Hard but fast

Buster flung, still courtesy of whatever this is.

 I love Buster Keaton, you've probably heard. And comedy relies on timing, you've probably heard as well. So I feel a bit of an idiot having admired Keaton's comic timing all this while without taking into account one of the most obvious features of Silent Comedy - a feature even people who know nothing else about Silent Comedy could probably tell you about Silent Comedy - which is that it's sped up! I only realised this last week because of an excellent video by Ben Model, posted in the comments section of David Cairns' Shadowplay - always one of my favourite places on the internet - in which gags from "Cops" are run in real time as recorded, rather than as projected. They're still extraordinary stunts but it's a very different performance from Buster, more like his later television work, which I'd always assumed just seemed slower because he was getting older, like an idiot... It's not a "performance" here though, is it, it's an ingredient. He knew exactly what he was doing as the video shows, even running different gags at different speeds. So the cranked up version is the actual "performance" and, as with the animated performances of Bugs or Daffy, the technology was a vital part of it.

I still don't like all that sped up stuff in Green Wing though.