How Charlie Chaplin Turned Dance into Comedy

The son of a bitch is a ballet dancer, remarked W.C. Fields after friends dragged him to see the 1917 short Easy Street. He's the best ballet dancer that ever lived and if I get a good chance I'll kill him. Critics had already noticed Chaplin's balletic grace. His unique talent lay in bringing aspects of dance to bear on comedy routines. His moves are funny because they combine contradictory impulses. They represent supposedly spontaneous responses to dramatic situations yet gratuitously use the elegance and rhythm of dance. If Chaplin was going to come right out and dance then he needed a gimmick to maintain the sense of absurd contradiction. Parking with a globe to show a megalomaniac's lust for power in physical form or replacing his body with forks and bread rolls to become a bizarre Mardi Gras figure with prim coquettish manners. But Chaplin the dancer is always present even if the scene isn't literally about dance. In his grace, in the precision of every movement and in the sense that all the action was timed to perfection to lead the eye across the screen in a pleasing way, every scene he did was Terpsichorean. And a key part of this effect was the use of repetition, seen to great effect in the celebrated boxing match in City Lights. The central idea of the sequence is Chaplin the anarchist, warping a sport all out of shape by refusing to play it conventionally. No boxer wants to get hit but Chaplin prioritises the avoidance of taking a punch above all other concerns. The challenge is to make this activity ridiculous without actually cheating, though probably some of the techniques used wouldn't meet with the marquess of Queensbury's approval. This scene takes repetition to the limit. Everything is performed more than once except the final knockout. The effect is cumulative, delirious. Chaplin could create surprise just by reshuffling the order of events and slowly introducing new ones which could themselves be repeated. The routine, choreographed to the smallest move, is not only a dance but a highly formal one. This impulse to instantly replay gags was a distinctly Chaplin-esque trait. It seemed to be a matter of pride with Keaton, at least in his heyday, not to ever do the same gag twice. And Lloyd, as Chaplin's closest competitor, laboured to fill his movies with comic invention. Variations on a theme, yes, but not outright repeats. But in Chaplin, if something works once, it's worth doing again. The audience gets to laugh with surprise at the first iteration of a gag, then with anticipation as the same action comes around again. This also gives the slower viewer a chance to catch up. Chaplin ensures that the whole audience is brought along, and this may partially account for his huge success among all ages. But the repetition isn't just there to make it easier for us. Choreographing his routines through endless rehearsals, building from a vague notion into a complex and detailed sequence of gags, Chaplin used recurring moments to add beauty to the rough-and-tumble interplay of characters. Where Keaton and Lloyd's artistry went into a stylised simulation of the casual and accidental, Chaplin's performance style aspires to a kind of fanciness like his character. The tramp who wears a necktie and a bowler hat is an analogue for the music hall comedian who moves like a ballet dancer.