Top Five Gags: The Electric House

*Spoilers.*

October 16, 1922—the day The Electric House was released. In terms of comedy, I’d probably put this mid-tier, but in terms of Buster’s inventive imagination, it’s right up there with his best. I will forever love Buster’s devices and mechanical gags, and this short is chock full of them.

 

Runaway Stairs

When Buster is showing off the new escalator stairs, the speed gets set too high and Big Joe Roberts is carried up and catapulted out the window at the top of the stairs. I love Buster getting caught on the stairs himself: racing to try to get back down, losing his footage and repeatedly tumbling up the escalator, etc. My favorite bit is when he tries to jump to the bottom, but every time he stops to hunker down and prepare to jump, the stairs carry him up too high to make it.

 

Playing Pool

 After the end of Buster’s pool cue gets twisted in a bad shot, he’s not ready to give up. Industriously, he shapes the mangled end into a golf club instead and stands on the table to putt the ball into the pocket. Great sight gag, I love it!

 

Stuck in the Door

By this point, the sabotaged electric house has gone thoroughly haywire, and Buster gets stuck when the sliding double doors shut on his neck. I just love Buster’s physical acting here, the way he staggers around the room in a daze afterwards and then collapses into someone’s arms.

 

Doing a Run-Up

Buster has weaponized the speeding escalator against the saboteur, dumping him out the window and into the pool outside. He makes to jump in after him, then thinks better of it. He slides (headfirst!) down the banister and proceeds to ride the stairs back up, assuming a jumping position as he readies himself to make his leap. Again, just a great bit of funny physicality.

 

Goodbye, Cruel World

Okay, so no surprise, but Buster’s fired. In his despair, he ties a rock to himself and prepares to jump into the pool. (Spoiler alert: he’s fine. The daughter pulls the lever to rapidly empty the pool so he doesn’t drown.) This bit is great for one particular moment—after tying the rope to the rock, he then ties it around his neck exactly like a necktie. Such a delightful Bustery flourish.

The Electric House (1922)

Today’s short isn’t as flush with stunts or gags as a lot of Buster’s work, but his creativity and mechanical sensibilities are definitely on display.  The released short is actually the second version of it.  The first time around, Buster broke his ankle while filming and, much to his dismay, had to put shooting on hold due to an injury he got doing something as pedestrian as getting his slap shoe caught in an escalator (he lived on a different level, no question about it.)  His resulting irritation made him scrap the whole production, but he must have still liked the idea well enough, because he came back and remade it later.

Thanks to a slight diploma mixup, newly-graduated botanist Buster is hired as an electrical engineer to update a wealthy man’s house (and why doesn’t Buster point out that he’s not an electrical engineer?  Because he gets a look at the guy’s daughter, obviously!)  Now, when most of us hear the words “electricity” and “house,” we probably picture stuff like lightswitches.  Not Buster!  When the family returns home from vacation, he has a plethora of labor-saving electrified features to show them, including an escalator, a dishwasher (in 1922, people!), a tub that runs on a track from the bed to the bathroom, and a pool table and sets itself up with the flick of a switch.  Of course, it’s only a matter of time until the real engineer, who was passed over for Buster, shows up to get his revenge crossed-wires-style.

As is typical for Buster’s highly-mechanical shorts, the electric doodads are the main attraction here.  Some are fairly impossible (seems like a bathtub can’t be both mobile and hooked up to the plumbing,) while others, like the electric trains running on a track from the kitchen to the dining room to carry dishes in and out, were used by Buster in real life.  They’re all pretty fun and make a nice window into how Buster’s mind operated.

The short is a little lighter on the comedy, but there are still some good bits.  Buster really sells his interest in botany in the opening scene by completely losing himself in the flower that the girl next to him is wearing in her hair, and there’s an amusing sight gag of Buster tying a rope like a necktie.  He also mines the escalator for all it’s worth, particularly in a scene where it malfunctions as he’s trying to lug a heavy trunk up the stairs.

Okay, so I knew Big Joe Roberts was in nearly all of Buster’s independent shorts (he’s the man who hires Buster to electrify his house,) and I knew Virginia Fox (the girl) was in a lot, too, but I don’t think I realized just how many she appeared in!  It’s only since I started doing full reviews of the shorts that I noticed I was writing her name almost every week.  IMDb tells me that Roberts was in sixteen of Buster’s nineteen shorts (plus Three Ages and Our Hospitality,) which sounds about right to me, while Fox, surprisingly, was in ten!  Even though she frequently doesn’t have much in do in these shorts, I always enjoy seeing her.

Warnings

Slapstick violence and some don’t-try-this-at-home with electricity.