With the coming of sound, silent comedy became a thing of the past, often viewed as a curiosity. Chaplin resisted making a talking film until 1940, when the Little Tramp posed as a parody of Hitler in The Great Dictator, and even then, the film's brightest spots were Chaplin's moments of silent pantomime. Only Laurel and Hardy made a completely successful transition into talking films, finding that dialogue provided a perfect extension of their comic personas. Eventually, most of the other clowns either retired -- like Lloyd, who had invested wisely in the days before income taxes and didn't need to work -- or faded into supporting roles.

Keaton's decline was one of the saddest, yet it also bore the seeds of his greatest influence. After a disastrous move to MGM in the late '20s, he had gradually lost control of his films. That got worse once sound came in, and he faded from popularity quickly. After a series of slapstick shorts and attempts to return to the stage, he wound up working at MGM for $75 a week in the '40s. There he wrote gags and played the occasional supporting role. But he also shared his expertise at physical comedy with two rising stars: Red Skelton and Lucille Ball. Skelton starred in remakes of The General (1926) and The Cameraman (1928), but when he and Keaton offered to work for free just to create a film together, studio executives turned them down. Keaton's influence on Ball was slower to build because she had yet to develop the Lucy Ricardo personality. You can see bits of his influence, however, when she gets to do physical comedy in Dubarry Was a Lady (1943) and Miss Grant Takes Richmond (1949). When she sold I Love Lucy to CBS in 1951, followed by The Lucy Show in 1962, Keaton's influence on her came to the fore in a series of classic slapstick bits.

Artistically, the silent comedy was pretty much forgotten during the sound era, though directors like Preston Sturges borrowed jokes from the older form in sophisticated comedies like The Lady Eve (1941) and even worked with Harold Lloyd on a failed film The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947). Things began to turn around, however, in 1949, when critic-screenwriter James Agee wrote "Comedy's Greatest Era" for Life Magazine. His article sparked new interest in silent slapstick, sending fans back to revival screenings and inspiring popular compilation films like The Golden Age of Comedy (1957). Television comedians like Sid Caesar, Jerry Lewis, Ernie Kovacs and Skelton drew on the silent slapstick traditions on their series. Before long filmmakers were once again paying tribute to the form. Stanley Kramer included a generous helping of silent-style slapstick in his epic comedy It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) and composer Henry Mancini called one track of his score for the slapstick-filled The Pink Panther (1963) "Shades of Sennett." Mel Brooks even made silent comedy the focus of his fifth film as a director-writer, Silent Movie (1976), about a director trying to bring silent slapstick back to the big screen. Of course, with ongoing restorations of the works of Chaplin, Keaton, Arbuckle, Lloyd and Laurel and Hardy, the truth is this treasured form of comedy has been back for a long time and clearly is here to stay.

By Frank Miller