What Makes Comedy Tick?

Another Lloydian moment comes at the end of "From Hand to Mouth," a 1919 short, when he celebrates victory -- it's always the same, he beats the clock and gets the girl -- by eating a breakfast of pancakes with a pair of scissors.

Lloyd was born in Nebraska in 1893, and he retained throughout his career the definite impress of wholesome Midwestern good health. His early forays into film were made in the shadow of Chaplin, but he eventually broke free of the "tramp" to develop his famous "glasses" character, a boyish man with Harry Potter-style round glasses. As an actor, he didn't go for range; rather, he worked in what might be called the sitcom mold, refining a basic archetypal character through all the possible variations. Although his films have been eclipsed over the years by those of Chaplin and Keaton, he was every bit an equal member of the club of early comedy greats.

Lloyd had both an acrobat's physical gifts and a magician's small-muscle control. His most iconic scene, hanging from a clock many floors above the ground in "Safety Last!," demonstrated his sheer strength and flexibility. But he was good at sleight of hand as well.

Just as impressive as the heart-stopping heights of what became known as "daredevil comedy" are the equally numerous moments when he does something with a glass or a fork or a vase in the smaller confines of indoor comedy. As he became more accomplished and more popular, he eventually set himself up as his own producer. Eventually he was one of the richest men in Hollywood.

Lloyd's comedy wasn't endlessly inventive. Patterns and conventions emerge. Early American film gravitated to motion just as naturally as photography gravitated to portraiture in its early days, and the basic setup of a Lloyd flick requires something to set the clock running, and a big prize for winning the high-stakes race. Money and a girl generally fill the latter requirement. The former, the need for speed -- for a car, bus and buggy chase -- was where the real creativity came in.

With that basic architecture, the films play out rather like operatic comedies, with highly developed, multi-part gags substituting for arias and coming in a handful of basic varieties. There are the accidental thefts, when Lloyd steals (and gets nabbed) without intending to (in one case, a crab falls into his coat pocket and pinches things for him). There are taunts to authority (cops with batons) that are based on small but crucial mistaken assumptions. There are the things that he must wear or carry that turn the world into a threatening obstacle course. And then there is the category of the "fortuitous," for which the film critic Siegfried Kracauer singled him out for praise, a category that includes things like a construction beam sliding accidentally through a window and under the seat of an office chair so that it carries an innocent secretary from the security of his desk to a swinging perch hundreds of feet off the ground.

By the 1930s, with the advent of the talkies, Lloyd's career was winding down. The accepted theory involves age -- it was getting harder to play the generic "boy" character -- and the advent of the Depression, which turned the general audience to pessimism.

But watch the 1930 talkie "Feet First," and you realize that it wasn't just crow's-feet or the country's souring mood that brought the genius to an end; it was the change of pace, a loss of the manic internal tempo that defined his earlier work.

In his spoken features Lloyd sounds just as you might expect: polite, plucky, confident but not overbearing. But when he repeats his daredevil comedy in the sound age, you hear the grunts and gasps and heavy breathing. The purely visual music of the high-flying dance is gone.

In part it's a literal loss of music. Robert Israel's scores for Lloyd's movies, included in this collection, are magnificent, and they clarify and underscore the basic rhythm of the films. It's a loss not to have them in "Feet First," but it's not the only loss. The new film genera require more plodding, more setup, more chitchat, more space between gags. You know it's still a Harold Lloyd film, but it feels like it's on depressants.

One can't help but think of Rossini, the composer who injected speed and acceleration into operatic comedy as surely as Lloyd injected it into the movie comedy. Rossini's great comedies are always built to a magnificent stretto , a quickening of the pace, a building of tension, that takes place over ridiculously long arches. He pulls back from the madcap only to gather strength for a new assault on absurdity.

So too Lloyd at his best. It's a reckless, prodigal form of entertainment, and a dizzying one. It can't be sustained for long -- a dozen or so forays, a decade perhaps -- before it begins to get dated. Lloyd sustained it for 10 years -- and like Rossini, he retired at the right moment, lived well, and is remembered fondly in perpetuity.

The Lloyd aesthetic would live on, here and there, in Bugs Bunny cartoons and Jackie Chan films. But it was a chapter that had to have an end, and for Lloyd it was closing by 1930. While it lasted, the results were spectacular. Lloyd's world of earnest college boys, ambitious young salesclerks and moon-faced lovers was a claustrophobic one, but shafts of light and laughter always broke through and are still captivating today.