The Good Natured Chaplin
September 19th, 2010 § 6 Comments
“Chaplin thought about how to make it more true, not how to make it more funny.”
- Keith Johnstone
Keith Johnstone’s voice kept echoing inside my head as I watched The Circus this afternoon at the Castro theater. Clearly Keith had spent a lot of time studying Chaplin. The faint memories I recall from childhood while watching Chaplin movies on Doordarshan were of him doing a lot of kicking people in the rear and running and tripping over himself. Kids love that kind of stuff. In my row today, a determined looking mother sat with two of her radiant looking children hoping to inculcate in them a sense of appreciation for the right kind of stuff . They loved the scene when he gets stuck in the lion’s cage, they shrieked and gasped. My faculty of appreciation had clearly become more sophisticated and therefore rather dull. Despite myself I was moved, delighted, heartbroken and amazed.
Chaplin is a genius. This much is clear.
But what does that really mean. Firstly, multi-talented. Not a dabbler but a master of many skills. His mime. It is brilliantly precise and evocative. There is a scene where running from the policeman and chances upon the side show of the circus (so thats where the term “side show” comes from). The side show is a house with those mechanical puppet contraptions. The clown that hits his head on the fence repeatedly, the scarecrow that takes off his hat and puts it back on again. Chaplin and another thief who is escaping from the law proceed to assume a place in the side show and Chaplin picks up what looks like an eggplant and improvises a display where he turns and raps the thief on the head with the eggplant (on closer inspection, its an umbrella which makes sense, its more harmonious with the reality of the scene, an eggplant would be not as believable), turns back and opens his mouth wide and laughs. Then does it again in precisely the same fashion as last time. This is where I marveled at the perfection of his mime. Eventually the thief passes out from being tapped on the head and the facade is blown. The audience howls with laughter.
Being a master of theatrical skill is not enough to be a historical legend and at one time arguably the most famous man in the world. He obviously had a mystically deep insight into comedy. Escaping from the Policeman, he runs into a flailing circus act. The magician makes a bored looking girl sitting in the chair disappear and in the reappearing act, he opens the door to the chamber where the girl would usually be and sees Chaplin cowering in there stricken with the most beautifully portrayed fear. The girl then sticks her head out from under a hole in the ground looking bewildered and confused. The magician is stunned and panics and shuts the door only to find Chaplin now in the chair under the magic cloth. The crowd goes wild. He finally manages to escape and the normal act resumes. The crowd cusses and boos and asks to “bring back the funny man.” The crotchety circus owner offers Charlie a job which he instantly accepts in his perpetual zeal for survival.
At the tryout is where we see Chaplin’s satire at its best. The owner barks an order at him.
“Go ahead and be funny!”
Charlie proceeds to do a little gig. Again, brilliant mime. The clowns find it hilarious but the owner is not impressed. He wants that same madness that gripped the crowd when Chaplin bad barged in on the act running from the police. He is frustrated that he doesn’t know how to bring back the magic. Until one day when the handy men quit their jobs and Chaplin is hired to replace them his first task being to transport a stack of dishes. He immediately drops one dish and in the act of trying to pick it up nudges a horse standing nearby and is then chased by the horse on to the circus arena spilling dishes all over the place. The crowd once again turns into a cheering beast. The circus owner finally figures it out. ”He is a sensation but he doesn’t know it. Keep him on as a handyman.”
“Improvisation is an exhibition of good nature.”
- Keith Johnstone
If you fail on stage and are good natured about it, the audience will want to take you home and cook you meal. Chaplin is an embodiment of this principle. Repeatedly we see him fail with extremely good nature. And that is hilarious. The Circus is a magnificent illustration of good nature and an extraordinary commentary on what constitutes funny. A reminder that the magic of spontaneity cannot be planned for or theorized about. That there is this intense delight in seeing someone relentlessly committed to the pursuit of an objective but being thwarted in every essay. Charlie Chaplin brings to you the most wonderful ways in which he can fail but always remains completely true to the story. He is absent-minded enough to wipe the fish along with the bowl but wily enough to play an entire game of golf without owning a golf ball, brave enough to fall hopelessly in love and adorable enough to know he has nothing to offer the girl. I wanted to bring him home and cook him a meal and take him shopping.
To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it!
- Charlie Chaplin
Wonderful article. I guess a lot of what you write comes from your personal experience (as an improv. artist) rather than mere film criticism. Keep up the good work
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The mirror maze scene is simply brilliant.
Professor, brilliant idea about the youtube link. The needful has been done. It brings absolutely the right context that this post needed. I do hope people will appreciate my comments more deeply now. And of course, thanks again for bringing this festival to my notice. Its awesome that you have enough of a pulse on happenings in SF that you could let me know this is happening from half-way across the globe. I wish you were here to watch this with us. cheers! I went again Sunday and watched City Lights, A Dog’s Life and Sunnyside. I’m gonna try and go for a double feature Tuesday night as well.
yes you are right. The mirror maze is mesmerizing. Thats when your amusement at watching Chaplin – the hopeless tramp, turns into a reverence for Chaplin – the genius.
I’ll commit felony, blasphemy is too mild, but this is the time to say it. I never got Charlie Chaplin. I have tried; and on my worst days watching America’s Funniest Videos reminds me of…okay, okay, I’ve made my point. I don’t get him.
Until you wrote this:
‘If you fail on stage and are good natured about it, the audience will want to take you home and cook you a meal.’
and this:
‘That there is this intense delight in seeing someone relentlessly committed to the pursuit of an objective but being thwarted in every essay. Charlie Chaplin brings to you the most wonderful ways in which he can fail but always remains completely true to the story.’
That’s why I didn’t get him. My heart was not large enough for his very…Buddhist existence. I was always more afraid for him, than he seemed to be for himself. He was being existentially funny, I wanted him to go pick up a job.
I didn’t know that when he wants you to take him home and cook him a meal, the joke’s on you.
Thank you, Saif Ali.
go(ld)phish
I understand. This is where I was kinda going with …
“The faint memories I recall from childhood while watching Chaplin movies on Doordarshan were of him doing a lot of kicking people in the rear and running and tripping over himself.”
As a kid, I don’t remember being enthralled but kinda tickled. So I didnt “get” him either really. When did you last watch a Chaplin? That would change a lot. Also it changes a lot when you see in on the big screen and not on TV while the domestic help asks you to lift your legs so they can pochcha-lagao under your feet. On the big screen, and certainly for you as a filmmaker, you would notice how brilliant the photography and the direction is. It is precise … precision … is something we dont associate with Chaplin. But he has needle hole precision. From Wikipedia:
“This is one reason why Chaplin took so much longer to complete his films than those of his rivals. In addition, Chaplin was an incredibly exacting director, showing his actors exactly how he wanted them to perform and shooting scores of takes until he had the shot he wanted. (Animator Chuck Jones, who lived near Charlie Chaplin’s Lone Star studio as a boy, remembered his father saying he watched Chaplin shoot a scene more than a hundred times until he was satisfied with it.[40] This combination of story improvisation and relentless perfectionism—which resulted in days of effort and thousands of feet of film being wasted, all at enormous expense—often proved very taxing for Chaplin, who in frustration would often lash out at his actors and crew, keep them waiting idly for hours or, in extreme cases, shutting down production altogether.[39]”
If you notice in the video embedded in the post, the Police chasing scene on the wheel (1:32). He laps the policeman and is actually running behind him. Then he hooks the policeman with his cane to minimize his running effort. Then to mock him further, he takes out his watch and checks the time and kinda does a little shrug. The whole thing is extremely precise, not for a moment does it break the illusion. The reason its funny is because its believable. And at that point, you *dont* feel sorry for him. He has the cop on the run and is mocking him while an entire circus laughs.
If you want to see Chaplin trying to pick up a job, watch this:
(at 2:59)