ABSTRACT
Whether judged by production statistics, contemporary critical acclaim, audience popularity or retrospective opinions, it is abundantly clear that the American silent film comedy was flourishing in the mid-twenties, rivaling drama as the dominant form of cinematic expression. My aim in this essay is to rethink the function of the gag in relation to the comic film as a classical system. I seek not to examine or catalog all the possible variations of the gag (as joke, as articulation of cinema space or as thematic permutations) but rather to examine its operation in the slapstick gerne. 2
