Review: Slapstick Festival's Silent Comedy Gala
Running since 2005, Slapstick Festival is a yearly celebration of all things silent film and visual comedy in UNESCO Heritage City of Film Bristol. It attracts thousands of comedy fans to the city every year and some of the biggest names in comedy to the stage across some of the best and most unusual venues in Bristol, and 2022 is no exception.
Host Stephen Mangan © Vonalina Cake
Everyday writer and photographer Vonalina Cake and culture editor Kerry Mead report back from the Silent Comedy Gala on Friday 28th January; a screening of three classic films from the silent comedy era, presented by Stephen Mangan in the impressive surroundings of Bristol Cathedral.
We arrived on a wet and windy evening along with 400 other enthusiasts at Bristol Cathedral and were warmly welcomed in by the door staff. We were shown to our frankly excellent seats just two rows back from the front and readied ourselves for the event.
Robin Ince and his tiny Barry Cryer badge © Vonalina Cake
Slapstick Festival Director Chris Daniels started us off with a short speech and introduced Stephen Mangan who enthusiastically shared with us his love of these old Hollywood classics. He told us how he fell in love with silent comedy films as a child in the 70s, especially Laurel & Hardy and Buster Keaton and how they still get to his heart. He spoke of how the comedy duo with their constant busying with hats and ties, Lloyd with his daredevil stunts and Keaton with his stillness, give us very different styles but all use their physicality to relay so many emotions, alongside the ensemble casts with their very expressive faces and strong physical presence.
The loss of Barry Cryer was very much on everybody’s minds and many a nod was made to him throughout the evening. Robin Ince came on stage to give us some anecdotes, two minutes of punchlines instead of a minute’s silence and a really touching poem dedicated to all the lost comics; it was a very fitting tribute to a man who has been making us laugh for sixty years. A reminder to “never lose touch with silly”, the motto coined by his lifelong friend Humphrey Lyttelton.
Harold Lloyd - Never Weaken. 1921.
For Von, Lloyd is a real favourite. She used to watch these old gems as a kid too in the 70’s, reenacting parts of them with her older brother; pretending they were scaling the heady heights of tower blocks being built, girder by girder. Harold and his love, Mildred Davis, billed as The Boy and The Girl, are sweethearts, getting engaged from a dangerous-looking open window high up in the air of the skyscraper they both work in. And then the antics begin. There’s some particularly excellent falling over in this one.
Laurel & Hardy - Two Tars. 1928.
Similarly, the antics start up pretty quickly when the sailors on shore leave meet two flapper girls who are clearly up for some fun. Two Tars is a perfect example of Laurel and Hardy’s particular flavour of slapstick high jinks; it’s quite violent like so many of the films at the time; lots of fights break out. We find the four protagonists in their far-too-little hire car in a traffic jam, they’ve exchanged hats with the women and look like they’ve been on the sauce. With each interaction Stan and Ollie readjust their ladies' cloche caps. There’s a lot of car damage leading me to wonder if they were made from tin!
Buster Keaton in The Cameraman
Buster Keaton - The Cameraman. 1928
This film opens with Buster working as a tintype street photographer trying to make money from passers by as a ticker tape parade obscures him in the ever-growing crowd. But then he sees, or rather smells, (a bit creepy) a girl. He finds his way into filming newsreels after following Sally, who works the desk at MGM. Throughout the film you can see various bruises on her pale, slender arms, Hollywood was harsh. There’s also a monkey; the maddest, most manic, most deranged and disturbing monkey we’ve ever seen. Keaton shows us his deadpan brilliance and pure joyous physicality in this madcap boy-does-good story. Kerry, a newcomer to the joys of silent comedy, was blown away by the pure brilliance of the cinematography in The Cameraman and Keaton’s pin sharp humour and purely joyous physicality, proving his absolute command of every scene.
When you watch these old films you quickly realise that there really are only seven stories and film makers have been telling them since the inception of movie making. All three films followed a pattern of confusion surrounding love and the things a man will do to impress a girl. Much of it wouldn’t pass now of course; sniffing a stranger's hair, stalking, and that monkey! But these films still hold up; the audience filled the vaults of the cathedral with laughs and gasps throughout.
Stephen Mangan in the cloisters. © Vonalina Cake
Throughout each film there was live musical accompaniment improvised on the spot from pianist John Sweeney for Never Weaken, who was joined for the later two films by Stephen Horton, also on piano, Martin Pile on percussion and Roger Huckle on violin. It sounded fantastic in the space, which has some of the best acoustics in the city, and went perfectly with the films, adding to the suspense and comedy beautifully. It was a really wonderful night out; a truly one-off experience, and a great headliner night in what has become one of the highlights of the Bristol cultural calendar.
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