The Silent Masters

Vaudeville was a light-hearted variety show, popular in theaters from the late 1800s until around Growing out of working-class entertainment, it including burlesque, acrobats, comedians, music and the now quite controversial minstrel, variety shows featuring white people performing in “blackface.” Vaudeville's popularity waned in the 1920s, as motion pictures entered the “talkie” era. By 1930, talking pictures were the new rage — between that and the monetary crush of the Great Depression, vaudeville was doomed. The screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s, such as “It Happened One Night” with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, used slapstick elements of vaudeville.

 One of the primary elements that early comedy films borrowed from Vaudeville was slapstick comedy, primarily because many of the early film stars had been vaudeville performers.  Slapstick is: comedy based on deliberately clumsy actions and humorously embarrassing events.

Mistaken Identity Love Conquers all Individual Vs. Society Individual Vs. Nature Individual vs. Self Opposites Attract

Life and Work  Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE was an English actor, comedian, and filmmaker who rose to fame in the silent era.  Chaplin co-founded the distribution company United Artists, which gave him complete control over his films. His first feature-length was The Kid (1921), followed by A Woman of Paris (1923), The Gold Rush (1925), and The Circus (1928). He refused to move to sound films in the 1930s, instead producing City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936) without dialogue. Chaplin became increasingly political and his next film, The Great Dictator (1940), satirised Adolf Hitler.  Specialized in physical comedy primarily through his character “The Tramp” =btfJh6eiV4U

April 20, 1893 – March 8, =QEcTjhUN_7U  Harold Lloyd ranks alongside Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton as one of the most popular and influential film comedians of the silent film era.  Lloyd made nearly 200 comedy films, both silent and "talkies", between 1914 and He is best known for his bespectacled "Glasses" character,[3][4] a resourceful, success-seeking go-getter who was perfectly in tune with 1920s era United States.

=8LdY0ROdpp4 October 4, 1895 – February 1, 1966  Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton was an American actor, vaudevillian, comedian, filmmaker, stunt performer, and writer.  He was best known for his silent films, in which his trademark was physical comedy with a consistently stoic, deadpan expression, earning him the nickname "The Great Stone Face".