Apologies: this week’s post is about racially insensitive jokes in silent comedy (Yes, Ben Martin, this one’s for you), and so I’ve got some unpleasant screen grabs, illustrating some gags most of us probably wish hadn’t been filmed, and then to make matters worse I’m going to speak clumsily and awkwardly about these things while analyzing jokes. None of which is really all that great an idea.
As recent history has tragically shown, we’ve got a lot of work do to repair race relations in America. But that’s not to say it’s on no one’s short list of priorities to pick at the scabs of ninety-year-old silent comedies.
Why am I doing this, then? Well, despite these festering wounds I love silent comedy, and I fear it’s slipping into cultural irrelevancy. The only way to keep these films and these comedians even marginally, passingly, culturally relevant is to keep bringing new audiences to them—and these racist gags are a significant barrier to that.
But not all racist gags are created equal. A while back I looked at a potentially incendiary blackface bit by Gene Wilder in the movie Silver Streak, and how Richard Pryor’s reconfiguration of the joke helped soften the blow. That’s what this week’s post is about—how certain jokes are pitched, and how those nuances change the hurt.
Let’s start with the simplest, and least horrendous, of the jokes on offer—one I call “The Black Reveal.” The basic idea is on display in Buster Keaton’s Seven Chances. Buster has to get married in a few hours or forfeit an inheritance—so he’s desperately proposing to every woman he sees. The proposals and rejecting get faster and faster as he goes.
As he walks down the street, there’s a woman ahead of him in a fur coat and fancy hat. He speeds up to meet her—and stops abruptly upon seeing that she’s black. No proposal is made—it is of course to be taken for granted that she’s not an option.
However, it’s worth remembering that this is a silent comedy—in which nearly all of the jokes must be expressed in purely visual terms. Not only that, but since comedy depends so much on pacing, the joke not only has to land entirely visually, but it also makes a huge difference how long it takes the viewer to process what they’re seeing. If the punchline depends on rapidly revealing to the audience that once again Buster’s hit a matrimonial dead end, then having the “wrong woman” be a different skin color is a helpful visual shorthand that gets the joke across quickly.
And we can see that in the numerous variations of this joke throughout the same film, what matters is the quick reveal, not the racial component. Earlier in the film Buster spotted a woman on the far side of the room. As he sat next to her, she lowered her newspaper to reveal—a baby on her lap! Moments thereafter he finds what he believes to be a possible bride—but once she’s removed her hat and coat she turns out to be a child, not a grown woman at all. And just before his encounter with the black woman, he tries to propose to a woman on a bench until he realizes she’s reading a Hebrew newspaper.
Nevertheless, the essence of the Black Reveal is the concept that on sight, based solely on skin color, one can make conclusions about a person’s place in society, their capabilities, their worth as a person. It may be a visual shorthand, but that visual shorthand is the very basis of racial prejudice.
Of all the Black Reveals I’ve seen, one stands out as not only defensible, but actually surprisingly positive. It occurs in the Charley Chase short Isn’t Life Terrible, in which Charley sets out on an epically disastrous family vacation. Early on, he accidentally takes the hand of a different girl instead of his daughter’s hand, and only later realizes he’s taken the wrong child along and left his own daughter behind alone. And, perhaps because the skin color difference helps telegraph the joke best in the accelerated pace of this two-reel silent short, sure enough the wrong kid on his arm is black. In any other film of the era, that would be the punchline—a quick “a ha!” reaction as he sees the girl is black, some quick panicked double takes, and then move on.
But, Charley Chase has set up the premise so that there’s no way to swap the kids back again, so after that first “a ha!” gag, the black girl stays in the film as his ersatz daughter. Suddenly the joke has changed—instead of being about the reaction to her skin color, it becomes an extended sight gag. More to the point, the sight gag isn’t at her expense, or to do with any racial stereotypes—it’s just indulging in the visual incongruity, back in the days of racial separation, to see a white family with a black child. But she continues to be treated as their child, though, as if skin color is just a mask…
Which brings us to Joke #2: Swapping Colors. This can refer either to white characters getting blacked up or black characters getting whiteface on.
Once again I’ll lead with a Keaton example, from College. Buster’s character has to disguise himself in blackface to get hired as a waiter. When the girl he loves and his romantic rival come in to eat, he only escapes the humiliation of being recognized as their waiter because he looks black (sort of). In other words, once again here’s a situation that’s using the racial angle as a visual shorthand—in a modern comedy, you could have a similar premise but have the comedian use other means to hide their identity (a fake accent, for example, or other sort of disguise).
Also notable, Keaton’s shuck-and-jive routine is contrasted directly with the actual black waiters and waitresses around him who seem perfectly competent at their jobs. Keaton, meanwhile, catastrophically misunderstands the in/out system of the kitchen doors, can’t take or deliver orders correctly, and seems generally unsuited to any aspect of the job. As with Pryor’s redo of the blackface gag in Silver Streak, this blackface sequence ends up doing nothing but making fun of Keaton’s character, not the African-Americans he’s trying to pass as.
One comedian who used blackface (and whiteface) extensively was Larry Semon. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a film of his that didn’t at some point have a white character get a bucket of paint dunked on his head, or a black character get coated in white flour. Or both.
I’ve never quite known what to make of Semon’s seemingly obsession with this kind of joke. I definitely get the feeling he thought there was nothing funnier than seeing a person who appeared to have changed skin color. But exactly what made that funny is up for debate. Is it because changing races is so transgressive, that just to think of the taboo is hilarious?
Semon’s films made frequent use of a black actor named Spencer Bell. He was a regularly featured supporting player with an agile physicality and expressive face. Semon cast Bell as the Cowardly Lion is his 1925 version of The Wizard of Oz. And if you just look at their partnership in these abstract terms, it sounds like Semon was doing his part to promote a black comedian… until you actually see the racial caricature that Bell was hired to play.
In fact, Bell makes a great case study for Joke #3, The Scaredy Black. In one Semon film (I think it was the feature film Spuds, but I don’t have a copy with which to verify my memory), Bell gets so scared at one point he is skeletonized. How’s that for dehumanizing?
Now, it’s true that the slapstick shenanigans of silent comedians needed someone to react to them, to help the jokes go bigger. And there were comic performers like Edgar Kennedy or Jimmy Finlayson who basically built their careers on making funny reactions to the havoc unleashed by the likes of Laurel & Hardy. So, it’s not necessarily a bad thing that there were so many black performers like Spencer Bell whose paychecks came from making funny double takes…
Except, all these black supporting players were there to act scared. Edgar Kennedy got to simmer like a pot set to boil over, Homer Simpsons’ “D’Oh!” is the direct descendant of Jimmy Finlayson’s annoyed grunt. There were an array of ways to react to slapstick, unless you were black, in which case abject terror was all that was on offer. And since it traded on longstanding stereotypes of black Americans as superstitious and ignorant, no matter how brilliantly Bell and his colleagues sold their scaredy acts, they reinforced an oppressive system.
When I first started writing this post, in response to Ben Martin’s comment on my earlier post on Zenobia, I had a digression here where I started talking about the Michael Brown verdict—but in the intervening weeks we’ve had so many other instances of similar tragedies that I felt I had to rewrite this section. You don’t need a film historian to tell you race relations in America are broken—just check out #AliveWhileBlack on Twitter for that. But maybe it is the role of a film historian to address how these prejudices can burrow into our favorite films.
In his book The Funny Parts, film historian Anthony Balducci makes the claim that racial stereotypes are more pernicious today than in the silent era, and that back then “everyone was fair game as long as a stereotype served the plot or made people laugh.” He also singles out Buster Keaton’s belief that comedians should be able to act foolish to get laughs, regardless of their race.
The problem with that defense, however, is it speaks from a position of unacknowledged privilege. No matter how stupidly a white comedian behaved, it wouldn’t incline audiences to think of white men as inherently stupid. There are simply too many disparate pop cultural representations of white men (rich, poor, dumb, smart, heroic, villainous, decent, cowardly, etc, etc) that no particular representation holds any special power.
But minorities—be they racial, religious, sexual, what have you—get such infrequent representations, such that how they are portrayed in those limited roles takes on disproportionate weight. And when those portrayals conform to existing prejudices, it only serves to reinforce those attitudes, in an endless feedback loop.
And the way the media depict minorities is fundamentally part of this—the images of black men in the media have a direct influence on how these recent tragic situations have played out, and can directly affect the life expectancy of a black man caught up in any interaction with a cop. But there’s simply no number of episodes of Dexter that can possibly establish an image of all white men as serial killers. To argue that everyone is equal game for stereotypes is to suggest that stereotypes have an equal effect on all people, which is demonstrably untrue.
Black faces appear rarely in silent comedy. When they do, they are the butt of mean-spirited jokes more often than not. At best, they are neutral figures in the background. This is unfortunate, and because it’s in the past we can’t change it. Acknowledging it is better than trying to pretend it wasn’t hurtful.