From the Keystone of Comedy to the Last of the Clowns

“Life gives us many different aspects of the comic, and it is linked up with various kinds of human activity.”7 Keeping in mind this statement by Ernst Kris, we find ourselves confronted with a bewildering phenomenon when we look back at the origin of movie comedy. Cameras then operated at a standard speed of sixteen pictures (or frames) a second, but when the film was projected in the theater the audience began to laugh because the action was speeded up at times so much that normal movements looked comical. The projectors were not yet synchronized to the speed of the cameras, so that the film was projected on the screen much faster than it had originally gone through the camera. Thus the comic was not linked up with a human activity; it was rather the result of a parting of ways, of an emancipation of the images from the real objects. The comic was the incidental by-product of a technical invention, of a machine.

One day in 1896 Georges Méliès, the Frenchman who developed moving film as an art, was photographing a Paris street scene when his camera jammed; the film had caught inside the aperture gate. Méliès cleared the gate, readjusted the film, and resumed shooting. When the film was projected later, he was surprised to see on the screen a bus suddenly turn into a hearse. The bus he had been photographing when the camera jammed had gone its way while he was readjusting the camera, and in its place a hearse had appeared. When Méliès had started shooting again the camera had taken a picture of the hearse on the same bit of film and in the same place where the bus had been photographed. Being a professional magician, he at once visualized the superior “supernatural” capacities of the movie camera, and investigating camera possibilities further, he discovered