Top Five Gags: The Cook

September 15, 1918 – the day The Cook was released.  This one’s a classic.  While decidedly rougher than some of my favorite Arbuckle-Keaton shorts, like The Bell Boy or Back Stage, there’s something really fun about the randomness of it.  It’s just sort of this collection of running gags and off-the-wall tangents, and it’s a delight (spoilers.)

The All-Purpose Vat

Back in the kitchen, Fatty has a giant vat out of which he pulls everything from steak to ham to scoops of ice cream, and it has a spigot at the bottom that variously dispenses coffee, soup, and milk.  It’s a fun ongoing gag in the short, waiting to see what’s going to come out of it next.

Kitchen Toss

Another ongoing bit.  Fatty gets all kinds of Harlem Globetrotters with his cooking, flipping pancakes between his legs, bouncing eggs off the floor, and so on.  And every single dish gets hurled over this tabletop shelf in the middle of the kitchen, with Buster neatly catching each without spilling a drop.  Mostly, these bits are of the “Fatty tosses in one shot, Buster catches in the next” variety, but there’s one classic shot in which Buster steps through the swinging doors into the kitchen and catches an empty plate tossed to him from a dishwasher off to the side, while Fatty simultaneously flips a pancake over his shoulder, which soars through the air and lands on Buster’s plate as he’s fluidly swiveling around to head back out the door!  At a Buster Keaton convention (one of the most wonderfully-nerdy events I’ve ever been to,) I once heard a fantastic lecture speculating as to just how our intrepid filmmakers managed to execute this three-second gag.

Ice Cream Mess

Buster heads out of the kitchen with two dishes of ice cream, promptly walking into someone and smushing one of them in the guy’s face.  But the real fun starts when, in his anxiousness to help clean it up, Buster drops the other scoop down the back of a woman’s dress.  Between Buster “going in” himself to try and retrieve it and a chain of mishaps that leads to someone catapulting through the swinging doors into the kitchen, it’s a classic escalating-disaster scenario.

Luke to the Rescue

That dog is a marvel.  While he later shows off his trick of climbing ladders and helps Fatty maneuver the world’s longest fishing pole, this scene features him working to oust an unruly Al St. John, clinging by his teeth to the seat of Al’s pants, flying off the ground as Al spins in a circle.

Spaghetti

An extended break that’s purely an exercise in seeing how many spaghetti gags can be stuffed into a single scene.  There’s Fatty wrapping individual noodles around his finger then popping them into his mouth, a “two people eating opposite ends of the same long noodle” bit way before Lady and the Tramp did it, and Fatty “knitting” his spaghetti among other things.  No surprise, though, Buster has my favorite gags.  After a number of false starts, he plops a mess of noodles into a coffee cup and “shaves” off the excess hanging over the rim, and he later takes a scissors to both his own noodles and other people’s.  Love it!

The Cook (1918)

The Cook isn’t in The Best Arbuckle-Keaton Collection because, when that DVD came out in 2001, the short was still believed to be lost.  Fortunately, the majority of the film has since been rediscovered and released on the DVD The Cook and Other Treasures (the missing final scene is described in the intertitles.)  This one is just so much fun.

Almost entirely plotless.  Fatty works as the cook at the Bull Pup Café, where Buster is the waiter, Alice Lake is the cashier, and Fatty’s dog Luke is the bouncer.  The assorted restaurant gags are broken up on occasion by Al St. John, playing a literal tough customer who’s taken an unsavory shine to Alice.

I don’t care that the storyline is basically “Storyline – what’s that?”  This short is delightful, up to its ears in fabulous gags and fantastic comic sequences.  I love the juggling sensibilities Fatty brings to cooking (flipping pancakes between two different pans and off his shoe is especially fun,) as well as his fancy knifework.  I love that he has one enormous vat from which he gets everything from sliced ham to ice cream to coffee.  I love absolutely everything about the spaghetti scene, which is a comic master class in dreaming up numerous gags from a single prop.  Fatty wrapping individual strands of spaghetti around his finger before eating them is fun, as is the sight gag of him trying to knit his spaghetti.

Buster is no slouch in that scene, either.  Completely flummoxed by his spaghetti, he variously uses a straight edge razor, a teacup, and a pair of scissors to try to eat it.  Really, Buster is great throughout the short.  The running gag of him catching every dish Fatty tosses through the air to him – including, among other things, a bowl of soup and a glass of milk – is terrific.  He helps kick off this amazing dance sequence that comes out of nowhere and has nothing to do with anything, but it’s just wonderful.  I don’t even know where some of his dance moves come from; they do not look like 1918, I know that much.  The man was a class unto himself.

He feels really Busterish here, closer to his persona in his own films.  Something about the combination between supremely athletic/suave and hopeless clumsy.  He has all sorts of funny little bits of business, and he also takes his patented Buster Keaton Soulful Eyes out for a test drive with Alice Lake and another woman in the short.

The stuff with Al St. John isn’t as good, except when he’s being chased by Luke.  Watching that dog climb ladders never gets old for me, and I get a kick out the scene where Al is spinning around in circles with Luke’s teeth clamped on the seat of his pants.

And in the “there’s cartoon gags, and then there’s just crazy” category, we have Fatty accidentally bringing a meat cleaver down on Buster’s neck.  Yes, there’s the amusing bit afterwards in which he verifies that Buster’s head is still attached, but that is absolutely ridiculous.

Warnings

Slapstick violence, drinking, and an attempted abduction.