I, the guardian of Charles Chaplin, agree for him to appear in Casey’s Court wherever it may be booked in the British Isles only, the agreement to commence May 14th, 1906, at a salary weekly of £2.5.0 (two pounds five shillings) increasing to £2.10.0 the week commencing July 1906.
— (signed) Sydney Chaplin1
WHILE HE WAS RELIEVED TO BE WORKING, the sixteen-year-old former dramatic actor was mortified to find himself playing a buffoon part in dumb show as a bungling plumber’s assistant whose klutzy pratfalls and slow-witted, blank-faced reactions were enhanced by clownish white face paint and a Bardolphian red nose. The crass indignity of England’s greatest boy actor hiding his features beneath a fool’s mask was almost unbearable. In every provincial city and town along the route of that seedy slapstick company’s itinerary, it felt as if he was being dragged further and further away from the West End and his beloved Duke of York’s.
Having fallen from grace, Chaplin soon discovered that his show business comeback depended on his learning how to fall with grace. Just as classical ballet had entrechats, pirouettes, and arabesques for beginners to master, so basic clownship had its standard repertoire of glissades, flip-flops, and sauts périlleux (somersaults.) On encountering the proverbial banana peel of the music hall comedy stage, a first-rate slapstick comedian had to be able to execute backslides, nosedives, fanny flops, and alley-oops on cue — in deadpan or in double take — deploying his body in space with the soaring ease and apparent weightlessness of a prima ballerina.
While the superbly coordinated teenager placed little immediate importance on the felicitous discovery that he possessed all of the natural acrobatic gifts required to play lowbrow slapstick, Chaplin the film star would later be enormously flattered by the lavish praise and admiration he received from the likes of Pavlova and Nijinsky, who placed his art on an equal footing with theirs. Or, as W. C. Fields remarked somewhat more pungently, “That sonofabitch is a goddam ballet dancer … and if I get a good chance, I’ll kill him with my bare hands!”2
For any serious student of comedy new to the slapstick game, touring the provinces had advantages over performing in as many as three separate music halls a night in London. Between shows, there was ample time to sharpen skills by tirelessly practicing the fine art of trapping one’s foot in the paste bucket or unleashing mayhem with the carpenter’s ladder, both standard property items of the Repairs company sketch.
And there were even opportunities to engage in industrial espionage by carefully studying other comedy acts on the bill in their nascent state of rehearsal undress, freshly deconstructed as they were at the start of each new workweek. Monday morning band rehearsal, with cues and songs for all acts, generally ended before midafternoon, leaving performers free to while away the hours before first curtain, in dalliance or in drink for the young and carefree, but making last-minute changes, trying out material from other comics’ routines, or putting finishing touches on one’s own act for the more ambitiously inclined.
Seven years earlier, as a newcomer to the halls, determined to execute the steps and routines of the Eight Lancashire Lads with flawless precision but beset by a stage fright so great that “I could hardly move my legs,” Charlie had struggled diligently to master his steps.3 One false move, much less a fall, had posed the mortifying prospect of being pelted with jeers if not with rotten fruits and vegetables by boisterous music hall crowds. It took six weeks of constant practice before the perfectionist nine-year-old felt confident enough to go on. As a fourteen-year-old, he had rehearsed with equally methodical precision until he could enter, exit, and move with a graceful command of stage space through Holmes’s Baker Street digs. But now everything was topsy-turvy. He was being asked to impersonate awkwardness. Skill and timing were required to syncopate a slip or coordinate a crash to the rhythm and beat of a pit band’s cues with metronomic precision.
From the standpoint of physical technique, there was a correct way to walk unsuspectingly, nose first, into a wall, with a turn of the head in order for it to appear funny. Not until he had the fundamentals down pat could a clown expect to embellish and improvise by adding distinctive topping gags of his own invention, such as reflexively tipping his hat. And while the Little Tramp’s quirky mannerism of absentmindedly tipping his topper to trees he encounters, as if to so many passing acquaintances, may or may not have originated on the Keystone Film Studio lot (Twenty Minutes of Love), the foundation on which it was built came straight out of British music hall.
After eight brief weeks apprenticing as a minor player in Repairs, Chaplin auditioned for his first major comedy role. Responding to an ad in the Era announcing auditions for boy comedians between the ages of fourteen and nineteen, Charlie arrived to discover more than a hundred hungry juveniles packing the staircase to the theatrical office and spilling out onto the street below, as they nervously awaited their tryouts. Finally, after three hours’ delay, his turn came.
I straightened my hat, squared my shoulders and marched in, determined to be very haughty and dignified.… a fat red-faced man, with his waistcoat unbuttoned, sat by a desk chewing a big cigar.
“Mr. Dailey,” I said, “I____I don’t know how it happened. My foot slipped. I tried to straighten up, slipped again, fell on all fours over a chair, which fell over on me, and sat up on the floor with the chair in my lap. “____want a part,” I finished, furious.4
Although Chaplin claimed he landed the part solely on the basis of this unplanned seat-of-the-pants entrance, one of his interviewers recalled there had been more to it than that:
I put him through his paces. He sang, danced, and did a little of practically everything in the entertaining line. He had the makings of a “star” in him, and I promptly took him on salary, 30s per week.5
Conceived as a sequel to an earlier show, Casey’s Court, which had enjoyed a successful run, Casey’s Court Circus consisted of a series of topical parodies of music hall and circus acts seen from the point of view of working-class teenagers all of whom lived in the same slum alley, or court. Apart from Will Murray, a mature comedian in his late twenties who played Mrs. Casey in drag, the cast consisted of fifteen colorful “street urchins.” Played by actors at that awkward stage between boyhood and manhood, they were a motley crew of East End juveniles who might best be described as a Cockney version of the Dead End Kids, well along their way to blossoming into the Bowery Boys.
As a minor, it was illegal for Charlie to enter into a contract on his own, and Syd signed as his guardian.
Although they regretted moving in separate directions, each of the brothers was advancing in his career at a rapid rate. While joining the Casey’s troupe provided seventeen-year-old Charlie with his first major experience as a comic juvenile, Sydney was about to achieve a much more prestigious success by signing a fabulous one-year contract with “the Guv’nor,” Fred Karno, England’s foremost producer of music hall comedy sketches. By fall, Syd would be touring the United States and enjoying featured billing in one of the empire-building Karno’s globe-trotting comedy troupes upon which, like Britannia itself, the sun never seemed to set.
One of Charlie’s two turns in the Casey’s review was a parody of the romantic outlaw Dick Turpin’s ride to York on his faithful mare, Black Bess. It was a comedy chase scene, in which Chaplin first developed one of the Little Tramp’s most distinctive mannerisms. Will Murray recalled:
The climax was the flight after the death of “Bonnie Black Bess.”
You can imagine the position of poor Mr. Turpin. He had to run, hide, do anything to get out of the way of the runners, and yet he had nowhere to go except round the circus track.
Nevertheless, Charlie started to run — and run — and run. He had to turn innumerable corners, and as he raised one foot and hopped along a little way on the other in getting round a nasty “bend,” the audience simply howled.
I think I can justly say that I am the man who taught Charlie how to turn corners.… It took many, many weary hours of monotonous rehearsals, but I am sure Charlie Chaplin, in looking back over those hours of rehearsals, will thank me for being so persistent in my instructions as to how I wanted the thing done.6
In a technical sense, Murray may have taught Chaplin that famous one-legged skid turn, which later became one of his Little Tramp’s signature movements, like the Rummy Binks shuffle. But the funny business did not begin with Murray. Just as Coleridge described poetic truth as a “divine ventriloquist” whose utterances passed through the lips of every poet, so the comic muse spoke through each generation of its wandering jongleurs, clowns, and jesters. Viewed from the perspective of theatrical history, that same stylized skid turn had probably had audiences howling three hundred years earlier in St. Mark’s Square, Venice, when the original mountebank Harlequins mounted their banks, or narrow trestle stages if you will, and confronted the same technical problem of comically conveying rapid motion in a tightly confined space.
Like an obedient pupil going through rote Latin and Greek drills he would never forget for the rest of his life, Charlie went through his rehearsal exercises over and over again until an entire repertoire of classic comic moves was permanently etched into those neuronal templates where skilled, automatic acts finally become stored. No wonder a debonair but aging Chaplin could still tumble from a sofa without spilling a drop of tea from his cup in Monsieur Verdoux with much the same alacrity and grace as a youthful Buster Keaton could flip-flop without spilling a drop of coffee from his cup in College. Both men received their classical slapstick comedy educations in the vaudeville houses and music halls of their respective countries.
The great Tommaso Visentini, one of the foremost Harlequins of his day, was reputed to execute that same maneuver with a glass of wine. And if more complete accounts survived, there is little doubt that Visentini would have been found in debt for that tumbling gag to some ancient Roman acrobatic comedian who had done the same thing with a flask of olive oil. As James Agee put it in his description of Keystone’s Mack Sennett, “He took his comics out of music halls, burlesque, vaudeville, circuses and limbo, and through them he tapped in on that great pipeline of horsing and miming which runs back unbroken through the fairs of the Middle Ages at least to Ancient Greece.”7
Chaplin’s second turn in Casey’s Court Circus was a parody of Dr. Walford Bodie, one of the best known and most sensational music hall acts of the day. A “Mesmerist and Electrical Wizard” whose “lightning cures” of the infirm were based on a combination of fantastical hypnotism and “bloodless surgery” accomplished by means of electricity, Bodie had no scientific credentials beyond a brief apprenticeship as an electrician with the National Telephone Company. Hounded by an irate medical community, which unwittingly provided him with endless amounts of free publicity as they vehemently denounced his patently false claims of medical cures, Bodie laughed all the way to the bank. He reputedly earned four hundred pounds per week for his music hall turn. When challenged, he freely admitted that the initials M.D. which he sometimes placed after his name stood for Merry Devil. A third-rate charlatan, he was nonetheless a first-rate showman who broke box-office records.
Having planted confederates in the audience, Bodie — sporting a silk top hat, cane, and opera cape — would ask for volunteers. Seating the subject in his famous Electric Chair, which he ceremoniously placed directly in front of the footlights for the delight of his audience, the Great Bodie would make an impressive series of hypnotic gestures and spellbinding flourishes complete with penetrating glances and sonorous suggestions delivered in an appropriately soothing voice that emanated resonantly from beneath a flowing waxed moustache of villainous proportions.
When his accomplice fell into a deep trance, Bodie would step back triumphantly, offering the cloth-capped Cockneys in the gallery an unobstructed view of his first astounding feat of legerdemain. Then, after a pause to heighten the moment, the Wizard would point dramatically in the direction of his somnolent stooge, who convincingly “jumped sharply upwards as though he had received an electric shock.”8 When the subject, by then fully aroused and on his feet, looked suspiciously at the chair, the good doctor held it up for his inspection to reassure him that it was unwired and free of all devices before inviting him to sit down again.
With hypnotic mastery established over this first “patient,” Dr. Bodie set the stage for an elaborate running gag, which could serve as a comic counterpoint to the spectacular medical marvels that awaited his audience. While proceeding with the serious Aesculapian business of curing the crippled, paralyzed, and infirm, whose crutches and canes were displayed in front of the theaters wherever he played, the venerable healer would periodically convulse his audience with laughter by playfully nipping his first subject’s fanny with little “electric” jolts by means of posthypnotic suggestion.
Chaplin prepared to “do” Bodie with gusto. He saw the role as a vehicle that could help reestablish his credibility as a dramatic actor in the legitimate theater:
I would put on such a marvelous character delineation that even the lowest music-hall audience would recognize it as great acting and I would be rescued by some good manager and brought back to a West End theater.
The idea grew upon me. Despising with all my heart the cheap, clap-trap burlesque which the manager [Will Murray] tried to drill into me, I paid only enough attention to it to get through rehearsals somehow, hurrying out afterward to watch Doctor Body [sic] and to practise before the mirror in our lodgings my own idea of the part.9
Murray confirmed that Chaplin mastered that Bodie impersonation by practicing in front of a mirror — much as Dickens’s daughter Mamey recalled watching her father do when he wanted to capture and consolidate his impressions of real-life characters he encountered, so he could to use them as the basis for his fictional portraits. But Murray and his erstwhile protégé were in disagreement as to whether Chaplin learned to “do” Bodie by studying him in person. Murray claimed that Chaplin “had never seen Bodie’s turn, but I endeavoured to give him an idea of the Doctor’s little mannerisms.”10
Whatever the case, Chaplin did have at least one opportunity to size up the great charlatan and study his mannerisms and quirks from an intimately close-up, offstage vantage point. At Westminster Abbey, at Sir Henry Irving’s funeral, the two actors had been seated — or, to put it more precisely, placed — next to each other. For while the well-behaved boy actor kept his seat and displayed his best manners in spite of his obstructed view, Charlie had been amazed by the outrageousness way Bodie, in order to obtain a better view of Irving’s ashes being lowered into the crypt, stepped on top of the prostrate body of a duke who had passed out.
Their encounter occurred seven months earlier. It might seem farfetched, even under such a memorable circumstance as Irving’s funeral, to assume that an hour or two spent in another’s presence could result in such vivid impressions of that person’s quirks and mannerisms that a seventeen-year-old boy could reproduce them faithfully after so many months. But there was nothing ordinary about Charlie Chaplin’s visual memory or his powers of impersonation. He observed his subject’s traits firsthand even if he did rely on Murray to supply some details of Bodie’s music hall act.
For Charlie, opening night arrived with a mixture of anxiety and excitement. Backstage, painting his “face stealthily among the uproar and quarrels of the other fourteen boys, who were all in the same dressing-room fighting over the mirrors and hurling epithets and make-up boxes,” he heard hoots and whistles coming from the raucous crowd out front. An earlier act on the bill of the “cheap East End music-hall” had already been driven offstage, pelted with rotten fruit. But it scarcely seemed safer backstage among the familiar maze of scene-shifting property men, gossiping chorus girls, and acrobats doing their warm-up exercises. He avoided Murray by milling purposely with the others “in the darkest part of the wings,” as he waited to make his entrance. Having determined to “make up as the real Doctor Body” instead of painting his face in the grotesque caricature mask his director had dictated, Charlie felt like “a boy committing his first burglary” as he prepared to dash past Murray and “get on the stage before I was caught.”11 For an inexperienced teenage comedian playing his first big part, it was a supreme act of willful disobedience.
After slipping past Murray “quick as an eel,” the elegantly attired young Dr. Bodie applied his brakes and slowed to a more stately paced, ceremonious entrance, as befitted his fame and station:
I advanced slowly, impressively, feeling the gaze of the crowd, and with a carefully studied gesture, hung my cane — I held it by the wrong end! Instead of hanging on my arm, as I expected, it clattered on the stage. Startled, I stooped to pick it up, and my high silk hat fell from my head. I grasped it, put it on quickly, and, paper wadding falling out, I found my whole head buried in its black depths.
A great burst of laughter came from the audience. When, pushing the hat back, I went seriously on with my serious lines, the crowd roared, held its sides, shrieked with mirth till it gasped. The more serious I was, the funnier it struck the audience. I came off at last, pursued by howls of laughter and wild applause, which called me back again. I had made the hit of the evening.12
A review in the Era of Casey’s Court Circus confirms Chaplin’s claim, declaring that, “the fun reaches its height when a burlesque of ‘lightning cures on a poor working man’ is given.”13 But much to Charlie’s dismay, despite the roaring applause and good notices he received, no West End talent scout appeared to whisk him back to the legitimate stage, and the Era reviewer had not even seen fit to mention him by name.
Nonetheless, he was beginning to be known in music hall circles as a talented young entertainer and, more important, he was starting to make peace with the idea of becoming a professional comedian and relinquishing his cherished dream of succeeding as a dramatic actor. Percy Honri, an established headliner whose act Concordia occasionally played the same bill as Casey’s Court Circus during this period, came away with the very distinct impression that Chaplin stood out from all of the other juvenile actors in the company as “a very earnest lad who went through his paces as tho his life was dependent on it.”14
Not only was Chaplin mastering the basics of slapstick and learning how seriocomic counterpoint could be used to soften its crudeness, he was also learning the crucial tactical strategy of immediately engaging an audience when he made his entrance. In the course of learning to “do” Bodie, he discovered the felicitous use of theatrical “moes” or character props. Moes were used to instantly establish nonverbal rapport with an audience by giving the performer readily identifiable physical characteristics that defined his stage character even before he began to speak.15
No doubt the real Dr. Bodie originally selected his luxuriously flowing waxed moustache so that its dazzling elegance could be as easily beheld by the boys in the balcony as the swells in the stalls. Likewise, Bodie’s other signature character props — his elegant cane, silk hat, and cape — all helped to reinforce his iconography as a spellbinder. And as Charlie was learning, like generations of comics before him, those very same moes could as easily be turned to trademark comic advantage if one bobbled the cane, tripped over the cape, and made the hat ill-fitting.
But for all the theatrical tricks of the trade and performance skills Chaplin picked up during his fifteen-month stint in the Casey’s troupe, his most important gain was a major conceptual breakthrough:
I had stumbled on the secret of being funny — unexpectedly. An idea, going in one direction, meets an opposite idea suddenly “Ha! Ha!” you shriek. It works every time.
I walk on to the stage, serious, dignified, solemn, pause before an easy chair, spread my coat-tails with an elegant gesture — and sit on the cat. Nothing funny about it, really, especially if you consider the feelings of the cat. But you laugh. You laugh because it is unexpected. Those little nervous shocks make you laugh; you can’t help it.16
Now, obviously, Charlie Chaplin knew how to be funny long before Casey’s Court Circus. As a veteran Lancashire Lad playing panto in Cinderella, he had disobeyed stage directions and defiantly improvised his first gag as the boy in the cat suit doing two typical canine routines (sniffing and peeing) that startled the audience. And over the years that followed, much of Chaplin’s time appears to have been devoted to being instinctively funny, offstage and on.
But what Charlie never understood conceptually until his Casey’s days was the element of audience surprise in humor — that is, what makes a gag funny. For it was one thing to be funny by instinct, on a strictly hit-or-miss basis, and quite another to have a firm technical appreciation of how gags are constructed, what their trip-wire mechanism consists of and why they work. While such “clicks” of insight were no substitute for natural acting ability or creative imagination, this structural understanding of comic performance technique would permit Chaplin to experiment more freely in pairing two-step gag images and vary the timing of their comic delivery. For the first time in his career, even though he had in fact been “gagging” for years, he was beginning to understand comedy in a structural sense.
Consisting of two incongruously mismatched images, the unexpected collision of which leads to surprise and the emotional release of laughter, a gag’s success depended on its ability to catch the audience off guard. While a mature comic might achieve that element of surprise by the sheer wackiness with which he could spin off fantastical pairs of mismated images, a newcomer like Charlie was better advised to stick to the basics by using standard, time-honored gags and concentrating on perfecting the timing of his delivery as his major means of getting a laugh. The fancy funny business could come later.
Classic comedy’s “rule of three” taught that the second mismated image, whether visual or verbal, should be delivered after a pause of two beats —that is, on the third beat —as in Burns and Allen’s famous: “Say goodnight, Gracie” … (one)… (two)… “Goodnight Gracie.” Deliver it too soon and there is no time to prepare the audience for a surprise. Present it too late and they have lost all interest. Timing is everything.
But like any rule worth its salt, comedy’s rule of three was nothing more than a principle to be honored as much in the breach as in the observance. The important point was to master the structural build-and-kill rhythms of comic delivery by learning to count lines or beats silently in order to maximize a laugh by presenting the punch line at the optimum moment. Only after those basics had been mastered could a comedian begin to evolve his own style of delivery and sharpen his powers of invention in a distinctively personal manner. And eighteen-year-old Charlie was still a far cry from such sophisticated developments by the time he left Casey’s Court Circus.
While he had passed from late adolescence to early manhood, he had by no means reached his comic majority. Still, the time had now come for him to leave behind that slum alley with its troupe of boy comics. Either too old or too uninterested to remain one of the gang, Charlie did not join them in their next great adventure on that July morning in 1907 when they marched off to a full-scale invasion of the provinces as Casey’s Army.
His fifteen months in Casey’s Court Circus had been well spent. In the course of learning the fundamentals of music hall slapstick, burlesque, and satire, Chaplin had become steeped in time-honored theatrical traditions and techniques of classic comedy. Barely able to read and write, Cockney Charlie had not the remotest inkling of the classical foundation upon which his solid comic education rested. Nor was he aware that the type of low comedy he played was considered highbrow in some intellectual circles. As he later put it, “the word ‘art’ never entered my head or my vocabulary.”17
Nonetheless, he was an ambitious young man filled with dreams of self-betterment and big plans to succeed. Having finally made peace with his failed adolescent dream of becoming England’s greatest juvenile actor, his sights were now set on a more realistically attainable form of greatness. This time it was
Top of the bill in a West End music-hall. That was all I wanted. That was the limit — the maddest dream — the most hopeless goal.18