ABSTRACT
The story of Keystone Comedies and the rise of an ex-boiler-maker named Mack Sennett is one of the great romances of motion pictures. Sennett was the man who can claim to have re-invented slapstick comedy, or rather to have adapted the knockabout technique, and improved it. Cohen at Coney Island was the first Keystone comedy, with Mabel Normand from Biograph, Ford Sterling from vaudeville, and fat Fred Mace from Biograph’s One Round O’Brien series. There was certainly nothing elevating about the Keystone touch. Perhaps some maiden aunts and a few school teachers saw little to laugh at when Chaplin hit someone over the head with a brick, or kicked a rival in the pants. It was at the end of 1917, after the collapse of Triangle, the producers of Keystone, that Sennett decided to join Paramount as a producer and director.
