STORY

Before movies could talk, they learned how to make us laugh.

A man slips on a banana peel. A policeman gets kicked in the backside. A tiny fellow in a bowler hat and oversized shoes strolls into trouble. A stone-faced young man stands perfectly still while the entire world collapses around him. Two friends attempt the simplest task imaginable and somehow reduce everything around them to rubble.

More than a century later, we're still laughing.

Welcome to ABSOLUTELY FUNNY, where AIN celebrates the comedians, filmmakers, writers and fearless physical performers who built screen comedy, and the generations who took what they invented and made us laugh all over again.

The story begins near the birth of cinema itself.

Early filmmakers quickly discovered something extraordinary about moving pictures: laughter didn't require language. A chase, a pratfall, a raised eyebrow or one perfectly timed reaction could cross borders and cultures.

Then came Mack Sennett.

Sennett founded Keystone Studios in 1912 and helped transform movie comedy into an industry. His frantic comedies gave audiences runaway cars, exploding situations, impossible chases and the gloriously incompetent Keystone Cops.

But Sennett's greatest contribution may have been the extraordinary comic talent that passed through his world.

Among them was a young English music-hall performer named Charlie Chaplin.

Chaplin arrived at Keystone in 1914 and soon created one of the most recognizable characters in movie history: the Little Tramp.

Bowler hat.

Cane.

Tiny mustache.

Oversized trousers.

Impossible dignity.

Chaplin discovered that screen comedy could do something more than produce laughter. It could break your heart at the same time.

Then another genius took physical comedy in an entirely different direction.

Buster Keaton rarely smiled.

He didn't need to.

While chaos exploded around him, Keaton's magnificent stone face remained calm. Houses collapsed. Trains thundered toward him. Boats sank. Buildings fell. Keaton turned machinery, architecture and gravity itself into comedy — frequently performing astonishing stunts himself.

Then came Harold Lloyd, dangling from the hands of a clock high above the city in Safety Last!

With his round glasses and ordinary young-man appearance, Lloyd created a different kind of silent comedy hero: ambitious, optimistic and forever trying to climb toward something better.

And then two men discovered that failure was much funnier when you had someone beside you to blame.

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy became one of the most beloved comedy teams in cinema history.

Stan scratched his head.

Ollie stared directly at us.

And somewhere nearby, something was about to be destroyed.

Their comedy wasn't simply about pratfalls. It was about friendship, frustration, pride and the magnificent human ability to make a bad situation infinitely worse.

Sound arrived, and comedy changed again.

Suddenly comedians could use voices, accents, insults, songs, misunderstandings and language itself.

For some silent stars, sound ended careers.

For others, it opened an entirely new comic universe.

W. C. Fields muttered, complained and battled children, dogs, relatives, bartenders and civilization itself.

The Marx Brothers attacked language with the same ferocity silent comedians had once attacked automobiles. Groucho fired jokes faster than audiences could recover from them. Chico mangled language. Harpo didn't need language at all.

Then came radio comedians, vaudeville veterans, screwball stars, comedy teams and generations of performers who inherited everything those pioneers had discovered.

From Chaplin's cane to Laurel and Hardy's derby hats, from Keaton's impossible stunts to Fields' irritated muttering, the DNA of modern comedy was being created right in front of the movie camera.

Watch carefully.

You'll recognize it everywhere.

The timing.

The double take.

The slow burn.

The chase.

The escalating disaster.

The perfectly placed pause.

The character who desperately wants to maintain dignity while the universe absolutely refuses to cooperate.

Comedy keeps changing.

Funny doesn't.

On ABSOLUTELY FUNNY, we're going back to where screen laughter began — and following it wherever it takes us.

Because before there were sitcoms, stand-up specials, comedy channels, viral videos and memes...

There were people with movie cameras figuring out how to make the whole world laugh.

And they were VERY good at it.

AIN BACKSTAGE SECRETS & AINTOIDS
MACK SENNETT — THE KING OF COMEDY

If we're going to tell the history of movie comedy, Mack Sennett deserves one of the first seats at the table.

Sennett founded the Keystone Film Company in 1912 and created a comedy factory unlike anything audiences had seen.

Keystone specialized in speed.

Chases.

Pratfalls.

Cars.

Policemen.

Chaos.

And more chaos.

Sennett became known as the King of Comedy, and his influence on American screen comedy is almost impossible to overstate.

THE KEYSTONE COPS

They were supposed to enforce the law.

That was the first joke.

The Keystone Cops were a spectacularly incompetent group of policemen who raced through Sennett's comedies creating almost as much chaos as the criminals they were pursuing.

Their frantic chases became so famous that "Keystone Cops" eventually entered the language as a description for any group attempting to solve a problem while making everything considerably worse.

More than a century later, people still use the phrase.

MABEL NORMAND — DON'T FORGET HER

The history of silent comedy cannot be told only through men.

Mabel Normand was one of Keystone's most important stars — an actress, comedian, director and screenwriter working during an era when women were helping build the motion-picture industry from the ground up.

She worked extensively with Sennett and appeared with Chaplin during his Keystone period.

Normand wasn't standing beside comedy history.

She was helping create it.

THEN CAME CHARLIE

Charlie Chaplin joined Keystone in 1914.

That same year, audiences began seeing the character who would become known throughout the world as the Little Tramp.

Chaplin eventually became far more than a performer. He wrote, directed, produced, edited and composed music for his films.

Few individuals in cinema history have exercised that level of creative control while simultaneously becoming one of the most recognizable human beings on Earth.

THE LITTLE TRAMP SPOKE WITHOUT WORDS

Chaplin understood one of silent cinema's greatest powers.

You didn't need to speak English to understand him.

Audiences around the world understood hunger.

Pride.

Love.

Embarrassment.

Loneliness.

Hope.

And getting kicked in the backside.

The Tramp could walk into virtually any culture without translation.

BUSTER KEATON — THE GREAT STONE FACE

Where Chaplin often asked us to feel for his character, Buster Keaton frequently seemed determined to outwit the physical universe.

His expression barely changed.

Everything else did.

Keaton became famous for extraordinary visual constructions and dangerous physical stunts in films including Sherlock Jr., Steamboat Bill, Jr. and The General.

That famous image of an entire building façade falling around Keaton while he survives because he happens to be standing exactly where an open window lands?

No computer effects.

No digital compositing.

Buster Keaton was really standing there.

HAROLD LLOYD HUNG FROM THAT CLOCK

One of the most famous images in silent cinema shows Harold Lloyd hanging from the hands of a giant clock above the streets of Los Angeles in Safety Last!

Movie magic helped create the illusion of the enormous height, but Lloyd still performed dangerous physical work to sell it.

And here's the extraordinary part:

Lloyd had previously lost the thumb and forefinger of his right hand in an accident involving what he believed was a harmless prop bomb.

He continued performing physical comedy using a specially designed glove.

LAUREL AND HARDY — TWO MEN, ONE DISASTER

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy had both worked in films before becoming a team.

Together, they became magic.

Laurel's childlike confusion collided perfectly with Hardy's enormous confidence in his own dignity.

When something went wrong, Hardy would frequently look directly into the camera as though asking the audience:

Are you seeing what I have to put up with?

We were.

And we loved it.

"ANOTHER FINE MESS"

The phrase became inseparable from Laurel and Hardy — even though the line audiences remember was commonly delivered as:

"Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into."

There actually is a Laurel and Hardy film titled Another Fine Mess, which helped cement the alternate wording in popular memory.

Comedy history even has its own misquotes.

HAL ROACH BUILT ANOTHER COMEDY EMPIRE

If Mack Sennett was one of silent comedy's great architects, Hal Roach became another.

The Hal Roach Studios were home to Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd, Our Gang and many other comedy performers.

Roach's studio became one of Hollywood's most important comedy factories and helped carry screen comedy from the silent period into the sound era.

OUR GANG CHANGED WHO GOT TO BE FUNNY

Beginning in the 1920s, Hal Roach's Our Gang comedies — later widely known as The Little Rascals — built comedy around children behaving like children rather than miniature adult performers.

The series also featured Black and white children appearing together on screen during an era of widespread racial segregation in American life.

The films remain important artifacts of both comedy history and American social history.

W. C. FIELDS — EVERYBODY ANNOYED HIM

Then there's W. C. Fields.

Fields came from vaudeville, where he had become internationally famous as a comedy juggler before developing the verbal personality movie audiences remember.

His screen character wanted very little from life.

A drink.

A little peace.

Perhaps a card game.

And for everyone else to leave him alone.

Naturally, nobody ever did.

THE MARX BROTHERS DECLARED WAR ON LANGUAGE

Sound cinema created an entirely new comedy weapon:

Words.

Nobody used them quite like the Marx Brothers.

Groucho Marx could demolish a room with a sentence.

Chico turned misunderstanding the English language into an art form.

And Harpo proved that even in the age of talking pictures, silence could still steal the show.

Their movies didn't merely break rules.

They behaved as though rules had never existed.

AINTOID: COMEDY HELPED BUILD HOLLYWOOD

Comedy wasn't a minor sideline during cinema's early decades.

It was one of the forces that built the movie business.

Audiences returned again and again to see their favorite comedians, and stars including Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy became internationally recognizable personalities.

People didn't simply go to see a comedy.

They went to see Charlie.

Or Buster.

Or Harold.

Or Stan and Ollie.

The comedian became the brand.

AINTOID: SILENT COMEDY WAS NEVER REALLY SILENT

Those old movies weren't normally experienced in completely silent theaters.

Films were accompanied by music — sometimes a pianist or organist, sometimes larger musical ensembles — and theaters could employ sound effects as part of the presentation.

The screen may not have spoken.

The theater certainly did.

AINTOID: THE CAMERA LEARNED THE JOKE TOO

Early movie comedy often placed the camera where audiences could simply watch performers execute a gag.

Then filmmakers became increasingly sophisticated.

Editing could create surprise.

A close-up could deliver a reaction.

Cutting between characters could establish comic timing.

Camera placement could hide information until exactly the right moment.

Comedy wasn't merely happening in front of the camera anymore.

The filmmaking itself became part of the joke.

AINTOID: SOUND DIDN'T KILL PHYSICAL COMEDY

Talking pictures changed comedy forever, but they didn't eliminate what the silent comedians had invented.

Watch almost any great physical comedian who came later and you'll see the inheritance.

The escalating catastrophe.

The impossible object.

The stubborn machine.

The perfectly timed fall.

The silent reaction.

The battle to preserve dignity.

Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Sennett, Laurel and Hardy didn't create museum pieces.

They created a comic language filmmakers are still speaking.

AINTOID: THE FACES CHANGE — THE LAUGHTER DOESN'T

Comedy has traveled from vaudeville stages to nickelodeons, silent shorts, movie palaces, talking pictures, radio, television, comedy clubs, cable, streaming and phones.

The technology changed.

The screens changed.

The stars changed.

But somewhere tonight, somebody will trip over something.

Somebody else will look at the camera.

And millions of people will laugh.

That's the history ABSOLUTELY FUNNY celebrates.

META TAGS

Absolutely Funny, Absolutely Indie Network, AIN, comedy, classic comedy, comedy history, history of cinema, history of screen comedy, silent comedy, early cinema, Mack Sennett, Keystone Studios, Keystone Cops, Charlie Chaplin, Little Tramp, Buster Keaton, Great Stone Face, Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, W. C. Fields, Marx Brothers, Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, Chico Marx, Mabel Normand, Hal Roach, Our Gang, Little Rascals, vaudeville, slapstick, physical comedy, screwball comedy, early sound comedy, silent films, classic comedians, movie comedy, Hollywood history, Golden Age Hollywood, vintage comedy, funny movies

DATE RELEASED

From the birth of cinema to today — ABSOLUTELY FUNNY celebrates more than a century of screen comedy.

COUNTRY RELEASED

United States and the world — because FUNNY needs no translation.