In praise of the pratfall: why slapstick comedy can be high art

There was much excitement and astonishment last week when the scripts for two previously unpublished sketches by Buster Keaton came to light. The excitement, I can well understand. Along with Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, Keaton was one of the three titans of the silent movie age, and arguably the boldest and most timeless of the lot.

Know that scene where the front of a house falls on top of an oblivious fellow but – thanks to a pane-free top-floor window – completely fails to touch him? That’s Keaton (in 1928’s Steamboat Bill, Jr.). And it was also he who – marvellously, potentially lethally – sat deadpan on the bobbing “wheel rod” of a chugging steam train as it disappeared into a tunnel in his 1926 masterpiece The General. The very idea that two sketches lurk in the vaults – unperformed, but nevertheless typed by the man himself – is tantalising.

The astonishment at the find, which centred around the supposed revelation that Keaton planned his jokes in minute detail, is harder to fathom, however. Yes, Keaton once told an interviewer: “As a rule, about 50 per cent you have in your mind when you start the picture, and the rest you develop as you’re making it.” And yes, both of these sketches (which were written for television in the Fifties and would have had sound but no dialogue) detail every last physical nuance and prop requirement in forensic detail.

But is this really such a contradiction? Choreographers and dancers – to take a close parallel – often improvise in the studio, but you can guarantee that what you ultimately see on stage will have been prepped and polished to within an inch of its life. Similarly, it is inconceivable that by the time Keaton came actually to perform and shoot his stunts, he hadn’t already slotted all the cogs into place with a watchmaker’s precision.

That house’s facade weighed two tons; the train, dozens of times that. The slightest failure in either case could have led to his being either squashed flat or ground to mincemeat.

Any surprise at Keaton’s painstaking preparation hints, I think, at a widespread misconception. Namely, that physical comedy – despite having its roots in the 16th-century Commedia dell’arte and being, at its best, the finest and funniest kind of comedy full stop – is somehow inherently inferior to the more obviously “clever” verbal kind; that it is, as the Edinburgh Fringe favourite Adam Riches suggests, someone “just pratting about and being a fool”.

Over the 20 years that I’ve been covering the Edinburgh Fringe for this paper – and, in fact, since the prize was launched in 1981 – just one non-verbal comedian, Doctor Brown, has won the award for best show (in 2012). And even New Zealander Sam Wills – whose mute Boy With Tape on His Face coincidentally snaffled the Panel Prize that same year and, renamed as Tape Face, is currently riding high at Hurrah’s club in Las Vegas – acknowledges this prejudice.

“Yes, there is a definite discrimination within the comedy industry against prop comics,” he tells me down the phone. “I’ve always been a ‘prop comic’, a physical comedian all my life, and there has always been that same stigma.

“It’s almost like musical comedy,” he continues. “You get people saying, ‘Why don’t they put down the guitar and just be funny?’, And they’re like, ‘I am being funny. And I’m playing guitar.’”

No one could accuse the garrulous Riches of being mute on stage. And yet the 2011 Edinburgh Comedy Awards winner is also one of the most physical and prop-reliant – and also audience-participatory – comedians on the circuit. After all, that award-winning (and in my experience unmatched) show saw him at one point pretend to be Daniel Day-Lewis, griping about not having won a major award “for four minutes” and then asking a few audience members to hurl him bodily at a few more; its 2014 follow-up saw him, now as Sean “Lord” Bean (in Game of Thrones’ Ned Stark mode) teaching an unsuspecting woman how to administer a humane death to a folding chair.

“It’s very difficult to make an accident happen on screen, as it is on stage,” he says, “because it’s all manufactured and all has to be tested and checked. And so I think any kind of criticism of physical comedy, and silent physical comedy, being lower down the tentpole is a way-off observation: there’s a lot going on.

“Keaton did it a hundred years ago with no words whatsoever,” he continues, “and there are now those sketches detailing all of the physical ‘beats’ that he would have. You can’t argue that that isn’t writing. That’s as ‘written’ as an exchange between two people building up to a punchline.”

Wills agrees, “one hundred per cent. My closest example,” he says, “is I’ve got that one routine where I shake horses’ hooves to the William Tell Overture. It’s a three-minute routine, but I spent six months on that, making sure that something was happening on every single beat. Setting up a joke, going into a punchline; setting up a joke, going into a punchline; all building towards one big joke.”

But who, you may wonder, are the big-screen heirs of Keaton and friends? Do they even exist? It has been hypothesised that, in this more mollycoddled, risk-averse, CGI-heavy age, audiences are simply less willing to see stars put themselves in genuine physical danger in the pursuit of laughs. Riches – currently holed up with his girlfriend and a tortoise, as he somehow would be – believes that there might be something in that.

“I think there’s such a potential for outcry over the moral responsibility of what you’re showing on screen,” he says, “that if you do show those haphazards, those kind of physical things, nowadays you’re just opening yourself up to a barrage of criticism.”

Both Riches and Wills do acknowledge, though, that Rowan Atkinson’s near-silent man-child Mr Bean – immensely popular, if predictably sniffed at by comedy snobs – is very much in the silent-movie tradition, with Riches praising the character as “a clever invention for sure”. I would argue too that in the always self-performed stunts of Jackie Chan – and in individual examples such as the lyrical, anarchic physicality of Jim Carrey’s Riddler in 1995’s otherwise awful Batman Forever – you have a direct link back to Keaton and co.

Also, as Riches points out, pratfalls have seldom fallen out of fashion on television. Michael Crawford’s chronically accident-prone Frank Spencer in the Seventies sitcom Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em is probably the most direct throwback, with Crawford – like Keaton, like Chan – doing all the hard work himself.

Wills, however, quickly cites stunt-fan Johnny Knoxville’s reality TV series and spin-off feature films Jackass as a one-stop rebuttal of the risk-aversion hypothesis, “because they are essentially silent films. Johnny Knoxville has even said he’s influenced by silent films”. He is equally swift, though, to stress that this might not necessarily be a cause for celebration. “Jackass and so on would become the modern-day version of silent comedy… God, how awful is that!”

And yet, and yet. True, it would be a rash soul to suggest that (say) people Super-Glueing their bodies together and peeling them apart, a man in a mouse costume crawling through a field of traps towards a piece of cheese, or Knoxville trying to launch himself into space strapped to an 8ft “big red rocket” (which blows in half) is any sort of rival for Keaton’s sublime physical poetry.

But admit it: that does all sound kind of funny, doesn’t it? And you know what? It is. I’m not entirely convinced, either, that Keaton himself would have entirely disapproved.

Buster Keaton (The 2020 Virtual Convention) will take place on Oct 3 and 4; busterkeaton.org. Steamboat Bill, Jr and other films by Buster Keaton are available through Amazon