The Comedy of Charlie Chaplin

1

IT IS the ambition of every newspaper cartoonist to get published in something that won’t be used to wrap fish in the next morning, and so, the other day, I was writing a book. It was a book about comedy. I came to the part about Charlie Chaplin, remembered some of his gags, and wrote about them. Then, when I read what I had written, I stopped, because I was afraid my memory had been playing tricks on me. Was he that good? I had to know. After some nagging, United Artists arranged a screening for me of the only Chaplin film then available in its New York office. It was City Lights. It hadn’t been out of the can in years.

In the projection room were about a dozen people: United Artists publicity men and executives (whose idea of escape from the drabness of their lives is to not go to the movies), two girls, and a Wife. The girls were a couple of cute secretaries who wandered into the projection room to wait wearily, because they had dates with the executives, and the Wife had suddenly turned up, I rather think, because the excuse of her executive husband that he had to stay late at the office because some cartoonist with influence wanted to see a twenty-year-old movie sounded to her like the kind of lie he might whip up to cover up the fact that he had a date with one of the secretaries.

Nobody in that projection room really wanted to be there except me, and I was pretty uncertain myself. Here I was taking the chance that a second look, after all those years, might prove that Chaplin wasn’t such a hell of an artist after all.

Then, at the opening shot, everybody began to laugh. And for an hour and a half we all roared and howled and bellowed with delight, until the final scene. This is when the blind girl, no longer blind, realizes that the miserable little tramp to whom she is giving a quarter is the dream knight of her blindness; and when the tramp realizes that the masquerade is over and that she knows him as the ludicrous, flea-bitten thing he is, and when his heart is both overflowing with joy that she can see, and breaking with sadness that she can see him.

So shattering was the tragedy of those last few minutes that, when the lights went on, none of us in that projection room dared look at the others. While we’d laughed, we had been delighted to laugh openly and in concert, but suddenly (although all through the masterpiece are forebodings of its final tragedy) our hearts had been touched, and we were embarrassed for our tears, and ashamed to look one another in the face. Because in each face was the thing that men are most ashamed for other men to see, and that is self-pity.

Terrible disasters had happened to Chaplin all through the film — and the more terrible they were, the harder we laughed. For we were laughing at him. And then, because he is the most understanding and exquisite of artists, Chaplin’s final tragedy became somehow our tragedy. He entered into us. We felt then all he felt, and the pity in us was no longer pity for a thing apart, because that comes out laughter; it was pity for a thing that great art had made a part of ourselves, and we were all embarrassed—each for the others as well as himself— when the lights went on.

Well, I had taken a second look, and I’d found that I was right the first time, only not right enough.

All comedy is based on man’s delight in man’s inhumanity to man. I know that is so, because I have made forty million people laugh more or less every day for sixteen years, and this has been the basis of all the comedy I have created. I think it is the basis of all comedy.

But I had forgotten, until I saw Chaplin again, that comedy can become sublime when it makes men sorrow at man’s inhumanity to man by making men pity themselves.

When the history of art in our time is written, and when the ideological passions of our time are laughable curios, the great artist that our time has produced will be recognized as Charlie Chaplin.

Just as Shakespeare’s Hamlet was, at first, regarded as a good job done by a well-known entertainer who had done other good jobs; and was applauded, forgotten, and then looked at again by another generation (whose added respect this entertainer had earned by now being dead), and only then discovered to be a job so very good, indeed, that it was better than any other job ever done — so will Chaplin’s City Lights take its place among those works of art that men cherish and revere and use as proof that they are not animals, but have in them a touch of divinity, since one of their kind created this.

City Lights was released in 1929. It was a great success, it made a lot of money, everyone saw it and then it was forgotten. Because, after all, it was merely a movie, and we all know that a work of art can endure only if it is done on canvas or printed on a page, because those are the traditional, respectable materials of art, and a can of film is not.

2

FOR anyone whose profession is to be visual comedy, it is as necessary to study the work of Charlie Chaplin as it is for the engineer to study mathematics. It is a crime that our libraries and schools don’t have permanent examples of his work, as they do of the work of Michelangelo and Mozart. They should be available to students not only of visual comedy but of fine arts, sociology, history, ballet, drama and composition, as are all masterworks.

In the Chaplin films you will find thousands of miraculously funny gags (and no matter how much they’ve been copied, his originals have still a pure, bright freshness). You will find scores of unique characters, each warmly funny because, no matter how wildly they’re drawn, they’re based on real, instantly recognizable types. You’ll find a treasuretrove of hilarious and intricate comedy situations — you’ll find everything that comedy is made of. But the most important thing you’ll find is this; that for all his dazzling succession of gags, characters, and situations, Charlie Chaplin told again and again, with infinite variation, one story the story of man’s inhumanity to man. And that is a very funny story.

You say you remember the Chaplin pictures and they were all about pie-throwing, cop-beingchased-by, and the horribly efficient machines that fed miserable helpless factory workers automatically, so they wouldn’t have to stop using their hands to work? Well, analyze any Chaplin picture, any Chaplin gag. For instance, an old classic called The Pilgrim.

The title itself is a comment on the cruel foolishness of a familiar kind of American thinking. With us that word “Pilgrim” has come to exude a certain rich, ripe, aristocratic air. To be descended from “the Pilgrims” means you are, somehow, a better, a realer, a little more than merely 100 per cent American. It means to some people (and you’ll find ‘em in Congress and on committees to “protect” and “preserve” their own idea of “ real ” Americanism) that they have a right to be stuffy and irritated about the coming to this country of the ragtag and refuse of Europe and Asia. Some Americans feel that, because they are descended from the Pilgrims, they are our aristocracy, and hence have a right to yammer and complain about other pilgrims.

So Chaplin, who told in his picture the story of a boatload of frightened, starving, sniveling, dirty, depressed D.P.’s of twenty years ago, called the most miserable of ‘em all — the character he played “‘The Pilgrim to remind us gently that those who rant and rave against the coming to America of today’s D.P.’s are the children of precisely the same kind of D. P.’s of a not her day. The title itself is a reminder to man that his inhumanity to his fellow man is one of the most ridiculous things about him.

One of the first scenes of this comedy classic is a delicious example of Chaplin’s carrying of man’s inhumanity to man to its ultimate absurdity - namely, the inhumanity of men other men have been inhuman to.

The refugees travel steerage of course. They are given one meal a day; one bowl of slops. But not quite one bowl, because at mealtime, while there are two rows of refugees seated, facing each other across the table, there is only one row of bowls. Which row of refugees gets a chance at the slops depends on which way the boat rolls, because, while the poor starving wretches must remain seated where they are, drooling and clutching their spoons, the slop bowls slither from one side to the other with the crazy rhythm of the boat.

And for twenty years, audiences have been laughing their heads off at this scene.

Why?

It is because we are eternally delighted at the inhumanity of man to man.

First, at the colossal evil of the shipowners who have devised such a simple and satanic scheme to degrade and cheat their most helpless guests. And second, at the crookedness of the helpless themselves, as they, in turn, devise little ways to cheat each other out of a morsel of slops here, a morsel there.

And the fact that countless audiences of normal, decent human beings have screamed with happy, carefree laughter at this almost unbearably heartrending scene is a further and highly helpful example of real man’s inhumanity to cinema man.

3

NEXT to Death, man’s greatest fear is Hunger. Yet Chaplin has made us laugh at his hunger. In The Tramp we first see him a starving bum, looking hungrily into the window of a cheap restaurant, watching a fat man being served a huge steak. The starving, fascinated bum drools.

Now right here is where everybody in the audience begins to grin. Chaplin’s starvation gives us a nice, warm feeling. We feel nice and warm because, unlike that poor soul, we know we’re going to eat after the show. His misery emphasizes our security. And thinking of our security makes us feel good, so we grin. Not starving is a nice thing. And nice things make us grin.

On with the story. The fat man cuts the steak with a flourish and lifts a juicy morsel to his mouth. The fascinated bum unconsciously mimics every move. He’s lost in a dream world of steak. The fat man tentatively munches the morsel, the bum munches his dream morsel; he is floating in ecstasy until he sees that the fat man has suddenly stopped munching and is looking indignant. The bum instantly stops munching too, and he looks indignant, although he doesn’t know what the hell they’re both so indignant about. The fat man roars to the waiter that his steak is too rare, and orders him to take it back. The fat man is the second most furious person in the scene. The first most furious is the bum. You see, he was having a wonderful time with that dream steak until the fat man ordered it taken away. The fat man will get his real steak back. The bum won’t ever again get his dream steak. His dream has been shattered. And we sit there, watching this pitiful scene, and roar with laughter.

We didn’t laugh because we were heartless wretches. We laughed because we are normal human beings, full of self-doubt, full of vague feelings of inferiority, full of a desperate need to be reassured. Somehow that whole scene made us feel superior. First, no matter how badly off any one of us was, we were till in better shape than that bum. The fact that we’d had enough spare cash to buy a ticket to that movie made us superior to him. That was the first thing that made us feel good. Next, we saw him starving. That wasn’t going to happen to us — another reason for feeling superior, better off at least than one person.

As the scene continued, it gave us a feeling of emotional and intellectual superiority. That was when the bum, so immersed in the sight of the fat man cutting the steak, began to imagine that he had a steak. He had been happy munching his dream steak. He had become wildly, luxuriously lost in his dream. He didn’t know that he was, inevitably, due for a terrible shock when he realized that the steak wasn’t real. But we did. We were way ahead of him. We had the inside dope and we delightedly anticipated his hideous disappointment when he found out something we’d known all along. We laughed because we were smarter than he was. We laughed because we were pleased with this tiny reassurance of our own superiority.

A millionaire passes in a limousine. He looks at a silver dollar dubiously—he bites it. It bends slightly. He grimaces. It’s a counterfeit. He throws it out into the gutter. The bum finds it. Delirious with joy, he rushes into the tough restaurant and, drunk with power, orders a plate of beans.

And the people laugh.

Why?

Because we’re smarter than he is and that makes us feel good. We know plenty that he doesn’t know. He thinks he’s rich. We know he isn’t. He thinks he’s going to have a fine time. We know better.

The bum devours his first plate of beans and orders another. All the time, he lovingly fingers his silver dollar, he polishes it on his sleeve, he kisses it. He trusts that silver dollar—it gives him confidence, security, dignity; it gives him a, place in the world. It even gives him the right to be nasty to the ape-waiter, whose fatness he had been admiring just a moment ago, before the silver dollar.

Now the ape-waiter pretends to admire him! The silver dollar has changed everything. The waiter hopes to got the change from it as a tip.

We laugh because we know the bum is going to get a beating from the waiter when he finds out, and although we’re sorry for the bum, we’re going to enjoy the beating.

Well, Chaplin finds out before the waiter does. While the ape is off to bring him his third plate of beans, he drops the silver dollar. It doesn’t ring true. It makes a dull, lead-like thud. Sweating, he bites it. It bends, horribly. It’s a phony. The world comes crashing down around the bum’s head.

We laugh — we smell blood.

The waiter brings his third plate of beans and indicates that his working day is up. He’d like Chaplin to hurry through this, pay for it, tip him, and let him go home. Chaplin miserably giggles that of course he’ll hurry. He wouldn’t dream of keeping him waiting. He indicates that he too is a man of affairs, and can’t afford to linger over a mere plate of beans. His assurances are elaborate and verbose, and take up a lot of time. That’s what the poor wretch wants to do — take up a lot of time before the inescapable revelation comes and he is beaten to a pulp.

We laugh at Chaplin’s pitiful, transparent lies. He hopes to avert the massacre, but we know he can’t. Sitting there in the theater, we are all gods on Olympus, watching an inferior being trying to escape the destiny we, in our omniscience, know must be his. Gosh, we feel good, even the most miserable of us.

As the waiter cuts off Chaplin’s long-winded explanation of how fast he’ll eat the beans, and tolls him to get on with it, the fat man (the one who likes his steak well done) is whizzed by the table, being beaten to a bloody pulp by a dozen ape-waiters. Chaplin’s own ape-waiter explains this: “He was,” he tells him, “a nickel short.”

The audience screams with joy.

The poor bum knows now that, if he ever finishes that plate of beans, his fate will be a thousandfold bloodier. Studiously averting the waiter’s impatient eve, he makes an elaborate and pitiful ceremony of each bean. First be carefully selects one, after much thought (a lovely bit, because no two things look more alike, or taste more alike, or have less individual personality, than beans from the same plate). Having thoughtfully selected trom the thousand the one bean which at that moment seemed most to suit his mood, he doesn’t eat it. He peels it. He slices it. He seasons each half of each bean. He tastes one half, puts it back, tastes the other. He thinks about the taste, as a gourmet would ponder over rare wines.

And we laugh because we know how futile it all is — we know how sick he feels inside, how terrified he is, how hopeless he is — and so, naturally, we feel great.

Chaplin, more than any other comic of our time, understood his fellow man’s pitiful and cruel mixture of insecurity and inhumanity.

A few years ago, Chaplin was shown around a great automobile factory. Its owners were mighty proud of their new gadgets. They were proud because their new gadgets were time-saving. Chaplin was horrified because they were also mankilling.

The superiority of gadget to man, the slavery of man to gadget, was to him a hilarious perversion of the only sane reason for the gadget — namely, to make man’s life easier.

So Chaplin made a picture called Modern Times. In it he played a harassed little worker in a gigantic factory, because this worker had become part of the gadget he operated, he had become utterly dehumanized. He moved jerkily, in complete coordination with the time-saving gadget, instead of gracefully and inefficiently like one of those timewasting human beings; he ate when the gadget fed him and not simply when he was hungry, like a sloppy and unreliable man; he didn’t waste time thinking— the gadget worked perfectly, so that wasn’t necessary. There was one thing, however, that the gadget couldn’t do — it couldn’t go to the toilet for him.

This was very humiliating to his boss, and it worried that good man considerably — but in the toilet he had another gadget. When Chaplin had been there long enough (according to scientific schedules, time-charts, and Gallup polls), a vast face of his boss appeared on a screen above the bowl and told him to stop fooling around and get the hell back to work.

Well, people howled at Modern Times, and industry howled to Chaplin. It was un-American, said they, to make people laugh at the inhumanity of gadget to man. Gadgets, they claimed, were a blessing to man. It had been okay for the comic to make people laugh at a vaguely inhuman Society that generally kicked ‘em around, but it was unfair, and unsporting really, to make people laugh at a specific system of dignified industrial “efficiency" that robbed them of their dignity as human beings.

4

IN practicing the art of love, men endure their most terrible confusions, miseries, and disasters. No matter how great and certain a man may have become in every other area of his life, in courtship (trying to convince a certain sweet someone that you are the sweetest someone ever produced by a certain other sex) all men are unsure, fumbling, and feel rotten most of the time.

No confused, despondent lover ever saw a Chaplin picture who didn’t come away feeling considerably cheered up. Cheered up because, no matter how inept in his love-making he had been, he had seen someone even more inept; no matter that the fair object of his affections had been unresponsive, the girl Chaplin courted had been downright contemptnous. Chaplin understood that the surest way to delight a world of lovers who suffered because they weren’t loved enough was to show them a lover who wasn’t loved at all.

There was always a beautiful girl in the Chaplin pictures. And the only reason she had anything to do with Chaplin was that nobody else wanted her because of some terrible handicap — terrible to everyone except Chaplin, who was grateful for any attention from any girl, no matter what was wrong with her, just as long as she was recognizably a girl and recognizably alive. The instant, however, the girl was all right again, she would inevitably abandon Chaplin.

The alter defeat of Chaplin as a lover made our own unsatisfactory romances seem much less humiliating. Nothing that ever happened to any of us could possibly be as disappointing as what always happened to him.

At least, if we had been spurned by a Beloved, there was something left. Hope. Hope that another, less ambitiously selected or more wisely courted, Beloved would accept us. We had a chance. Not Chaplin. Nobody wanted him. Nobody ever would.

We laughed at Chaplin’s romances because no matter how often we had been licked, we could get started again and it might come out good; and because, on the other hand (and a comforting thing it was for us to realize), no matter how often he started again, it couldn’t come out anything but bad, because he was licked before he started.

We knew that once the lame girl who looked fondly up at him from her wheelchair could walk, she’d walk away from him. We knew that the starving dance-hall blowzer who had agreed to come to his little cabin for dinner would forget him and that date the minute anyone in the saloon offered to feed her there, because what she was interested in wasn’t romance—it was fast chow. We knew that the blind girl was sweet to him only because she couldn’t see him, and that the instant she could, she’d laugh her pretty head off at him.

We felt fine watching Chaplin’s courtships because he gave us a couple of things that make men feel fine. Omniscience; we knew something the poor little bum didn’t know —that he didn’t have a chance. We knew something that would have crushed his hopeful heart if he were as wise as his art had made us; we knew his desperate, eager efforts were all in vain. We knew that no girl would ever want him, and that emphasized the fact that some girl would or did want us, and that gave us the other thing that makes men feel fine, security.

In my own work — this is a footnote—I have tried to make cheerier a world of disappointed lovers. No lover is ever anything but disappointed, since the greatest of all disappointments is the final triumphant possession of the love one has dreamt of having. It’s never as wonderful as your dreams of it, because there are no limits to wonderfulness in dreaming. I try to make a disappointed lover feel better by having “Li’l Abner” never know what to do about a succession of eager, luscious girls who throw their juicy selves at him. “Li’l Abner” doesn’t know what to do, and so he does nothing. And that makes every male who reads “Li’l Abner” feel fine. Because he would know what to do. No matter how fumbling or stupid he has been, compared with “Li’l Abner” he’s Don Juan. It makes him feel fine to be Don Juan. So he feels fine about “Li’l Abner.”

The more secure a man feels, the more ready he is to laugh. So Chaplin — the instant he appeared — gave us all a feeling of security. Certainly none of us, no matter how badly off we were, were as badly off as this bundle of rags.

Let’s go back to the picture I began with, City Lights. In it Chaplin, homeless, penniless, nervous about cops, meets a very rich man. We know that he has millions, not because he wears a silk hat and white tie well, but because he wears them badly and sloppily. This guy is so rich that he is contemptuous of attire that would overawe a less rich man. Also he is very drunk. He is so drunk that he does not cringe from Chaplin in distaste. He embraces Chaplin. He tells the little bum that he loves him and is going to show him a good time. Chaplin is deliriously happy and so we laugh at him.

We know that the rich man, once he sobers up, will loathe ihe pitiful little bum. We know that Chaplin’s security isn’t going to last, and ours to a degree is. Chaplin is at the mercy of a rich drunk’s whim. If things go badly — that is, if the drunk sobers up — Chaplin will have nothing. We are better off than somebody. We are such a hell of a lot better off than he is that he has made us feel secure and protected and we laugh.

Arm in arm, the slobbering millionaire and the little bum wander off in search of food and fun. After a night of wild, expensive revelry, arm in arm they lurch back to the millionaire’s town house. The butler, a man of aristocratic impulses although a servant, wants to beat up the tramp and toss him back into the gutter. But the millionaire still loves him. The bum is his li’l pal. He is to be given everything in the house.

Chaplin takes on airs and graces. He orders the butler around. He snaps his fingers in his face. The butler grinds his teeth and waits. He knows that his master will be sober in the morning. He knows that in the morning his master will see the bum as clearly as he does. He knows that the bum will get his, and we know it, but the bum doesn’t.

The millionaire wakes up. He is terribly sober. He sees the bum sleeping next to him. He calls the butler in and asks who it is. Brutally aroused, the bewildered bum pleads with the millionaire to remember their everlasting, to-the-death friendship of only a few short hours before. The millionaire looks at him coldly, uncomprehendingly, and with distaste. He orders the butler to throw him out.

Disillusioned and embittered, the little bum resumes his miserable existence. Months pass. One night a figure in top hat and tails lurches out of a gaudy café and throws his arms around him. It is the millionaire again. Again he is plastered, and again he loves the little bum, with a passion that knows no bounds. He weeps that their friendship is everlasting, that he will fight for him to the death, that everything he has is his, and he wants to give him a big party. At first the little bum is suspicious. He has been fooled before. But as the millionaire continues to slobber over him, that old look of love and trust comes back into the bum’s eyes. And this is where we laugh loudest. The little bum is such a sucker. We would know enough, even the dumbest of us, never again to trust that man. But Chaplin isn’t smart. He isn’t even as smart as we are. We feel fine.

And that’s what a comedian is for, isn’t he? To make people feel fine?