Soup Stains and Burnt Tongues

There is nothing particularly funny about a bowl of soup.  Not the steam.  Not the broth.  Not the crackers.  I had lentil soup the other day and it didn't even make me crack a smile.  Yet, soup became a major comic prop in the early days of film.

The myopic maid featured in Nearsighted Mary (1909) spills soup on her employer's head.  This was soon to become a familiar gag.  At the dawn of film comedy, it was commonplace for clumsy waiters and incompetent servants to spill soup on people.  The soup may land on a head (preferably bald), or into a lap, or down a back.  A critic for Moving Picture World described a scene from The Rink (1916) in which "soup invades the decollette of a feminine diner." 

This was a world in which absurdly long beards hung down into soup bowls.  Harold Lloyd ran into this problem in Luke's Late Lunchers (1916).  He quickly addressed this diner's vulgar display by tying his beard around his neck.

Often, whether by accident or sabotage, inappropriate ingredients became submerged within the murky depths of a soup pot.  Mischievous children poured an excessive amount of pepper into a soup pot in Nora Declares War (1917).  A 1914 British comedy (title unknown) featured George Robey hiding an anarchist's bomb in a pot of soup.  A housemaid accidentally poured kerosene into soup in a 1910 Powers comedy called Our Housemaid.  This business with the kerosene-spiked soup was a time-tested Commedia dell'arte routine that would later be performed on film by both Charlie Chaplin (Shanghaied, 1915) and Buster Keaton (The Timid Young Man, 1935).

During this period, the most ludicrous soup ingredient was introduced in a 1909 Gaumont comedy called In the Consomme.  A maid mistakenly drops a sponge into a pot of soup and, without realizing the maid's error, her employer ingests the sponge as part of his meal.

The world became less funny when we stopped laughing at a bowl of soup.

Additional Note

I no sooner posted this article then Jay Brennan, the author of Don't Shoot Me, I'm Only The Gorilla!,  reminded me of this soup routine from You're Darn Tootin' (1928).

It takes comedians with a well-developed sense of timing and a natural gift of expressiveness to make such a simple and subdued routine so funny.  How many comedians can get laughs with a common salt shaker?  Thanks, Jay!

Gaumont Gets Stuck

I found a 1907 Gaumont Film Company catalog online.  This catalog would have been useful when I was writing my recent "Stuck!" article.  A number of films included in the catalog are about people getting stuck on something or getting something stuck on them.  Take, for instance, A New Toboggan.  A man goes tobogganing down a flight of stairs and ends up landing inside a barrel.  As a crowd of people gather to investigate the commotion, they find that the man's backside has become stuck inside the barrel.

Then, we have In an Armchair, which involves a man who becomes stuck in a narrow armchair.  The man leaves his apartment to get help, but he remains trapped in the chair's tight grip as he tumbles down a flight of stairs.   

 

L'homme aimanté (The Magnetized Man) features a pair of police officers who become magnetized and find themselves stuck together.

The last film in this category is a glue comedy, The Soldier's Helmet.  A mischievous boy applies a generous amount of glue to the inside of a soldier's helmet.  As expected, this creates a problem for the soldier once he puts on the helmet.  The remainder of the plot is explained as follows:

"About to retire, he finds that his helmet is glued to his head and that the united efforts of himself and his companions fail to remove it.  Finding that he cannot get it off, he goes to bed with it on.  The officer of the watch appears on his tour of inspection and, seeing the soldier sleeping with helmet on, demands the reason, which is given. . . [S]eeing the plight the soldier is in, he orders the guard to remove it but they also fail.  Finding all efforts in vain, he orders the man to the hospital. . . [The doctor] is about to operate on the man, who vigorously objects, and as an after-thought the doctor orders his assistant to go out and fetch him a fireman.  He orders the man to stand before the hose, which is vigorously played upon the helmet.  It becomes soddened and the glue softens.  It falls off, to the great relief of the soldier and the eternal glory of the doctor."

 

I found a non-sticky film in the catalog that I thought was interesting.  The film, The Electric Belt, involves medical science gone awry.  A wife is determined to help her husband with his lumbago.  A doctor assures her that the cure is an electric belt that he has specially designed.  The woman promptly buys the belt and sews it into the lining of her husband's coat.  As soon as her husband dons the coat, he is transformed from a man who is bent over in pain to a man who is jumping and prancing.  He also becomes extremely amorous, kissing every woman that he meets.  The police arrest the man for being a public nuisance.  He is stripped of his coat before being placed in a jail cell and he now returns to being a sick, bent man.  A police sergeant mistakenly grabs the coat from a rack and he no sooner puts it on then he becomes seized with the fidgets and attempts to kiss a woman.  When he removes the coat, he becomes calm and normal again.  Next, the coat is stolen by a tramp, who upsets a push cart in his attempt to caress the female proprietor.  You need to keep in mind that this is just a movie.  I would not recommend sticking a fork into an electrical socket to bring yourself to sexual arousal.  This is the reason that they always tell you, "Do not try this at home."

This reminds me of something that happened to me several years ago.  I ordered this Fast Abs belt that I saw on television.  They refer to the belt as an "electronic massager" and claim it can work off fat.  Don't believe it.  I got the package in the mail.  The package was so small and light that I couldn't imagine it had anything inside.  But I reached deep down into the box and managed to dig out a few things - a plastic battery case the size of a cigarette lighter, a pair of lithium batteries, a nylon strip with Velcro at either end, a tube of gel, and a nylon buckle lined with foil.  The device looked like it cost two cents to make.  I foolishly put on the belt even though I had no confidence that it would work.  I no sooner installed the batteries then I got the goddamnedest shock of my life!  It ends up that's all this device does is shock the person dumb enough to put it on.  They explain in the instructions that it delivers an electrical current into your body to stimulate blood and tissue.  Yeah, right, it stimulates a whole lot of stuff when you're getting electrocuted.  Sorry, my friends, I was not interested.  If I was in the mood for some electrical stimulation, I would have paid a dominatrix to attach wires from my toaster to my nipples.  I went back to the original ad and didn't see anything about getting juiced.

I have a better product for dieters.  I got the inspiration for this product when I had to move furniture into my kitchen in preparation of a carpet cleaning.  Having to squeeze past a table and chairs to get to my refrigerator deterred me from eating much food that day.  It occurred to me that I could lose a few pounds if I left these items in the kitchen for the next week.  I even thought that I might be able to make money by marketing something like this to dieters.  I am sure that my kitchen barricade could help more fat people than the Fast Abs belt.

In the meantime, people will continue to laugh at people getting into sticky situations.

I Take My Hat and I Bid You Adieu!

 

 

I bring you another hodgepodge today.  I hope that you enjoy it.

Let us start with the legendary, one-and-only Shemp Howard, who performs the hat mix-up routine in this scene from A Hit with a Miss (1945).

I identified a number of cutaway sets in a recent article, but I have now found a cutaway set that predated all of those other ones.  The set was designed by innovative French director Maurice Tourneur for the crime drama The Hand of Peril (1916).

It is always interesting to see a writer try to freshen up an old idea.  The man slipping on a banana peel was already an old joke by 1907.  So, a writer got the idea to change the joke by replacing the banana peel with the peel from another sort of fruit.  The result was a 1907 British film called The Orange Peel, which not surprisingly involved people slipping on a boy's discarded bits of orange peel.

This scene from Adventure Time includes a more imaginative variation of the banana peel gag.

I love these stills from the 1915 film adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. 

 

The film does not suffer from the CGI bloat of the recent adaptation.  Essentially, Wonderland is trees, a fountain, and midgets in Mardi Gras heads.

A good Murphy bed gag will always get a smile out of me.

Here we have a portrait of Charlie Chaplin and Harry Lauder.

 
I once had a girlfriend who hated silent comedy films because she thought that the exaggerated make-up made the characters look like ghouls.  This photo would no doubt support her argument. 

That guy looks like something out of Insidious.

 
 This photo of Victor Potel and Wan Duffy isn't much better.

 
The steely-eyed gunfighter was already a cliché ripe for lampooning when Snub Pollard appeared as a steely-eyed western sheriff in Before the Public (1923).

 

Now, let's see how Ennio Morricone's music from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly works with Before the Public.

The ten-cent Chaplin outfit that was offered in this advertisement consisted of a moustache ("made of real hair"), a gold tooth that could slip over your real tooth, a roll of stage money, an "Ish Ka Bibble" button, and a coin vanishing magic trick ("The Great Chaplin Coin Vanisher"). 

 
Other than the moustache, I don't know what any of this has to do with Chaplin.  Chaplin's tramp often smiled when his heart was breaking, but he never smiled and showed off a gold tooth.  But I suppose Chaplin impersonation contests were big at the time and maybe you could impress the judges by showing them you could make a coin disappear.

Impersonation contests also cropped up around another comedy sensation, Harold Lloyd.

This is an interesting ad, too.

  
Well, that's it for today.  Safe driving, my friends.

Making a Fuss About Russ

Russ Powell may not be an actor that is well known, but he turned up in character roles in a number of popular films. 

The Soul of Youth (1920) Patrolman Jones

The Slim Princess (1920)  The Governor General

The Big Trail (1930) Windy Bill

The Public Enemy (1931) Bartender

 

Me and My Gal (1932) Burper

Taxi! (1932) Dance Judge Presenting Cup

 

King Kong (1933) Watchman

A Night at the Opera (1935) Carriage Driver

 

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) Host of the ugly man competition

 

Son of Frankenstein (1939) Webber, Grand Burgher

Prior to his work as a character actor, Powell took slaps and falls in comedy shorts for Biograph, MinA, Knickerbocker, Vogue, L-KO, Century and Sennett.  

Alone in the City of Sighs and Tears (1915, MinA)

His time in the field did not last long.  He began this period of his career in 1915 (as "Fat Customer" in Biograph's The Fashion Shop) and ended it in 1919 (as a jealous, gun-toting husband in Sennett's Reilly's Wash Day).

 The Morning After (1915, Knickerbocker)

Vogue put forth a determined effort to promote Powell as an up-and-coming comedy star.  In those days, an overweight comedian was defined by his voluminous belly.  The following ad could not have laid it out clearer - "Big, fat Russ Powell is the chief funnyman."  

 

Film Fun magazine included Powell in a pictorial called "Fourteen Funny Fat Folk of the Film."  We get it, people like to laugh at the obese.  Of course, people laugh at skinny folk, too.

Powell was cast opposite a bright starlet named Priscilla Dean, whose job it was to be pretty while Powell performed pratfalls.  To leave no doubt about the primary reason that Dean was in the series, director  John Francis Dillion nicknamed his leading lady "Pretty Priscilla."  

 

Dillion promised that the series would provide "slapstick with reason," which addressed complaints from exhibitors that most comedies were comprised of random hitting and running around.

Heaven Will Protect a Woiking Goil (1916, Vogue)

Regardless of what Vogue intended, the series may not have been an ideal showcase for Powell or Dean.  Trade reviews suggest that Paddy McGuire, a supporting player in the series, may have taken away the spotlight from the stars.  McGuire established a following by playing a character named Bungling Bill, the slapstick antics of which were nothing if not random, and the actor was able in the end to outlast Powell and Dean's time at Vogue.

It is notable among Powell's credits that the actor played the conniving Kingfish in Check and Double Check, a 1930 feature film adaptation of the "Amos and Andy" radio series.

I am always happy to do a little bell-ringing for a forgotten clown.  My teacher used to tell me that, every time a bell rings, a baggy pants (or baggy robe) angel gets his wings.