Great movies you're not watching

Hi kids! This is Charlie Chaplin (THE Charlie Chaplin), writing from the great beyond. Thanks to Ken for letting me guest blog today.  I really love his blog except when he writes about baseball or Patty Heaton.  But I digress.   I realize a lot of you don’t know who I am (or was). I was a silent movie star. You may have seen my little tramp character. Ken has posted a photo. I was really funny back in those days. Lots of sight gags. Like I said, we had no sound. We couldn’t do sparkling dialog like in STAR WARS. I also introduced “pathos” (sadness) to comedy. For the five cents you’d pay to see one of my movies you expected more than just hilarity.

I wasn’t the only big comedy star back then (although I was sleeping with more women). Buster Keaton was a genius. Somehow he could make inanimate objects come alive. And many of his stunts were truly death defying. Again, people were paying a whole nickel. You had to really wow them.

Harold Lloyd was another funny chap (we didn’t use “dude” then). You may have seen the famous scene where he is hanging from a large clock on the side of a skyscraper? (Ken, please provide a photo of that too.) Amazing. And he only had strength in one hand. Most people don’t know that. So all of his stunts were really incredible.

Personally I think these guys were nuts to risk their lives for the sake of a laugh, but we had no WIPE OUT so they were providing a real service. I just saw Buster recently and he said if he had it to all over again, he would have just gone up for romantic leads.  In that case, lose the pork pie hat. 

Anyway, we also had Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy – two very funny gentlemen who made the transition from silent to sound with relative ease. Stan was the comic genius – writing and directing all their pictures – but Ollie was maybe the funniest comic actor of our day. Even now, whenever I’m feeling a little low I just drop a few bricks on Ollie’s head and laugh and laugh. The guy kills me. And I’m dead.

Other funny folks came along. The Marx Brothers (although they were always a little to Jewish for my taste), W.C. Fields, Abbott & Costello, Carole Lombard (and Katherine Heigl calls herself a comedienne), and Cary Grant (Good luck, Buster, going up against that guy for romantic leads. You were better off being dragged by moving trains.).

So why am I here? To remind you that most of our movies are still available to see. In fact, with the internet, they’re even easier to access. If you’re interested at all in comedy you will be exposed to a whole new world. All the hilarious sight-gags you see in Judd Apatow/Seth Rogen/Tyler Perry movies – we all invented them a gazillion years ago. And we did our own stunts and baked our own pies.

But most young people don’t watch us anymore. And why is that? They’re just a click away. The reason is that all of our films are in black and white. First of all, lemme say it’s not like we had a choice. Don’t you think I would have used 3D and CGI and THX if I could? I would have crushed it on Blu-Ray. But black and white was all we had. And drugstores took forever to process the film. 

So what is so off-putting about b & w? Just because we’re not in color, we’re not worth watching? Jokes are only funny in pastels? Only old or dead people are in black and white movies? Comedy wasn’t invented until 2002? Seriously, what is it? All this amazing, inspiring, uproarious material and you kids have no interest because we’re all in gray. I’ve got news for you. Buster Keaton WAS gray.

I invite you to all to set aside your bias and discover the exciting wondrous illuminating world of black and white.  You'll thank me as if I tipped you to BREAKING BAD.  Black and white, my friends.   Black and white.   Sound – eh, that you can live without.

Thanks, Ken.