Buster Keaton and the Art of the ‘Wise Fool’

Buster Keaton with Florence Turner in College (1927) directed by James Horne. Well-known for doing his own stunts in his films, Keaton was depressed when for the first time in his career he had to hire California athlete Lee Barnes to do a pole-vaulting sequence in the picture.

On a relentlessly hot day in July 1898, Buster Keaton, not yet three years old, lost part of a finger in a clothes wringer, had several stitches after a stone thrown into the air gashed his forehead, and was carried off by a cyclone.

Keaton’s parents were appearing in vaudeville in Kansas. At the climax of the act the auditorium door burst open and a voice yelled ‘Cyclone! Cyclone! Hit for cover!’ The theatre emptied. Joe and Myra Keaton ran back to the boarding house where they had left their son. Up to the bedroom, no Buster. Down to the storm cellar, no Buster:

‘At that moment, Buster was sitting in his nightgown in the dusty middle of unpaved Main Street some four blocks away... Just as his parents were scrambling in the front door, the vast vacuum of the tornado’s eye had sucked him bodily right out of the second-story window. Before Joe and Myra were halfway up the stairs, their son was sailing high over trees and houses, too amazed to be afraid, and then coasting down a slow-relaxing ramp of air to land gently in the very centre of an empty street’ (Blesh, 1966: 9-10).

The incident is legendary. It set its stamp on a man who literally tumbled into the lives and affections of millions. Buster Keaton went on stage with his father as a child star in a ‘roughhouse’ act in which he was bodily thrown into the wings and against the stage backcloth without ever coming to harm. He learnt how to trip and fall and do all the visual gags that later served him so well in his films. Early on he discovered that a deadpan face – never smiling, never blinking an eye – would get the audience’s attention. It was the mask of the tragic clown.

Commedia dell’arte tradition

Buster Keaton’s character and style were a throwback to commedia dell’arte in which masked actors improvised on traditional themes. Such performances flourished in Italy from the 14th to the 17th century. In practice the plays did not originate in the inspiration of the moment. The subject was predetermined, the characters named, their relations to one another established and the situations clearly identified beforehand.

The chief characters in commedia dell’arte were an old man (Pantalone), a learned pedant, a swashbuckling soldier, serving maids and comic servants, of which the best known are Arlecchino (Harlequin) and Colombina. In the 18th century the commedia dell’arte tradition began to infiltrate the satirical plays of the Paris fairs, where unlicensed theatres performed pièces en vaudeville (plays in dumb show – because dialogue was forbidden) parodying the famous Comédie-Française. The format was imported into English as Harlequinade, an early kind of pantomime. Here Harlequin often figured as a persecuted lover befriended by a good fairy. Commedia dell’arte, Harlequinade and pantomime metamorphosed into vaudeville, the loose collection of variety acts that entertained people in the days before cinema, radio and television.

The plots of commedia dell’arte were mostly concerned with love intrigues, clever tricks to get money or to outwit some simpleton. An important part of the action were the humorous interruptions, called lazzi, which often had nothing to do with the story itself. These might be acrobatic feats, juggling, pantomime acts, or wrestling. The stock characters in commedia dell’arte wore masks, which told the audience what to expect. There is a strong parallel between the physicality and characters of commedia dell’arte and Buster Keaton’s comic ‘persona’, including his mask-like face and the simple characters he plays in his films.

The wise clown

The influence of commedia dell’arte can be traced in the plays of Shakespeare, who saw actors improvising plots and who used material from translations of the 16th century Italian playwright Lodovico Ariosto. Shakespeare altered the tradition by using his comic characters to comment on serious or romantic action as well as to add entertainment value.

Shakespeare’s ‘clown’ was often a caricature of a rustic buffoon who nevertheless embodied common sense. In contrast, the ‘fool’ had his origins in real life. In Elizabethan times, ‘natural’ and ‘wise’ fools were kept in great houses, the former providing involuntary entertainment through their mental incapacity, the latter more sophisticated entertainment in which the appearance of folly was part of the act. On stage:

‘Shakespeare’s fools are mostly wise; they hover on the edges of the play’s action, enabled by their classlessness to move easily between high and low characters, glancing obliquely in anecdote, jest, and song at the follies of their social betters... No one could be more sympathetic than the apotheosis of Shakespeare’s use of the character type, the Fool of King Lear, whose very namelessness assists the sense of disembodied intelligence existing purely for the sake of his master’ (Wells, 2002: 140).

This is not a far cry from the character of the wise clown that Buster Keaton develops in his films. Audiences everywhere recognise the individual who confronts the mundane aspects of daily life. The seeming fool lifts the veil of authority, pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes, unmasking the more unpleasant aspects of power, encouraging society to reflect on and laugh at its own foibles. The loner triumphs over adversity, which, in Keaton’s case, often involved a machine. Among the many that he made, two films in particular reveal Keaton’s innate understanding of the human condition and the comic possibilities offered by fate: Cops and The General. A third, at the end of his career, marks the homage paid to a great comic actor by a great playwright: Film.

Cops (1922)

The story is that of an easygoing youth (Keaton), getting nowhere in particular, whose girl (the mayor’s daughter) gives him an ultimatum: ‘Either become a big businessman, or lose me.’ He finds money in the street and uses it to go into business. He pays a sharpster, who does not own them, for a horse and wagon that are not for sale. Next he pays a con man for a houseful of furniture. The youth now sets out on the wagon, aiming to sell the furniture at a handsome profit. Then he will be what his girl wants him to be – a success.

Buster and the wagon somehow stumble into the annual police parade. He is swept along a crowd-lined street towards the mayor and local dignitaries on a reviewing stand in front of City Hall. Just as Buster and the wagon approach, the scene cuts to a nearby roof where a bunch of anarchists are lighting the fuse of a bomb. They toss it over the parapet and it lands on Buster’s wagon seat. Oblivious, Buster lights a cigarette with the burning fuse and carelessly throws the bomb onto the sidewalk in front of the reviewing stand.

The bomb explodes, catapulting Buster into the air, shattering the wagon, tipping over the stand and flattening the marchers. A quick shot shows the people on the stand shaken, but uninjured. Cue thousands of cops in pursuit of one small man. But these are not Keystone Cops; these are real and the chase is on, swirling through the city. Finally, Buster flees into a great open doorway before the camera pans to a sign above that reads ‘Central Police Station’. A few moments elapse and slowly the great doors open and a policeman backs out. Locking the doors he turns and reveals his face: Keaton.

Even so there is a last laugh. At that very moment the girl Buster loves walks past. He looks at her; she tosses her head and walks away. Sadly Buster retrieves the key to the Police Station and opens the door. A dozen grasping hands drag him inside. The final shot is a tombstone. Engraved on it are the words ‘The End’. Commedia finita est, and that’s the way real life so often goes.

The General (1926)

The story behind the film is true. In 1868 William Pittenger published The Great Locomotive Chase. It told the stranger-than-fiction tale of an incident in 1862, during the Civil War, when a handful of Union raiders operating behind Confederate lines tried to steal a locomotive and nearly got away with it. The film is, therefore, more or less one long chase, with ‘The General’ (the stolen locomotive) being endlessly pursued by Keaton.

Refused enlistment in the Confederate army because he is considered indispensable as a civilian railroad engineer, John Gray (Keaton) has two loves, a beautiful old locomotive and his girl, Annabelle Lee. When the locomotive is kidnapped (along with Annabelle) John follows the train northward in one comic sequence after another. That night, in territory held by the North, he arrives at Union headquarters to reclaim both his loves. Snatching Annabelle up and boarding ‘The General’, John heads south pursued by Northern soldiers in another locomotive, ‘The Texas’... The film is too good to spoil with the rest of the story!

The real-life drama of ‘The General’ ended with the scattered flight and capture of the raiders, the hanging of some and the long imprisonment of others. A thrilling story to read, but not, one would have thought, material for comedy. But Keaton had moved away from comedy for comedy’s sake to explore a deeper level in which his fate-ridden characters exhibit a kind of noble pathos. The result in The General is a masterpiece of cinema, whose mix of bravura and heroism tinged with sadness established a new genre of comedy:

‘At this stage, laughs had become secondary – at least in the sense that easy laughs would no longer do. The character had to tell his story, a real story told so that all must believe. Now, neither thoughtless nor thoughtlessly provoked, laughter wells up from a deeper place’ (Blesh, 1966: 270).

The genre that Buster Keaton inaugurated is reflected in the work of a later great film comedian, Jacques Tati. Keaton was already a star in France, where he was known as Malec, when he began to appear live at the Cirque Médrano. An acknowledged disciple of Keaton, Tati’s films – Jour de fête (1949), Les Vacances de M. Hulot (1953) and Mon Oncle (1958) – are:

‘remarkable for their economy of style and gesture. Using a minimum of dialogue and maximum of visual effect and natural sound, Tati creates an observant satire on contemporary France as it moves into becoming a society of consumption’ (Hayward, 1993: 185).

Social commentary was not Keaton’s principal aim, but he succeeded in showing how ‘serious comedy’ could still be used to observe society.

Buster Keaton working with Samuel Beckett on Film (1965). Keaton later said of the ‘plot’: ‘What I think it all means is that a man can keep away from everybody, but he can’t get away from himself.’

Film (1965)

A year before Keaton died, Barney Rosset of Evergreen Theatre invited Eugène Ionesco, Harold Pinter, and Samuel Beckett to write the scripts for a feature-length trilogy. Beckett wrote Film. His first choice for its lone protagonist was Irish actor Jack McGowran, who was unavailable. So were Charlie Chaplin and Zero Mostel. Finally, Beckett agreed that Buster Keaton would be ideal.

Film was shot in black and white and directed by Alan Schneider under the personal supervision of Samuel Beckett, who may only have been there in person because of his declared admiration for Keaton’s work:

‘It has even been suggested that the inspiration for Waiting for Godot might have come from a minor Keaton film called The Loveable Cheat, in which Keaton plays a man who waits endlessly for the return of his partner – whose name interestingly enough was Godot’ (Waugh, 1995).

In Film, the camera follows Keaton through the streets from behind so that the audience never sees his face. People in front gasp in horror as they catch sight of him. The character eventually reaches the apartment where he lives and goes inside. He shoos his cat and dog from the room and covers up the goldfish bowl. After tearing up family photos, the camera finally traps Keaton into looking into the lens and two points of view are revealed: Keaton’s look of sheer anguish (at being seen) and the camera’s (transformed into Keaton’s alter ego) look of intent curiosity.

Asked what Film is about, Beckett said:

‘It’s about a man trying to escape from perception of all kinds – from all perceivers – even divine perceivers... But he can’t escape from self-perception. It is an idea from Bishop Berkeley, the Irish philosopher and idealist, “To be is to be perceived”. The man who desires to cease to be must cease to be perceived. If being is being perceived, to cease being is to cease to be perceived’ (Brownlow, 1996).

The first European screening of Film took place at the 1965 Venice Film Festival. At 75 years old Keaton received a standing ovation and was visibly moved. ‘Fighting back tears he told a correspondent: “This is the first time I’ve been invited to a film festival, but I hope it won’t be the last.” But it was. Three months later, Buster Keaton was dead’ (Blesh, 1966: 373).

In silent movies, action is more important than words. In silent comedy, slapstick is often used to caricature life’s hardships and human fallibility. The tragic clown’s ability to survive against the odds and to recover from life’s blows – physically and psychologically – are presented as universals. Laughing is a means to reflection.

Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton are the giants of silent film comedy. If Chaplin forces us ‘to see through the veils and fictions of the socialist order to a deeper level of humanity’ (Hurley, 1978: 105), ‘Stone Face’ Keaton invites complicity in the kind of misfortune that befalls everyone. Keaton evokes sympathy for the individual pitted against conspiracy and machine:

‘He was the only major comedian who kept sentiment almost entirely out of his work, and he brought pure physical comedy to its greatest heights. Beneath his lack of emotion, he was also uninsistantly sardonic; deep below that, giving a disturbing tension and grandeur to the foolishness in his comedy, there was a freezing whisper not of pathos but of melancholia. With the humour, the craftsmanship and the action there was often, besides, a fine, still and sometimes dreamlike beauty’ (Agee, 1949).

Keaton’s mask is Shakespeare’s mirror, whose purpose is ‘to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image’ (Hamlet). The heroic endurance of Keaton’s characters reflects everyone’s struggle to find meaning in life. Glimpsing our true nature – even on screen – can be disheartening. More often than not it is exemplary and morally rewarding. Therein lies Keaton’s greatness.

References

Agee, James (1949). ‘Comedy’s Greatest Era’. Life Magazine, 5 September 1949.
Blesh, Rudi (1966). Keaton. New York: Macmillan.
Browlow, Kevin (1996). ‘Interview with Samuel Beckett’. Film West 22, Spring.
Hayward, Susan (1993). French National Cinema. New York: Routledge.
Hurley, Neil P. (1978). The Reel Revolution. A Film Primer on Liberation. Matyknoll, NY: Orbis Books.
Waugh, Katherine and Daly, Fergus (1995). ‘Film by Samuel Beckett’. Film West 20, Spring.
Wells, Stanley (2002). Shakespeare For All Time. London: Macmillan.

Philip Lee joined the staff of the World Association for Christian Communication in 1975, where he works on the Global Studies Programme and is co-editor of the international journal Media Development. Recent publications include Requiem: Here’s Another Fine Mass You’ve Gotten Me Into (2001); and Many Voices, One Vision: The Right to Communicate in Practice (ed.) (2004).