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!