Top Five Gags: His Wedding Night

August 20, 1917 – the day His Wedding Night was released.  Not my favorite Fatty Arbuckle short and certainly one of the more problematic ones.  Still, there are some good jokes in here, and Buster continues to gain screentime in his collaborations with Arbuckle (and none of the uncomfortable stuff is on his side, so it’s easier to enjoy freely.)  Spoilers.

Fun with Ice Cream

I always like watching Fatty show up while preparing/serving food, and he on the typical soda-jerk show here, twirling the ice cream scoop, catching the ice cream in the cup, etc.  Bonus points for the gross but funny gag of him using a comb to pour the malt more easily into the glass and then using a brush to clean off the sides of the glass where the ice cream spilled over.

Watermelon

This is a little thing, but it cracks me up.  While Al and Alice are digging into some watermelon, Al’s piece is perfectly-sized so that the ends of the rind stick in his ears as he eats down into his piece.  Great moment of messy-eating realism.

The Wink

You’ll notice that, once Buster enters the scene, all my favorite gags here are Buster-related.  In this one, he’s trying to blink dust out of his eye, and Fatty takes his winking as a cue for some non-Prohibition-friendly refreshment.  I like Fatty gradually adding more and more bar elements to the scene, offering Buster a footrest and sprinkling some sawdust(?) on the floor around him.

Losing the Dress

As I’ve said other times I’ve talked about this short, Buster misplaces a wedding dress and checks his pockets for it!  It’s totally a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment with no attention drawn to it, but it’s probably – in my opinion – the single funniest part of the entire short.

Wedding Dress Model

What I like here isn’t just that Buster models the wedding dresses as well as delivers them; it’s that it’s apparently an expected part of his services.  When he starts undressing, Alice is only upset that he’s not doing it behind the changing screen – there’s never a point where either of them doesn’t expect him to put on the dress and show it to her.  It’s just what he does!

His Wedding Night (1917)

Mixed feelings on this one.  Compared to The Rough House, it’s quite a bit funnier, the plot holds together better, and no one chases anyone with a knife, but there’s also some pretty messed-up stuff going on.  Buster, though, is a delight; this is the first Fatty Arbuckle short where he definitely feels like a character rather than a (firstrate) comic prop.  A few spoilers.

Fatty is working at a soda fountain, showing off his mad ice-cream-serving skills and making eyes at the boss’s daughter.  The two lovebirds get engaged, but spurned rival Al St. John has his own ideas to thwart their happiness.  Buster has a small but significant role as a delivery boy.

Fatty is fun here, as is frequent collaborator Alice Lake as his girl.  It’s interesting the way relationships seem to work in silent comedies.  They tend to go from zero to marriage in two minutes flat, and yet courtships often play out in such a childlike manner (it tracks with the way a lot of silent comics simply call their character “the boy” – Buster did this a lot in his shorts, as did Harold Lloyd.)  I like their coziness together and Fatty’s recurring habit of “tasting” kisses from the girl in his movies.  As usual, there’s also “fun with work” stuff, with Fatty showboating with the ice cream and later clowning around as a shrewd gas pump attendant. 

But parts of this short are seriously messed-up.  Al’s plan to kidnap Alice and make her forcibly marry him instead of Fatty falls under the “obviously sexist but kind of expected for a silent comedy” category – it sometimes feels like about half of the woman’s job in a silent comedy is to get abducted by the villain.  However, there’s also this really weird, really frakked-up subplot involving a lot of chloroforming, both accidental and intentional, and it actually features Fatty kissing an unconscious woman and then chloroforming her again as she comes to so he can keep kissing her.  I mean… what?!?  Needless to say, not a good moment for American cinema.

And then there’s Buster, Buster the wedding-dress delivery boy.  He’s just a hoot here, and there’s a logical throughline to his scenes that moves the story from point A to point B (I wonder if he had a hand in writing this part of the film – I know he said he was Fatty’s unofficial AD by the third film they were in together.)  Making a crash landing with his bike outside the store, Buster gets dust in his eye and can’t stop winking when he gets to the counter.  Fatty interprets the wink as a sign to hook him up with a little Prohibition-era delight on the quiet, and I’m assuming that it’s because Buster’s drunk that he models the wedding dress for Alice instead of just delivering it to her (although she only seems surprised that he starts undressing in front of her, not the mere fact that he’s undressing, so maybe this is just part of Buster’s standard delivery service?)  Anyway, this leads to the comic climax of Al accidentally kidnapping Buster, not Alice.  See?  Crazy and silly, but logical from beat to beat.  Also, because I’m lawfully bound to bring this up every time I talk about His Wedding Night, Buster momentarily loses track of the wedding dress and checks his pockets for it.  Just a tiny throwaway moment, but so fantastically hilarious.  Who else did stuff like that?

Warnings

Slapstick violence (including fake-strangling of women) and some troubling scenes involving chloroform.