.

And to return to the Moustache Brigade for a moment, think of all the possibilities inherent in gag creation. Watch some of the masters of the gag at work, like the comedians mentioned in the previous paragraph, or Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd and Laurel & Hardy. Keaton is the apotheosis of the gag technician. He was the master of all aspects of the gag: its creation; the scale of the gag, which in Keaton often reached epic proportions; the filming of the gag to optimize its potential to induce laughs; the stunning use of trick photography, most notably in 'The Playhouse' and SHERLOCK, JR., in gag creation; in the poetic beauty of space and motion in Keaton's films; in the sheer breakneck daredeviltry of Keaton's stuntwork. When you watch the work of Keaton and go back to a film starring a member of the Moustache Brigade, you realize the huge difference between a genius and a hack.

LEVEL THREE: FILMMAKING/PERFORMANCE

Given that the Level Two category is restricted to gags for the sake of gags, when is a gag not an end in itself? Answers to that question bring us to the third category, Filmmaking/Performance, the means of incorporating Levels One and Two within a grander scheme.

The first aspect, filmmaking, is self-explanatory. Keaton and Harold Lloyd were the best filmmakers of the silent comedians, with the edge going to Keaton because of his input on so many levels of film production. Keaton, as mentioned in the discussion on gags, was the best gag technician in film comedy. But Keaton's art went beyond the creation of gags. He sustained routines in choreographed chaos that would have done Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly proud. He situated camera, actors, and setting to maximize the potential of the gag. He orchestrated events with an inexorable logic which was at once brilliant funny and starkly beautiful. The chase in 'Cops'; the boulders running him down in SEVEN CHANCES; the motorcycle handle run in SHERLOCK, JR.; the cliff and rope segment in OUR HOSPITALITY; the cyclone climax in STEAMBOAT BILL, JR.; the cannon loaded painstakingly by him and eventually aimed his way in THE GENERAL; the search for the girl shipboard in THE NAVIGATOR, with the girl and Buster each near-missing each other while the camera, as if fed up with the cat and mouse game, sits in one spot and tracks the progress of the two hapless protagonists. The train heading for the house in 'One Week'. The boat smashing through the house in 'The Boat'. Perfectly thought out, perfectly shot, perfectly executed.

What Buster Keaton was to space, scale and motion, Harold Lloyd was to time and incident. No other comedian was as artful as Lloyd in stringing together a series of seemingly random occurrences which built and built and built until the comedian was inextricably caught up in some nightmarish trap. SAFETY LAST and Lloyd's climb up the building is the most obvious example, but his best routines demonstrated an almost uncanny ability to orchestrate the most contrived situations into comic masterpieces. The film HOT WATER is one of Lloyd's lesser silent features, but in its three basic scenarios he demonstrates his ability to weave comic situations into an intricate and hilarious pattern. The courtship scenes in GRANDMA'S BOY [with Mildred Davis on the couch], and with Jobyna Ralston in GIRL SHY, THE FRESHMAN and THE KID BROTHER, are superb examples as well of Lloyd's ability to blend the comic, romantic and pathetic with seeming ease.

Performance brings us to Chaplin. Chaplin was the greatest actor in silent film. He did so many things so well that his work is sometimes taken for granted. After he had invented more gags than the industry could lift, he deepened the art immeasurably by drawing on his personal experiences and refracting them throughout his '20s features. THE KID is obviously Chaplin's reminiscences and wish-fulfilment fantasies about his boyhood. More obliquely, THE GOLD RUSH and THE CIRCUS are references to Chaplin's anxieties with fame, the fickle moviegoing public and women. Death in a cold, lonely place was what Hollywood must have felt like to Chaplin during the middle of his career, and the GOLD RUSH reflects this bleakness. THE CIRCUS is Chaplin's reflection on his life and art, anticipating Fellini by about forty years. CITY LIGHTS seems sentimental superficially, with its blind flower girl and its capricious millionaire. But nothing is that simple in Chaplin's universe, and the girl could be a fitting metaphor for Chaplin's beloved mother, who went irreversibly mad and detached from reality before Chaplin became a celebrity. The capricious millionaire, outrageously benevolent and cruel by turns, may be a portrait of Chaplin himself. When you explore Chaplin's life and work, and realize that the links between the two are so tightly bound that Chaplin himself could not tell you the sources of his art, you begin to realize that the bravura play of gags, sentiment and performance are mere surface aspects of Chaplin's art. He was silent film's only true fullblooded artist, for his '20s feature films sprung from a personal vision of himself and those who left the deepest psychic resonances on him.

Other Level Threes:

*Roscoe Arbuckle was a filmmaker and gag creator of the first rank, an often-overlooked comedy technician who made delightful gag comedies in the shadow of Chaplin's genius during the late 'teens. Arbuckle's films are full of inspired gags, lovely and wild flights of fancy and, especially in his work with Mabel Normand, such as 'Fatty and Mabel Adrift', a deft charm rare in silent comedies of the period. His post-scandal directorial work does not give us an adequate picture of where he could have taken silent comedy.

*Harry Langdon. I suspect most silent comedy aficionados would place Langdon as, at best, a talented Level One comedian, down there with Finlayson, Kennedy and other talented muggers. But Langdon was much more than an artful pantomimist. He was closest to Chaplin in terms of sheer performance. He established a persona which, however much it may grate on the nerves of silent comedy aficionados then and now, was a unique, poetic, beautifully realized construct. He took chances with comedy ~ with timing, with sustaining a routine with virtually nothing but his art as a pantomimist, with building a routine only to have the punchline come as the most delicate change of facial expression. In terms of comedic timing and the prevailing conventions of silent comedy construction during the mid-'20s Langdon took as many nervy chances as Keaton took physically and Chaplin took artistically. That Langdon failed as much or more often than he succeeded is due in no small part to the vagaries of film comedy collaboration, star ego, the inability to sustain a mass audience for one's work, shifts in the taste of a fickle movie-going public and other exigencies of pop culture. Langdon accomplished enough to rank as a solid Level Three silent comedian.

LEVEL FOUR: SUSTAINED EXCELLENCE OF LEVELS ONE-THREE

Langdon's short stay near the top of the heap and his rapid decline before the decade's end are emblematic of the importance of a too easily overlooked aspect of comedic excellence: the sheer endurance of sustained excellence. It's relatively easy for a Moustache Brigade veteran to do basically the same thing over and over again for the better part of ten years or more. It's something else entirely to renew your creative energies for a prolonged period, maintain not only your artistic excellence but a popular audience as well, and keep growing as an artist.

Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd were unique among the silent comedians for driving themselves and their audience to new levels of artistic brilliance. Not all their work is as a steady progression. Keaton's COLLEGE, GO WEST, and BATTLING BUTLER, Lloyd's HOT WATER, DR. JACK, FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE, Chaplin's short films of the '20s, represent regressions of varying degrees from their best work. But they consistently broke through with new twists on old themes, new levels of performance and gag construction. Even when they appeared to have taken a step back, they redeemed themselves. Chaplin followed THE CIRCUS with CITY LIGHTS, perhaps his single greatest film. Keaton, minus most of his crew of gagmen and his best cameraman, Elgin Lessley, went on to make THE GENERAL. Lloyd seemed tired in FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE, lost the services of Sam Taylor and Fred Newmeyer, his main directorial unit during his early-mid'20s period, regrouped, and made THE KID BROTHER, which for many silent film aficonados stands alongside CITY LIGHTS and THE GENERAL as one of the greatest of all silent comedies.

LEVEL FIVE: INFLUENCE, CONTEMPORARY AND ENDURING

A comedian who pulls his or her way through the four previous levels exerts an influence as strong as a planet's gravity on the course of contemporary and future comedians and filmmakers.

That Chaplin exploded the boundaries of film comedy with each successive phase in his career, much like Picasso exploded the boundaries of art with each successive phase of his career, is either known too well or too often taken for granted. You have to have a sense of what film comedy was like before, during and after Chaplin's career to get an inkling of the immense impact he made on 20th century culture. He found a form that was no more than malformed commercial tripe to those watching it, making it and exploiting it; he turned it, singlehandedly, in to an art form. That has to be understood: art and film comedy were so far apart when Chaplin refashioned the nature of the game in the mid-'teens that most people cannot watch, even with grim amusement, most slapstick film comedy of the pre-Chaplin period. And, in THE KID, when Chaplin took the elements of Dickensian melodrama and grafted on to it the sleight of hand slapstick and gesture that form the essence of his performing art, grafting a Music Hall comic's insouciance and seemingly negligable ease without sacrificing one whit of the emotional power of the story of an orphaned boy who could very well have been Chaplin himself ~ when Chaplin did that, after he had shaped virtually all of slapstick comedy from the mid-'teens to '20 ~ to dismiss Chaplin's accomplishments, from THE KID to CITY LIGHTS, as creaky, Dickensian and overly sentimental is to be either wilfully or stupidly blind to one of the great accomplishments of artistic creation in our century.

Enough has been said about Keaton in earlier passages to give somewhat of the sense of that genius' impact on film comedy.

Harold Lloyd seems less impressive as an influence when compared with Chaplin and Keaton but it's easy to overlook the fact that Lloyd's work was actually more influential since it was easiest to steal. Lloyd created nothing new. The path of his career is a neat correlative to the categories outlined in this piece. He went from being perhaps the lamest of the Moustache Brigade during the mid-'teens ~ a guy who shouldn't have been in the same room with Ford Sterling or Snub Pollard ~ to the only film comedian to withstand comparison, over the long haul, with Chaplin and Keaton. What Lloyd did better than any of his contemporaries was to assimilate all the conventions of the period. Starting at ground zero with a minimal grasp of slapstick technique, he took popular stage and film juvenile melodrama, meshed it with elaborately choreographed slapstick matched only by Keaton, and blended the two disparate elements in to a cross-genre which liberated the sentimental narrative from overt sappiness and fully realized the potential of slapstick as a medium of expression. It's only within the last ten years or so, thanks largely to the Kevin Brownlow-David Gill restorations of some of Lloyd's silent features, that he's finally been accorded the recognition and acknowledgement he has long deserved.

Oliver Hardy would have been a Level One genius for his takes and facial expressions if he had never teamed with Stan Laurel. Laurel had all the tools to rank with Chaplin and Keaton as the greatest of all silent comedians. Together Laurel & Hardy made virtually the only great silent short-reelers of the late '20s. During the '30s their exponential growth in popularity, artistic genius and enduring popularity among comedy aficionados, filmmakers and performers places them squarely in the highest ranking of comedic greatness.

Argue the rankings all you want. But a true appreciation of silent film comedy begins with an understanding of what the comedians did and how far they took the form. One classic moment in a Hank Mann comedy does not place Hank Mann on the same footing as Chaplin, even in the most democratic of comedy heavens. Give the great ones credit: they passed through a few circles to get where they were. A few more circles than Jimmy Aubrey passed through, at any rate.

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