Top Five Gags: Neighbors

 December 22^nd, 1920 – the day Neighbors was released. That’s right, The Scarecrow and Neighbors both came out on the same day. I guess Buster was more than ready to get his shorts out there! Tremendously funny and brimming with great gags. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that there are a few racist jokes in this one, which is disappointing. However, today is about the short’s best qualities, not its problematic ones. Here are my favorite gags (spoilers.)

 

Riding the Clothesline

Eager to get away from Virginia’s father, Buster climbs out of the third-story window and slides across the clothesline back into his neighboring tenement, where he promptly slides down the banister, shoots out the second-story window, and rides that clothesline back in through the window of Virginia’s tenement, barreling into her father on the landing. Flawlessly-executed circular gag!

 

Caught Unawares

One tiny, awesome moment within the larger running-from-the-cops gag sequence. Given a temporary respite, Buster has stopped to watch a baseball game through a crack in the fence when another cop comes up behind him. When he turns and notices the cop’s presence, Buster collapses in shock, then tries to drag himself away by his hands, his still-limp legs trailing behind him. Great visual!

 

The “Fly-Swatter”

Buster’s “patented” invention to get back at Virginia’s father. He attaches a long wooden board to the door in the fence between their tenements, the board swinging on a fulcrum whenever someone goes through the door, smacking them on the bottom. Buster has plenty of fun goading Virginia’s father into chasing after him through the door, but the real action starts as more people show up on either side of the fence, with dads and cops alternately being swatted on the bottom, knocked on the head, and caught under the chin. This is a great example of the weird elegance that Buster’s work brings to slapstick, wry cleverness mixed with superb timing and technical precision.

 

The Broken Suspenders

When Buster’s suspenders break minutes before his own wedding, he’s left desperately trying to hold his pants up at the altar. Is this an easy gag? Sure, but it’s Buster, so the way he does it is impeccable. Whether it’s awkwardly groping through his pockets for the ring with one hand while holding his pants with the other, swiping the preacher’s belt to set off even further hijinks, or the embarrassed preacher deciding to then conduct the ceremony while sitting on the floor, every moment here is gold. As a bonus, I love how clearly you can read the panic in Buster’s expression despite his trademark stone face; I still don’t know how he managed to act the way he did, but it works every time.

 

The Escape

Obviously, this sequence had to be included! In the climactic getaway, Buster reaches the third story of Virginia’s tenement by standing on the shoulders of two friends. They walk repeatedly between the two tenements, climbing in through the windows of either building to hide as needed, and ultimately make a wobbly break for it with Virginia slung over Buster’s shoulder, still atop the other two. The coordination here is a blast, and I love seeing how Buster’s co-conspirators are taken out one by one. By far, the most iconic scene in Neighbors and one of my favorite moments from all of Buster’s independent shorts.

Neighbors (1920)

This short just screams Buster to me.  It’s one of my favorite shorts of his – so funny, so imaginative.  The mechanical gags are fun, the circular gags are topnotch, and the human-ladder climax is a positive showstopper.

Buster is hopelessly in love with the girl next door, but their feuding fathers threaten to keep them apart (not unlike Our Hospitality and Steamboat Bill, Jr. – Buster really liked Romeo and Juliet stories.)  Passing notes through holes in the fence that separates them and using their families’ shared clothesline as a means of transport, they make every effort for love to win out.

The gags in this short just sparkle, coming hard, fast, and funny throughout.  There are some fantastic creative touches, like Buster getting strung along the clothesline by his girl’s father, and the human-ladder getaway has to be seen to be believed.  The dialogue gets in some fun zingers, too.  It kills me when Buster’s dad, trying to get him unstuck from the mud, angrily dismisses his neighbor’s advice with, “He’s my son and I’ll break his neck any way I please!”  More points for the human fly-swatter, the beltless wedding (oh my goodness, so funny,) and Buster’s ability to baffle a police officer by only wiping half his face clean of black (brown?) paint.

Speaking of police, this isn’t Buster’s earliest short dealing with cops – that would be Convict 13 – but it’s the first to feature his patented pursued-by-officers-of-the-law street chases, which he later employs so well in The Goat and Cops.  Some of the cop gags are excellent; my favorite is Buster’s break into a “don’t mind me, nothing to see here” jig when he accidentally stumbles upon one of the police he’d thought he evaded.  This whole sequence is a bit of a detour as far as the story goes, but each part is so fun and flows so well into the next that I don’t mind.

However, I should mention that this short has some of the most racial humor to be found in Buster’s work, and, since this was 1920, that can get uncomfortable.  For the most part, I’m okay with the cops mistaking Buster for a Black man when his face is covered in mud or dark paint, because the joke is on the cops rather than Black people.  The (Black) man originally nabbed for Buster’s unintentional thwacking of a police officer gets away, and he later watches in amusement as Buster confuses the cop with his half-and-half face.  For me, the most insensitive part comes later, when Buster hides in a Black woman’s laundry.  As he rises, still covered by a white bed sheet, the woman and her family all run away from the “ghost.”  To be fair, the number of people, white or Black, who appear to believe in ghosts in silent comedies seems to be wildly disproportionate to the actual numbers, and Buster himself does his own “ghost fright” double-takes in some of his movies, but doing the same gag with a Black family feels stereotypical and uncool to me.

Virginia Fox is cute as a button and a real delight as Buster’s girl.  Big Joe Roberts plays her dad, and art imitates life with Buster’s actual father Joe playing his dad here; their comic roughhousing together doesn’t miss a step.

Warnings

Slapstick violence and some racially-insensitive humor.