Just a Note to Let You Know that I've Not Forgotten You.

Rejoice with me; I am now the proud owner of a four-disc set of Fatty Arbuckle movies. The accompanying booklet tries to make a good case for Fatty being the unheralded “fourth genius” of silent comedy, after Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd. Since we are now, finally, at a far enough distance from the scandal that destroyed his career (silent-film historians in the freaking Seventies didn’t consider themselves distant enough from it), we can be a little objective about it. I’m willing to give Langdon the boot and institute Fatty in his place (besides, there’s almost no Langdon on DVD). But I want to mention the scandal. Briefly, at a party at Arbuckle’s house, a woman died of an overdose of drugs; she and Fatty had been alone together at different points during the night. Arbuckle was cleared of any wrongdoing at the inquest and later at a trial. Recent investigations into all the available evidence also clear him, as definitively as possible. He did nothing except be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s bizarre today, in the days of O. J. Simpson and Kobe Bryant, to realize that this meant he could never again work in Hollywood under his real name. (Which was Roscoe, by the way. But I don’t call Buster Keaton “Joseph” and Fatty remains Fatty.) Isn’t the whole point of the musical Chicago the idea that no publicity is bad publicity? But Hollywood in 1921 still labored under the delusion that the Titaness (we’ll return to this idea later; meanwhile, read Thomas Beer’s The Gay Nineties) represented the vast majority of potential ticket-buyers. Plus, Fatty was a comedian and therefore expendable.

This gets into one of the things I wanted to mention about the Lux Radio Theater: namely, that the man who hosted (and “produced”) it for just over a decade, Cecil B. DeMille, had about the worse taste of anyone with good taste in Hollywood. He waxed rhapsodic on sentimental bilge about sacrificial mothers and lovers reunited after death, and had no sympathy at all with comedy, unless it had shown itself to be immensely successful (for decades the ultimate criteria of aesthetic worth in America). Hearing him announce, in reverent tones, “the curtain rises on the second act of Hold Back the Dawn” and then, in an expressionless voice that connotes blank incomprehension more than anything else, “the curtain rises on the second act of It Happened One Night” is a graduate course in early-twentieth-century aesthetic snobbery, of the sort that Gilbert Seldes beautifully skewered in The Seven Lively Arts. (If you want to understand any single aspect of American popular culture in the years between 1900 and 1950, you cannot do better than to read this book.)

Comedians, and perhaps especially film comedians, because they were enormously popular with an illiterate or half-literate underclass composed largely of immigrants, were second-class citizens in Hollywood — and indeed largely remain so. Not that there isn’t a sense in which Jim Carrey or Adam Sandler can’t be taken seriously until they do an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or a Punch-Drunk Love; but the aesthetic value of seriousness per se is very small, and the aesthetic value of things-that-make-us-laugh is enormous, especially when, as silent film comedy does, it holds up over the years much better than so-called drama does. Oscar winners rarely made the century-in-review best-of lists that proliferated six years ago; and I’d say the same holds true across aesthetic boundaries, in literature and comics and music.

The last thing I wanted to mention about Fatty Arbuckle is that there seems to be a history of large comedians either dying young or in other ways having a smaller body of lasting work than their talents deserve. Jackie Gleason, Zero Mostel, John Belushi, John Candy and Chris Farley come to mind as examples. I’m sure there are plenty of counter-examples, though none save perhaps Oliver Hardy come to mind.