In partnership with The Film Foundation, Turner Classic Movies is proud to bring you this exclusive monthly column by iconic film director and classic movie lover Martin Scorsese.

TCM SPOTLIGHT: OUCH! A SALUTE TO SLAPSTICK (Tuesdays and Wednesdays in September, 8pm)--Slapstick has its origins in commedia dell'arte, Elizabethan theatre and English pantomime, but slapstick movie comedy--really, physical movie comedy--is primarily an American art form. Mack Sennett himself gave credit to Fred Karno, the great English impresario, for the invention of slapstick in his music hall sketches. Karno also gave us Charlie Chaplin (he was touring with Karno's troupe when he came to America) and Arthur Jefferson, otherwise known as Stan Laurel. The rest is history. TCM's monthlong tribute to slapstick begins with Robert Youngson's enormously popular 1957 compilation film The Golden Age of Comedy, which reintroduced audiences to the art of movie slapstick from Chaplin through Laurel and Hardy. The early teens through the '30s was an amazing period in movie history, and the level of invention and cross-pollination is astonishing-- when you watch Sennett's Tillie's Punctured Romance (the first feature-length comedy and the last of Chaplin's films that he didn't direct himself) alongside Mabel Normand in Mickey (made after her departure from Sennett and the biggest movie of 1918), the French comic artist Max Linder (in Seven Years Bad Luck), Buster Keaton with Fatty Arbuckle (in Coney Island) and on his own (in One Week and Steamboat Bill Jr.), Harold Lloyd (in Number Please, Speedy and Movie Crazy), Charley Chase (in Charley My Boy directed by Leo McCarey, Dollar Dizzy and The Pip from Pittsburgh), and Laurel and Hardy (in The Music Box and Sons of the Desert)--you can see everyone borrowing from one another, trying to top each other, building certain forms (drunk acts, the comedy of humiliation, the slow burn) to perfection. In the greatest work of The Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields (represented here by A Night at the Opera and The Bank Dick), physical and verbal comedy joined together and became one, like two guitars alternating lead and rhythm. Preston Sturges built from their example and took movie comedy to a whole new level (with The Palm Beach Story, the Sturges picture being shown in this tribute, he also looked back to the ancient roots of comedy--to Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors and even further back to its Roman source, Menaechmi by Plautus). After Sturges, in the era of color and Cinemascope, physical comedy in the movies became increasingly tied to visual design--you can really feel it the '50s comedies of Frank Tashlin and Jerry Lewis (strangely, neither of them are represented here, though there is the Martin and Lewis comedy Scared Stiff, directed by George Marshall), in Blake Edwards' pictures, in Stanley Kramer's 1963 slapstick extravaganza It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, and in the work of the French director and performer Jacques Tati (Mon Oncle). In the '60s, Edwards and Peter Sellars joined forces for the Pink Panther movies--along with their 1968 picture The Party, one of the most politically incorrect movies ever made and one of the funniest--and they created their own version of slapstick that was exquisitely refined and elegant and utterly outrageous, always upping the ante. And then Mel Brooks pushed the outrageousness even further--in his pictures (like Young Frankenstein, included here), you have the inspiration for the Naked Gun series with the great Leslie Nielsen and the Will Ferrell comedies (Anchorman will be shown near the end of the tribute). Slapstick is now a long and proud tradition.

by Martin Scorsese