The films of the great silent-film star Harold Lloyd inspire two kinds of laughter.
Mostly there is a mild, knowing laughter, a laughter that acknowledges, across the space of eight decades, that this must have been very funny when it was new. Then there are the laughs that take you by surprise, the spontaneous, didn't-see-that-coming sort of laughter that proves that Lloyd's comedy, at its best, is as fresh and as shocking as anything produced today.
Leonard Maltin, who provides commentary for a new, three-volume, seven-DVD Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection, writes, "Not only does his comedy play to any audience of any age in any country, but it's just as funny today as it was in the 1920s."
That's not entirely true. The films of Lloyd are very much steeped in both the charm and ugliness of their era, the 1920s, when the entire middle class seemed to be in high school -- caught up in a whirl of silly romance, benign one-upmanship, petty ambition and generally fun-loving high jinks.
But scan his movies intently for a sign of the Other, people of different races, outsiders, and you realize that these films epitomize the last, regnant, unalloyed era of Whiteness. A Chinese man who wanders into the 1928 "Speedy" is a caricature; a Jew who sells Lloyd jewelry in the 1923 "Safety Last!" is a penny-pinching stereotype; black characters, always incidental, are generally ridiculous, vaudeville reductions.
So the films aren't universal, but very particular to what might be called the Golden Age of the White Man, which is also essential to understanding the charm of Lloyd's character. Unlike Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin, the Lloyd character -- a young man with a blazingly pale face, set off by a shock of dark hair and often a dark suit -- is utterly at home in his world. He may be insecure, or poor, or reduced by love to ridiculousness, but he inhabits his world as if he owns it.
Yes, the world is modernizing, getting faster, sometimes dangerous, but Lloyd is a descendant of Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer and all the earnest, androgynous, ambitious adolescents of Horatio Alger's novels. He is the essence of pluck, the virtue that privileged men always recommend to the less fortunate, unaware that pluck and opportunity don't go hand in hand. Pluck works for the right people , the ones for whom the rules have been written to ensure a happy ending.
So when a real laugh breaks through the fantasy world of Lloyd's films, it pierces more than just the polished, mesmerizing veneer of his supremely well-made comedies. It connects us, via a comedic thread that stretches back through the comic operas of Rossini to the rustics of Shakespeare, to a manic and redemptive creativity -- often most pronounced in artists working with a new form, or a form that they are completely remaking. Among the many pleasures of watching Lloyd at work is the sense that he is not only a master of the minutiae of film mechanics, but he's also pushing the limits of the new medium's basic narrative coherence. And it's when he pushes those limits that we laugh the hardest.
In "Ask Father," a 13-minute short from 1919, the gag is all simplicity: To marry the girl, the boy must ask the father's permission, but the father is consumed with business, and imperious when it comes to distraction. Lloyd makes repeated efforts to gain access to the sanctum sanctorum of the man's inner office, and is repeatedly sent packing by the front-office men. A kindly secretary takes pity on him enough to lay out a cushion for his many crash landings into the corridor. She knows, before he knows, that he's about to go flying again, a clever acknowledgment of the basic truth of slapstick: It may seem to be woven from accidents and coincidence and preposterous turns of fate, but the outcome is always the same.
But then Lloyd makes another attempt on the father, this time dressed from head to toe in a suit of armor, breastplate, greaves, gauntlets and visor. It is a pure non sequitur, something that the early David Letterman or Monty Python might have thought of.
One particularly pleasurable danger of comedy is that something will go off course, some word, misheard, will send a character down the wrong path, perhaps without recourse. Lloyd may be making a subtle comment on the idea that the boy-fights-for-girl setup is one of the oldest in the book, hence the throwback to the days of chivalry. But more likely, he's just thrown in a visual wild card to see whether it will derail the smooth choreographic process of the film. It doesn't, but it comes close, and we laugh without inhibition or condescension.
There are moments like these throughout the 15 feature films and 13 shorts collected on these DVDs. In the 1924 "Girl Shy," Lloyd imagines various romantic conquests, recording his fantasies in a manuscript, the publication of which he hopes will make his fortune and secure for him a real girl. In one chapter he seduces "the Flapper," a modern woman (she smokes!), with "my caveman methods." Few men were physically or temperamentally less suited to playing the "caveman" than the character created by Lloyd. The results are hysterical.
