Top Five Gags: The Balloonatic

*Spoilers.*

January 22, 1923—the day The Balloonatic was released. It starts slow, but the gags pick up a lot in the second half of the short. Here are my favorites.

 

 

Fishing

Lots of good bits in this sequence. I love when Buster accidentally gets his fishing waders full of water—after first trying to scoop the water out with his hands, he just stands on his head to dump it all out at once. At one point, after too many mishaps, he takes to cautiously dipping his line into the water by hand, and he ultimately resorts to trying to herd the fish into one spot and then damming the river so the bed goes dry, trapping them. I also love the awkward way he waddles around when his feet start slipping out of boots.

 

 

The Dive

After Buster’s makeshift dam (of course) breaks, he’s sent tumbling downstream. He finally manages to right himself in the exact spot where Phyllis Haver is about to dive into the water. Great physical comedy here as she knocks into him and they both stagger up dazedly, trying to figure out what on earth just happened!

 

 

Fish Dinner

Buster’s finally caught a fish, and it’s time to eat. Unfortunately, he decides to light his cooking fire inside his canoe, and in lieu of a pan, he cooks his fish on a tennis racket. This idea is every bit as terrible as you can imagine, and even as the tennis racket immediately goes up in flames, it still doesn’t occur to him that he might want to put out the fire in the canoe.

 

Canoeing

With his fish charred to bits, Buster takes to the river to go hunting, gliding along until he comes upon a rabbit on the shore. As he moves in to take his shot, I love how smoothly it’s revealed that his legs have been sticking through the hole burned in his canoe this whole time, and he’s essentially been canoeing Fred Flintstone-style.

 

 

Tailed by a Bear

Buster has plenty of gags where he unwittingly lopes along with someone/something dangerous right behind him. This one is elevated to art when he drops down to shoot at a squirrel, the bear still right at his heels. The squirrel darts away just in time for a second bear to pop up right in front of him. In a superbly-timed gag, Buster clubs Bear #2 with the butt of his rifle, unknowingly shooting Bear #1 at the exact same moment between his legs. It’s like a circular mechanical gag, but with wild animals! He was one of a kind, I tell you.

The Balloonatic (1923)

This short is from the tail end of Buster Keaton’s independent-short era.  For Buster, I’d say it’s decent – a little all-over-the-place, but with some pretty funny bits.

Through a series of carnival misadventures (because why the heck not?), Buster finds himself carried off by a runaway hot air balloon.  Eventually crashing in the woods, he’s forced to fend for himself, which, given Buster’s general luck, is no small task.  Still, he does what he can to keep himself safe, fed, and relatively undrowned, at the same time making eyes at a comely camper.

This short’s largest detriment is probably the fact that it riffs on so many ideas that Buster uses to greater effect in other films.  Whether it’s something he already did so well in a previous short (shallow-water gags in The Boat) or a subject he introduces here but later does so much better in a different film (hunting gags in Battling Butler and The Railrodder, fishing gags – and waterfall scenes! – in Our Hospitality, trying-to-walk-in-waterlogged-clothing gags in The Navigator,) many of the gags here have a second-best feel to them.  Maybe that’s not fair, since some of them are very funny – duck hunting in a hot air balloon is my favorite – but at the same time, in blaming Buster for it, I’m really just pointing out that this short has a bit of a hard time because he’s too funny elsewhere, and that’s hardly a condemnation.

If there’s a market that this short has cornered, though, it’s probably canoe gags.  Buster mines some great comedy out of that canoe, coming up with varied uses for it and adapting it in surprising ways.  He also gets tons of credit for acting opposite, not one, but two live bears – especially since he spends so much time with his back to one of them!  (He really did expect to be buried on a movie set someday, didn’t he?)  And for whatever reason, I just love that his hunting strategy evidently involves crawling on his hands and knees and then lying flat on his stomach before he shoots, no matter what he’s aiming for.

The girl here is supplied by Phyllis Haver, who I’m not familiar with.  She does a nice job playing a woman who seems fairly adept at roughing it.  She and Buster play well off of each other.  I especially like his sheepish retreat when she’s indignant about having had to save herself from a wild animal, and when she mistakes him going weak at the knees (in bear-related fright) with playful/flirtatious nudging, it’s too cute.  I’ve already talked about the short’s final gag with these two, which is a delight.

All in all, a nice enough little film.  Not the first Buster short I’d show to someone I was trying to convert, but it gets the job done. 

Warnings

Plenty of physical comedy/tumbling, but there’s really not much in terms of slapstick violence.  Just lots of “don’t try this at home!”  (Or in the woods.  Whatever.)