Tag: Mack Sennett
Chain of Fools
Silent Comedy and Its Legacies
from Nickelodeons to YouTube
by Trav S.D.
Trav S.D. —oddly enough named after his gritty home town in the middle of South Dakota’s Badlands — is a so-good-he’s-bad vaudevillian: a performer, producer, historian, popularizer, and blogger whose popular blog Travalanche is a must for the variety arts fan.
Just over 100 years ago ago, Mack Sennett hit cinema pay dirt and spawned American silent film comedy when he introduced audiences to the hapless Keystone Cops, forever the butt of the joke. Chaplin and Keaton and their fellow silent film comedians likewise mocked police incompetence and, more politically, condemned at least implicitly their treatment of the underdog. Nowadays such attitudes are rarer in film comedy, but certainly not in the work of French prankster and provocateur Rémi Gaillard, whose YouTube videos have had over a billion hits.
Thursday night I caught a preview performance of Chaplin: The Musical, a new Broadway show starring newcomer Rob McClure that was first developed at the La Jolla Playhouse under the title Limelight: The Story of Charlie Chaplin. That first draft did not get particularly good reviews, but that was a couple of years ago.
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Workshops & Other Events
My first book (1976)
My book Clowns has long been out of print, but you can borrow it for two weeks at a time from the Internet Archive. More information is available here.
My second book (2015)
Visual and verbal humor for the cognitively and artistically curious! Available here.
“A book to treasure!”
—Bill Irwin