Lightweight
but funny, a classic “bumbling Buster makes good” scenario wrapped in
vaudeville sensibilities with some good gags to keep it moving. The Educational shorts hit a fairly low
stretch in the middle, but they shape up quite nicely towards the end.
Things
are finally looking up for a down-on-his-luck Buster. He’s just gotten a job as a magician’s
assistant, and more importantly, he’ll be working alongside the girl he’s
fallen for, the magician’s other, lovelier assistant. But because this is Buster we’re talking
about, it can’t be that simple. His own
onstage fumbles and mishaps wreak enough havoc on the show, but when his
disgruntled predecessor shows up to take his revenge on the magician, it really
hits the fan.
I’m
always a sucker for these types of gags from Buster, novelty stage-act stuff
inspired by his vaudeville days. Here,
we have a slew of magician’s tricks gone wrong, with Buster continually giving
the game away with his mistakes and misunderstandings. I love when, thinking the magician has
stabbed the girl for real instead of in a trick, Buster faints dead away, and
who doesn’t love a fish bowl strapped to someone’s back? The pinnacle of this short is undoubtedly the
duck gag, where Buster is below the stage and supposed to send up ducks from
alternating trap doors at the magician’s prompting, and naturally, it’s a total
disaster. It’s a fun sequence that
builds the comedy really well.
While
the botched show is definitely the highlight of the piece, there are some fine
gags that come before it as well.
There’s a bit of surprisingly-funny Great Depression humor that you
wouldn’t typically expect in a slapstick comedy, but Buster makes it work. Really, he played a number of characters over
the years who had to hustle for their supper, especially in his independent shorts,
so he was no stranger to making jokes about being poor. Here, I like the running gag of the
near-penniless Buster being beset upon by hoboes who wind up eating better than
he does.
There
really aren’t any major knocks against the short – it’s solid through and
through. All I can really say against it
is that it kind of just gets the job done.
While it’s consistently funny with good jokes and some nice physical
comedy from Buster (you can’t go wrong with Buster getting tangled up in the
flies!), it doesn’t quite pop the way that the other shorts he made around this
time do. In other words, its only fault
is that it isn’t as fun as Grand Slam Opera, Blue Blazes, or The Chemist, but it’s still perfectly
respectable. Hey, I’d even say it’s
tighter and funnier than some of the lesser Fatty Arbuckle shorts, but in all
honesty, I’m not complaining at all.
Warnings
Slapstick
violence.
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