Top Five Gags: The Hayseed

October 26, 1919 – the day The Hayseed was released. As far as Keaton-Arbuckle shorts go, this one’s pretty middling and feels more meandering than usual, but it still includes some fun gags. Here are my favorites (spoilers.)

Horse Upkeep

Easy but delightful gag. Buster pulls up to the post office in the horse cart and then jumps down with an oil can to oil the horse’s legs. The execution is well-timed, with the horse bending each knee as Buster oils its joints, and bonus points for Buster ducking underneath the horse to get at the other side.

Dear Departed Whiskey

This gag is totally random, but it cracks me up. While making his mail deliveries, Fatty stops to pick some flowers and comes across an empty whiskey bottle. He immediately buries it, sets up a stone to mark the “grave,” and scatters his flowers over it. It’s funny enough as it is, but it now occurs to me that Prohibition would been starting close to the time this short was being made, making the “death” of this whiskey bottle even more tragic for Fatty!

Ring Size

Cut and clever. Fatty “discreetly” measures his girlfriend’s ring finger by jamming it into a piece of cheese. He then sticks a pickle in the hole her finger made, notes where it “fits” comfortably, and sends away for a ring, with instructions to fit it to “the third bump on the enclosed pickle” to ensure the right size.

Measuring the Suit

Fatty sends away for a suit as well, and he enlists Buster to help him with the measurements. While it’s an obvious comedy bit, that doesn’t stop the various bits of business within it from being a hoot. I especially like Fatty repeatedly knocking Buster on the chin as he sticks his arm out and Buster attempting to measure Fatty’s generous backside with a yard stick.

Cutting a Rug

At the town dance, Fatty and Buster take turns with an enthusiastic partner. First, Fatty spins her around the floor like a rag doll (at one point knocking Buster off his feet.) Then, when Buster takes over and the two of them stumble together, he does a backward somersault over the top of her as she goes down. Even in a so-so short, Buster’s comic acrobatics are something to see!

Top Five Gags: Back Stage

September 7^th, 1919 – the day Back Stage was released. It’s been nearly a year since I last did a 100 Years of Buster Keaton post, and it was only recently that it occurred to me why: this would’ve been the stretch of time when Buster was serving in World War I. While Fatty Arbuckle continued to make shorts throughout 1919, this would have been the first he made after Buster returned home. A classic, and for good reason. Tons of great gags (and stunts!), but these are my favorites (spoilers.)

The Traveling Star

The stagehands are used to dealing with actors’ egos at the theatre. They have a single star attached to a pulley system that they use to hang it over each dressing room door in turn. That way, each arriving actor thinks they’re the star. Ha!

Unfortunate Sign Placement

Fatty has pasted up a wall ad for a new show, involving the famous actress Miss Gertrude McSkinny performing in The Little Laundress. However, the placement of the words on the ad, combined with its position right next to a sliding door, means that when the door is open, half the sign is covered and what remains are the words “Miss Skinny Will Undress Here at 2 P.M.” I love me a good sight gag.

Dancing Fails

This whole sequence is terrific. The stagehands are trying to imitate a dancer in the show. Fatty gets in on the action first, doing pretty well until he crosses his ankles and they get stuck that way, leaving him teetering. But Buster’s contribution is great, too. Attempting a complicated move, he winds up staggering around the backstage area in a precarious limbo position, unable to straighten back up. The cherry comes when Fatty winds up with a broom to knock him off his feet; as Buster sits up, he shakes Fatty’s hand in a matter-of-fact display of gratitude.

Wrestling with the Barbell

More awesome physical comedy from Fatty and Buster. After getting an electrical current to hit the barbell as the strongman is lifting it, they’ve knocked him out and are now struggling to get the barbell off him. Neither is up to the task, and Buster of course ends up trapped on the ground with the barbell lying across his neck. His gravity-defying attempts to free himself are a total Buster move, while Fatty’s efforts to help are well-meaning but wildly ineffective.

The King and Queen

You can’t talk about Back Stage without talking about this sequence. Everything about Fatty and Buster playing the king and queen in the show is a delight: their overly-dramatic posing, Fatty catching the leaping Buster in his arms, and the two of them lounging by their “throne” with Buster systematically yanking out Fatty’s leg hairs. There’s also Buster’s amazing series of no-handed cartwheels, which isn’t really a gag but still deserves mention just for being so damn cool.

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!