Introduction

James Agee’s influential essay, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” organizes the history of the genre around the distinctive contributions of the major silent clowns and their virtuoso performances. Agee is interested in the play between, on the one hand, a shared vocabulary of stock gestures and performance tricks which constituted the legacy of variety entertainment upon silent slapstick, and on the other, the unique personalities and expressive potential of individual comic stars:

The man who could handle them [these clichés] properly combined several of the more difficult accomplishments of the acrobat, the dancer, the clown and the mime. Some very gifted comedians, unforgettably Ben Turpin, had an immense vocabulary of these clichés and were in part so lovable because they were deeply conservative classicists and never tried to break away from them. The still more gifted men, of course, simplified and invented, finding out new and much deeper uses for the idiom. They learned to show emotion through it, and comic psychology, more eloquently than most language has ever managed to, and they discovered beauties of comic motion which are hopelessly beyond the reach of words. ¹