Latest Poll Results

The results of the latest poll are in— despite intense lobbying efforts on behalf of both the Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers were your favorite comedy team of the 1930s, taking a plurality of the 37 votes cast, with 18. The Stooges received eleven heartfelt votes, and Laurel and Hardy and Our Gang 3 each. Burns and Allen and the Ritz Brothers closed out the voting with one vote each, although support for the latter was strongly suspected of being an inside joke between readers Muleboy and bellotoot.

"I knew it!" Zeppo Marx crowed at the awards ceremony. "I knew I'd win an award someday! I've been carrying these guys for years and finally it's my moment to shine. I'm king of the world!"

In an expansive mood at MGM Queen Norma Shearer's always raucous after-party, Chico Marx opined, "Comedy is a chair. I'm an artist and if you give me a tuba or perhaps a French horn or any of the wind instruments, I'll bring you a laugh out of it, either by falling into it or maybe by blowing on it and making a funny sound."

His brother Julius, who performs under the stage name "Groucho," was more subdued as he shared a quiet drink with his cigar and grease-paint moustache. "I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member. Those are my principles," he added, "if you don't like them, well, I have others."

Accepting the silver medal on behalf of the Three Stooges was an eloquent Jerome "Curly" Howard whose tearful speech was the highlight of the awards ceremony. "Woo woo woo!" he said at one point, which he followed quickly with, "Nyuck nyuck nyuck."

George Burns was philosophical in defeat. "Everything that goes up must come down. But there comes a time when not everything that's down can come up."

"They laughed at Joan of Arc," his wife and lifelong partner, Gracie Allen, interrupted, "but she went right ahead and built it."

"Gracie, did the maid ever drop you on your head when you were a baby?"

"Don't be silly, George, we couldn't afford a maid. My mother had to do it."

"Say goodnight, Gracie."

"Goodnight!"

On the other hand, Spanky McFarland, one-time star of the Our Gang comedies, now every day third baseman for the Washington Nationals, was inconsolable after the loss.

"I blame Buckwheat," he said bitterly. "The Little Rascals were a tight little comedy act—me, Darla, Alfalfa, Stymie. Even a no-talent stiff like Dickie Moore could get a rise out of an audience from time to time. Then Buckwheat goes on Saturday Night Live and gets himself shot and suddenly we're a national joke! Comedy is no laughing matter, dammit!"

For the first time in Monkey Blog history, intense lobbying efforts from outside interest groups attempted to influence the outcome of the poll, no doubt a result of the recent Supreme Court ruling allowing corporate spending in elections. Who Am Us Anyway and Thingy, who supported the Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy, respectively, sparred good-naturedly but passionately in favor of their candidates.

"Look what I'm up against," Who com- plained, "a basic misunder- standing on the part of the electorate regarding the actual question presented. And since there seems to be some confusion on this point, let me put it plainly: Comedy, to the aficionado, means 'falling, hitting and making funny noises.'"

His ardent support for the Stooges, he said, was motivated by "my continuing quest to drive away all high-class, intellectual readers who are smarter than me," and added that if you couldn't at least muster a wry grin at the antics of Moe, Larry and Curly, "I don't want to know you."

For her part, Thingy would stop at nothing to boost the chances of Laurel and Hardy, even at one point posting an enticing cheesecake photo of her legs. Yet afterwards, she shrugged off the duo's defeat. "I think I'll go watch The Thin Man," she said. "Now, that was a comedy team."

This Week's Monkey Poll

I'm working on my essay for the best director of 1931-32. A thousand words so far and I don't know who the winner is yet.

In the meantime, be sure to vote in this week's Monkey Poll: Who is your favorite comedy team of the 1930s?

Here are your choices:

Burns and Allen

Laurel and Hardy

The Marx Brothers

Our Gang (The Little Rascals)

The Ritz Brothers

The Three Stooges

Other

Remember, every vote counts and the results have no effect on anything. So vote early and vote often.

Child Stars: Jackie Cooper

Between Jackie Coogan's turn in Charlie Chaplin's 1921 comedy classic, The Kid, and the advent of box office phenomenon Shirley Temple in the early 1930s, no child star was bigger or better than "America's Boy," Jackie Cooper.

Born in 1922, Cooper broke into movies at the age of seven, working in the Our Gang comedies at the Hal Roach Studios for $50 a week. Cooper became a star just two years later when he landed the lead role in Skippy, a film version of the day's most famous comic strip. (So popular was the strip, in fact, that Skippy brand peanut butter was named for it—or was it? Strip creator Percy Crosby filed suit and won a decision in the U.S. Patent Court, yet seventy-six years later, Skippy is still my peanut butter of choice.)

Skippy—the movie not the peanut butter—was the one where Cooper's uncle, director Norman Taurog, famously threatened to shoot Cooper's dog if the boy didn't cry on cue, then sent a production assistant outside with a gun loaded with blanks. Cooper heard the shot and predictably cried buckets. Only nine years old at the time, he's still the youngest actor to be nominated for an Oscar in a lead role.

Like most of us, he slept through the ceremony, although in his case, in Oscar-winner Marie Dressler's lap. "I was much more interested in not having to go to school that day than I was in the ceremony," he later admitted.

Cooper was even better a year later in the award-winning boxing movie, The Champ. Directed by King Vidor, The Champ is an unabashed tearjerker of the first water and turned Cooper and co-star Wallace Beery into the unlikeliest of screen teams. The pair made four feature-length movies together between 1931 and 1935.

Beery won an Oscar playing an alcoholic, over-the- hill boxer with delusions of grandeur, the kind of guy who wins a horse for his son in a crap game, then promptly loses it back again—twice! When he's not gambling, he's hungover in a fleabag hotel room over a saloon, haunted by what might have been and fueled by pipe dreams of another shot at the title. Cooper is the champ's son, who even at nine years of age is a classic enabler. He adores his father but has been disappointed too many times to lie to himself anymore, even as he lies to the Champ.

Cooper more than holds his own in his scenes with the more experienced Beery, for example, in an early scene when fight promoters call his father a drunk and a "palooka." Eyes glistening with a mixture of rage, disappointment and humiliation, Cooper holds his defiant pose for a moment, then his shoulders slump and he turns away.

"You don't believe what they said about me being drunk the night I lost the championship, do ya, Dink."

"No," says Cooper, slump shouldered, not looking at his father, and starting to clean up after him like he always does.

It's a formula that has served Hollywood well, right up to and including Mickey Rourke's 2008 comeback in The Wrestler, and won Frances Marion an Oscar for the screenplay, her second.

Cooper himself was rather dismissive of most of his early screen roles. "Very often on some of this stuff when I'd have to go to work. I'd just give the script a cursory glance. I had no training, and I was a quick study, so nobody knew how involved or not involved I was. But I look at that stuff now and I can see I wasn't involved, and I wasn't very good."

Cooper and Beery made three more films together, including Treasure Island. "They kept me in short pants as long as they could," Cooper said of his days as a child actor, "until they were shaving the hair on my legs because it was beginning to photograph."

Ironically, because of his own experiences, Cooper grew up opposed to children working full-time as actors. "No amount of rationalization, no excuses, can make up for what a kid loses—what I lost—when a normal childhood is abandoned for a movie career.

His 1981 autobiography was entitled Please Don't Shoot My Dog.

Cooper left Hollywood during World War II, serving in the United States Navy where he attained the rank of Captain. After the war, the transition from child star to adult performer was difficult for Cooper, but he eventually wound up in television, both as an actor and as a director. As the latter, he won two Emmys for directing episodes of MASH (one of the funny ones) and The White Shadow. Maybe his most famous movie role after childhood was that of Daily Planet editor Perry White in four Superman movies between 1978 and 1987.

Cooper retired in 1989. He has four children and lives in California.

Best Actor Of The Silent Era: Charles Chaplin (Part Two: "Chaplin Or Keaton: The Never-ending Argument")

Charles Chaplin or Buster Keaton, who was greater, is one of those perennial questions—like "Republican or Democrat" "Elvis or the Beatles"—that transcends its original context and ends up saying more about the people doing the debating than about the subject at hand. As with any debate of this type, there is no right or wrong answer, only a matter of taste.

My tastes, which are broad enough to include both performers, ultimately lean toward Chaplin.

At his peak, Chaplin was the most popular movie performer in the world and yet his reputation rests on a relatively small body of work. After beginning his career with a flood of forgettable short features (mostly directed by Mack Sennett), Chaplin worked meticulously and produced few films. Over a span of ten years beginning in 1921, he directed only three shorts (including The Idle Class and Pay Day) and five features, one of which—the drama A Woman Of Paris—included only a cameo on his part.

Keaton was more prolific. "[I]n an extraordinary period from 1920 to 1929," Roger Ebert has written, "[Keaton] worked without interruption on a series of films that make him, arguably, the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies."

The public, however, found Keaton to be an acquired taste and he was always scrounging for funding. Still, he managed to make some of the best silent comedies of all time, including The General, Sherlock Jr., Our Hospitality and The Navigator.

Both wrote, directed and starred in their own productions. Both did most of their own stunts. And both were, at their best, hilarious. Neither truly hit their stride until they formed their own production companies and took full control of their work, United Artists in Chaplin's case, Buster Keaton Productions in the other.

The argument in favor of Keaton is a good one. He made what many, including myself, consider to be the best movie of the Silent Era, The General. In addition, the understated style of his comedy as his characters single-mindedly pursue their desires is a style at once familiar and easily-accessible to modern audiences. Finally, his movies have none of the unabashed sentimentality of Chaplin's films that some, though not me, find cloying and heavy.

In arguing for Chaplin the actor, I am relying on the handful of shorts and the feature-length films, including The Kid, The Gold Rush and The Circus, over which he exercised complete artistic control.

Watching those movies again, and comparing them with Keaton's, I was struck by the range of the emotions and comic situations in Chaplin, from the gentle humor in the domesticity of The Kid to the surreal slapstick of The Gold Rush to the acrobatic grace and athleticism of The Circus.

While I believe you can argue about who made the better movies, Chaplin, as a comedian and an actor, could simply hit a greater variety of notes with seeming ease than Keaton ever dared try.

I remember one terrific laugh in Chaplin's comedy, The Kid, that comes from a matter-of-fact flick of Chaplin's eyes from a foundling baby to an open sewer hole that certainly suggests one solution to the problem of unplanned parenthood.

And yet later in The Kid there's that unforgettable sequence when Chaplin races across the rooftops to rescue this same child, now a six year old boy he has raised as his own, from the remorseless representatives of the local orphanage. The reunion of Chaplin and the boy is one of the most touching scenes in movie history.

I guess that's what separates Chaplin from Keaton for me: both can make me laugh, but only Chaplin can make me cry.

If that makes me, to quote Louis in Casablanca, "a rank sentimentalist," so be it, I'll cop to the charge.

Audiences the world over related to the character Chaplin played in nearly every movie, the Tramp, the little guy living in squalid poverty, oppressed by the soulless machinery of a hostile society—which is pretty much the human condition in a nutshell for millions of people.

These same audiences longed, I suspect, to achieve the in-it-but-not-of-it insouciance with which the Tramp met his daily suffering. Oh, to relish the taste of the boot you've boiled for your Thanksgiving dinner the way the Tramp did—there's Chaplin's appeal reduced to a single scene.

The other key to Chaplin's allure is that more than any other silent performer, Keaton included, Chaplin truly did not need dialogue to convey action, jokes and especially emotion. As Roger Ebert has pointed out, children get Chaplin; it's only after they grow up that they forget how words serve mostly to confuse and distract.

Chaplin continued to make films sporadically during the sound era. Two of those films, City Lights and Modern Times, are masterpieces, and a third, The Great Dictator, is nearly so.

Chaplin was awarded honorary Oscars for his achievements twice, one at the very first Oscar ceremony in 1929, the second in 1972. He won a single competitive Oscar for his scoring of Limelight.

Nothing I've said here settles the debate—the debate can never be settled. Fortunately, I only have to choose between Chaplin and Keaton for purposes of handing out an award that doesn't even exist. My movie collection includes a healthy sampling of each.

You want my advice? Skip the argument, watch Chaplin and Keaton and become a fan of both.

Note: The boy in the photograph with Chaplin is Jackie Coogan, who not only played the title character in Chaplin's classic, The Kid, but later grew up to play Uncle Fester in one of my favorite television shows, The Addams Family.

Keep that in mind the next time you think, "Gee, what a cute kid ..."