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Dying is Easy - Comedy is Hard

Dying is easy – comedy is hard. This show biz byword has been around for ages, but no one knows who said it first. It has been attributed to Donald Crisp and to Edmund Gwenn on his deathbed, but it may go back to some unsung vaudeville comic. Its meaning is clear, and comic actors often insist that comedy is harder to play than drama.

Why should this be? Certain styles of comedy (romantic comedy, character comedy, satire) require a light touch that looks easy but requires precision and control. Line readings are everything. A comic actor must take a well-written line and knock it out of the park. Comic actors may work obliquely. Where a tragedian shows us anguish to earn our sympathy, the comedian often earns our laughter without any show of mirth, perhaps playing exasperation, pettiness, or hypocrisy. Comics like Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel, Harpo Marx, and Curly Howard create otherworldly screen characters which they play with conviction, never letting the mask slip, although in Keaton and Laurel’s cases particularly, they were heavily involved in the technical business of each gag and sequence. Finally, physical comedy requires grace, athletic skill, and the ability to do bits of business with props. And timing, always timing.

Here is a look at three vintage comedies and the performances that make them classics.

City Lights (1931)

This is Charlie Chaplin’s most critically acclaimed film, and, although many fans prefer Modern Times, it is City Lights that appears most often on lists of the all-time greatest films. It is the story of The Tramp’s infatuation with a blind girl (Virginia Cherrill) and only Limelight equals it in Chaplin’s canon as a mixture of humor and pathos.

Pathos is perilous territory for the artist.   The heavy sentiment in City Lights must be met as one accepts (or rejects) Les Miserables or David Copperfield. Chaplin’s script shamelessly draws on our pity for the blind flower girl. This is balanced by some of his finest comic sequences: the opening, where Charlie upsets the unveiling of a statue; the gag with the freight elevator which follows; the manic sequences with Harry Myers as a drunk millionaire; and the incredible choreographed prize fright, which took four days to rehearse and six days to shoot. There is also ingenious storytelling. Note the chain of circumstance from which the blind girl comes to assume that Charlie is a rich man.

In fact, this film of pure and basic elements was shot and reshot over a full two years. Chaplin’s comedy triumphs in concealing his obsessive search for the perfect gesture and gag structure; it is a light and fluid art born of rigor and attention to detail.

The ending is Chaplin’s most dramatic use of The Tramp. The famous closing scene was first attempted in November 1929, but not completed until a week of intense work in September 1930. The Tramp has been to prison, and when we see him again on the street he is no longer a figure of comic shabbiness; he appears ill, bitter, and destroyed by life. Now, when taunted by the same newsboys he encountered at the start of the film, he is a pathetic victim. The final shot is a gift to the audience which I won’t fully describe, except to say that Chaplin worked and reworked it, and, according to Norman Lloyd, who heard it from Chaplin; he finally achieved it by thinking of nothing. If this is true, then two of the most famous closing shots of the ‘30s, this and Garbo’s in Queen Christina, were brought off by using a mental blank as an acting technique.

Private Lives (1931)

It is a commonplace that It Happened One Night inspired a wave of romantic comedies. There is some substance to this, and Capra’s film starring Norma Shearer and Robert Montgomery is a miracle production, of which one would not change a single frame. But romantic comedy already had a successful tradition in film, with stars like Constance Talmadge, Reginald Denny, Harold Lloyd, and Marion Davies. Early talkie entries include The Love Parade (1929) and Laughter (1930) which play somewhat creaky today; One Hour with You(1932), Love Me Tonight (1932), and Pleasure Cruise (1933), a stylish delight with Genevieve Tobin, Roland Young, and Ralph Forbes, which, with bigger box office names, would be on everyone’s best-of list.

Shearer and Montgomery carry on the tradition with witty performances in MGM’s production of Noel Coward’s Private Lives. They are Amanda and Elyot, remarried exes who meet up on their second honeymoons and resume their fiery romance. This was Montgomery’s forte, not so much Shearer’s. With typical thoroughness, MGM commissioned a film of the stage production for the cast to study in preproduction.

The actors who play these finicky types must act out each snit as if it decided a point of world diplomacy. Montgomery has a wonderful line to his new wife: “Don’t quibble, Sybil!” After reams of quibbling dialogue among the two couples, Coward throws in the dynamite, a slapstick smackdown between Amanda and Elyot. Shearer and Montgomery grab the moment gleefully. The battle starts when Amanda breaks a jazz record on Elyot’s head. He slaps her. After a stunned moment, Norma Shearer tosses out a career’s worth of gentility in one blood-curdling shriek. In the melee that follows, she’s more than his equal. She throws herself into a comic frenzy, unlike any scene in her other films. Two stories, impossible to verify, have followed this scene. Supposedly, the slap that sends Montgomery falling through a decorative screen was unplanned. Even harder to believe: in one unused take, Shearer knocked him out with a punch to the jaw.

The result is engaging. Amanda and Elyot are glamorous neurotics whose only hope seems to be a bumpy future together. It’s boudoir comedy, and it was a vehicle for Coward and Gertrude Lawrence in the ‘30s, Talullah Bankhead and Donald Cook in the ‘40s, and Burton and Taylor in the ‘80s, among a long list of revivals. Private Lives would make a fine double bill with The Awful Truth. Its star duo showed that Hollywood could pull off a sophisticated Noel Coward piece, with most of its dialogue intact.

Their First Mistake (1932)

This short, one of Laurel and Hardy's best from one of their best years, is included in the compilation set Laurel and Hardy, The Essential Collection. Ollie quarrels with his wife, Arabella (Mae Busch at full boil), who is angry over the amount of time he spends with Stan. When Stan appears at their apartment door, she explodes, and attacks them both with a broom. They flee to Stan’s dumpy apartment, which is so small they end up lolling on his bed.

The ensuing dialogue, in which Stan convinces Ollie that adopting a baby will save his marriage, is one of the team’s most inventive sequences. As they talk, they shift positions, from sprawling to sitting, until the restless Stan lies on his back and swings his feet over his head, continuing the action to polish his shoes with some hanging bedclothes. All of this mimicking the actions of impulsive eight-year-olds, and they carry it off without missing a beat of the conversation.

From what we know of the team, Stan was the guiding hand in this scene, and it helped that Hal Roach was the producer. Roach’s work with Harold Lloyd, Charley Chase, and Laurel & Hardy shows a producer who gave creative freedom to his stars. Laurel and Hardy’s best years were the 13 they spent on the Roach lot. In their later work, primarily at Fox, they fell into the straitened production style that plagued Buster Keaton at MGM. Their comedy suffered when their employers left them out of creative decisions.

The rest of Their First Mistake shows Stan and Ollie returning to Ollie’s flat with a baby they have somehow adopted. A process server (Billy Gilbert) informs them that Arabella is suing Ollie for divorce – and Stan for alienation of Ollie’s affections! The two argue about the baby, and the script (uncredited, although the dialogue in their Roach shorts was usually by H.M. Walker) has some satiric lines comparing them to illicit lovers.

Ollie: “You were the one that wanted me to have a baby. And now that you’ve gotten me into this trouble, you want to walk out and leave me flat.”

An extended slapstick sequence follows, with the boys trying to quiet the baby for bedtime, creating chaos instead. The film might have been better as a three-reeler, for it ends abruptly, and Mae Busch never returns for a second meltdown as expected. But this is still prime L & H, a classic, with the team drawing laugh after laugh from the most basic of setups. Laurel as the lamblike, absent-minded man-child, and pompous Hardy, supposedly the smart one, but just as prone to idiocy; these are totally inhabited characters in a landscape full of potential disaster. We usually think of Tracy, Olivier, Bogart or Streep when the subject is nuance and strategy in acting. Watch Laurel and Hardy at their best and, between laughs, appreciate the absolute conviction in their performances and the extensive use of gesture, posture, inflection, and dramatic pause. Comic masters played these fools.