Hey! Aren't you afraid of overloading your mouth?

And tonight derspatchel and I went to see the Alloy Orchestra play three short silent comedies: The Butcher Boy (1917), Good Night, Nurse! (1918), and The Playhouse (1921). I had never seen Buster Keaton before the mid-'20's. I had never seen any Fatty Arbuckle at all. Time machine, please, or at least an alternate history? All three shorts are beautiful strings of sight gags bordering on surrealism, cross-dressing and spontaneous pie fights included. Any altercation can turn physical, any fight will turn into acrobatics, everyone runs a lot and nobody runs anywhere without a startled leap first. Beds are bounced on. Pillows snow out the screen. Keaton saves a girl from drowning in a stage act, washes the audience on a tidal wave out of the theater, paddles his way to safety in the orchestra pit with a bass drum and a ukulele. It's amazing to see him before the famous stoneface—his physical elasticity surprised me only because I didn't think a person could spin around that many times without being on ice, but in his first film appearance he's a plaintive hayseed with the full range from polite bewilderment to panic (he'll end up siding with the heavy because he came in to buy some molasses and Fatty glued him to the floor with it) and I'd never seen him play anyone like his smarmy little doctor in Nurse!, snickering, blushing, attempting to flirt slyly and terribly with Fatty in sanitarium nurse drag. Between the two of them, they work up a bizarre and wonderful little pantomime of significant glances and coy fingers to mouths and toying with the paint on the walls, culminating when Fatty ragdolls him across the hallway for presuming on a respectable girl. Oscar Levant must have seen him in The Playhouse, is all I'm saying about that one. But this is starting to sound as if I didn't notice Arbuckle at all: and he's incredible. You're not shocked when someone of Keaton's slightness moves like a dancer, but Arbuckle is just as nimble on his feet and yet his size isn't something the choreography ignores, either—early in The Butcher Boy, a rival socks him in the apron and Arbuckle just bellies the guy disdainfully offscreen, boink, like something out of the Muppets. He's bouncy and graceful, he can roll a cigarette one-handed like he's snapping his fingers. As the butcher boy at his counter, he throws cleavers around like the Flying Karamazov Brothers. He has such expressive eyes, they make an unexpected combination of broad comedy in long shots and people's actual faces close up. He's a far more convincing girl than his love-rival Al St. John. And I don't know how many of his films remain, or how many I can get hold of, but I'd like the answer to be at least a bunch, because damn.