Top Five Gags: The Playhouse

*Spoilers.*

October 6^th, 1921 – the day The Playhouse was released. Normally, when I do one of these write-ups, I jot down potential entries for the Top Five as I’m rewatching the short and then have to narrow down a list of at least eight or nine gags to get my absolute favorites. With The Playhouse, my list was pretty set by the time I finished watching, so I didn’t have to debate as much over which gags to keep. Not that it’s not funny, of course – this is still Buster Keaton we’re talking about – but it’s a film the focuses a lot more on the technical achievements of its opening scene and less on the laughs-per-minute. That said, I was still able to assemble quite a respectable Top Five Gags for this short.

 

The Pit Orchestra

This is from the “Buster plays every character” opening dream sequence. While it’s obviously fun to see Buster in a bunch of different costumes/guises throughout, the section featuring the pit orchestra is peppered with all sorts of fun little bits of business. I especially enjoy the cellist chalking his bow like a pool cue, the conductor trying to scratch his back with his baton between measures, and the trombonist oiling his instrument, which is then so slick that it flies apart in his hands!

 

Breaking Down the Bedroom

A bit of the visual equivalent to a dad joke, but I still like it. Buster is roughly awoken from his dream by big Joe Roberts, glowering over him and making commands. Buster slinks out, and it’s revealed that he wasn’t sleeping in his bedroom at all but a bedroom set backstage. As soon as Buster leaves the “room,” other stagehands pick up the bedroom’s “walls” and haul them away.

 

Buster the Monkey

Again, Buster probably gets more acting credit for the opening scene, where he’s playing all the roles, but he’s also an absolute stitch as the monkey. When the trained monkey runs off backstage, Buster rolls up his sleeves in a “needs must” kind of way and makes himself up to look like the monkey just in time for its act. He has the movements and the facial expressions down pat (while still staying within the bounds of his trademark Stone Face,) and I get a kick out of the ways he subtly undermines his human stage partner but maintains just enough plausible deniability that he’s simply doing what any monkey would do.

 

Fire Backstage

Big Joe Roberts is smoking while he puts on a stage beard, so naturally, it’s only a matter of time before it catches on fire. From the moment Buster, rushing around backstage amid the crisis, notices the fire axe in its glass case, you know it’s about to get good! He charges Big Joe with the axe, smacks him on the head with the flat end to knock him out, and then uses the blade to give him a close shave, cutting the smoldering beard away. A fun sight gag that’s perfectly paced out.

 

The Flood

Buster’s girl (Virginia Fox) is performing an underwater trick and gets stuck in the tank. After Buster (very awesomely) runs over with a teacup to delicately empty the tank cupful by cupful, he gets with the program and smashes the tank with a sledgehammer, at which point buckets of water come pouring out, washing everyone out of the theatre. My favorite part of the sequence is when Buster navigates the flooded pit area by riding in a bass drum like a miniature boat, using a violin as an oar.

The Playhouse (1921)

Can’t go wrong with this one.  Probably Buster’s most astounding technical cinematic feat, with its veritable cornucopia of Busters, and it’s darn funny to boot.  One of my favorite shorts of his – it never fails to amaze me.

Thinking about it now, the plot is thinner than in many of Buster’s shorts.  While the recurring gags rise and fall masterfully, the story is mainly a series of vignettes centered around the hustle and bustle of a vaudeville playhouse (like the Fatty Arbuckle short Back Stage, it draws a lot of inspiration from Buster’s childhood experiences.)  Buster plays an intrepid stage hand who, despite his talent for fouling up any act he comes near, continues to find new ways for the show to go on.  Meanwhile, he deals with the pitfalls of being in love with one half of a twin act.

This short, of course, is most famous for its tour-de-force opening sequence, in which Buster dreams that he’s everyone at the playhouse:  a bevy of audience members, the conductor, every person in the pit band, the backstage crew, a dancing duo, and a nine-man minstrel act (yeah – not cool.  That said, it’s mercifully short, and while the blackface is obviously terrible, the acting/jokes don’t seem pointedly offensive.)  When we think of how impressive it can be to see the same actor performing opposite themselves on camera today – like on Orphan Black, where the double-/triple-/quadrupling is so seamless – seeing Buster do it in 1921 is practically magic.  They’re all Buster, every last one of them.  The man danced to a metronome to make sure he’d be in step with himself, shot anywhere from one-half to one-ninth of the frame at a time, and employed a cameraman who could hand-crank the film at precisely the same speed in every take.

(I should point out that The Playhouse happened because Buster broke his ankle filming an aborted version of The Electric House and couldn’t do serious stunts or tumbling until it healed.  First, I guess necessity really is the mother of invention, and second, this is what Buster taking it easy looks like, people – playing more than 20 characters in the same short!)

But it’s not just a technical marvel.  It’s also delightfully funny, both in the dream sequence and in the rest of the short.  I love all the Buster’s little touches throughout the dream, particularly the various gags in the pit – I like the conductor continually scratching his back with his baton and the clarinetist playing so hard he almost drops his clarinet – and the nicely-differentiated audience members.  Later, there are some fun twin gags (including the hilarious closing image,) an amusing chase, an aquatic escape, an original and alarming application of breaking glass in case of emergency, and Buster doing an absolute bang-up job of pretending to be a monkey.  Also, there’s a pair of one-armed veterans in the audience who both applaud by clapping the other guy’s hand, and they just kill me.

Unsurprisingly, we see a couple of familiar faces.  Big Joe Roberts plays the temperamental stage manager (although to be fair, with Buster as a stage hand, he has good reason to be temperamental,) and Virginia Fox appears as the twin Buster has his eye on.

Warnings

Slapstick violence and a brief, unfortunate scene of blackface.