Top Five Gags: Three Ages

Three Ages in many ways straddles the line between a short and a feature.  After all, an hour-long film that tells the same story three times in different settings is essentially three two-reel shorts, divided into segments.  The gags also feel more reminiscent of a short, silly bits that Buster would call “cartoon gags.”  The features that came afterword are definitely funnier and better made, but there’s still good comedy to be found here.

Stone Age Calling Card

I get a huge kick out of the Stone-Age and Roman-Age anachronisms, and this one might be my favorite of all:  Buster presenting his “card” before entering someone else’s cave.  The fact that it’s a stone tablet is funny enough, but I love that it’s just a very simple carving of his face.

Collapsing Automobile

No idea how he did this one.  Normally, with the really impressive bits, it’s easy to find the play-by-play for how Buster made it happen, but I’ve never found an explanation for how he got that car to fall to pieces.  The sight gag is absurd, and the timing is just impeccable (and I wouldn’t have thought collapsing cars were known for their comic timing!)

Chariot Race

There are some fun chariot sight gags earlier in the film (I love that each of his four horses/donkeys are such mismatched sizes, and the spare wheel on the back cracks me up,) but this whole sequence is terrific.  The old Buster ingenuity is in full force here, swapping out his wheels for skis and his horses for dogs when the big race comes on the heels of a blizzard.  I also love that he has a “spare” here as well, an extra dog to trade places when one gets tired.

Police Chase

The mere fact of this fantastic circular gag that takes Buster from the police station, across the city, and back again is awesome enough; the transitions of falling in through the open window, sliding down the firemen’s pole, dropping onto the fire truck, and riding straight back to the burning police station are pitch-perfect.  But, of course, it’s made even better by the rooftop-jump that Buster doesn’t make, the one he was supposed to clear and was laid up for a few days over.  He decided the footage of him missing the ledge was funnier than it would’ve been to make it and shot a few extra gags to show how he broke his fall.  Now that’s the mother of invention!

In the Lions’ Den

Very cartoony, but I like it anyway.  I enjoy the set-up of Buster not being able to remember of specifics of Aesop’s fable, just that someone made friends with a lion by doing something with its paw, and the sight of Buster giving a giant lion puppet a mani is terrific.  It reminds me a little of him offering the choosy horse from The Blacksmith a wide range of horseshoe styles.