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26
Wl»y I Can’t
Wherein Buster Keaton explains the dilemma of comedians
by martin regan
• Buster Keaton can make other
folks laugh, but he can’t laugh at himself on the screen.
The frozen-faced Buster is not a doleful sort of person at all. He loves to laugh. But he is finding it harder and harder to ensnare laughter.
“It’s just like the candymaker who handles sweet stuff every day of his life,” Buster explained. “He sees so much sugar that he loses all taste for it.
“That’s my fix. I used to be able to laugh at anything funny. But thinking comedy, playing comedy, and making work out of humor have taken away my taste for laughter.
“People seem to feel it a sort of duty to tell me funny stories. I used to hear about a hundred stories a week which would give me a good laugh. Now, if I hear three or four new ones,
I feel lucky.”
For years Buster’s face has been set in that woe-filled expression at which the whole world roars. But Buster can laugh as loudly and as heartily as you
and I.
“People ask me why I never smile,” Buster grinned. “In fact, they ask me so often that the question becomes really embarrassing. I started it years ago on the stage, because I found that the dead pan got laughs. I did it in the pictures for the same reason. Now it has become a habit.
“But I’m not the way 1 look, at all. No one loves laughter more than I do. Like all comedians, I live so close to comedy that it begins to grow stale.
“The whole world is gradually getting to the same point of laughter staleness. It is going bankrupt on laughs. Audiences have seen so many two-reel comedies . . . they look at one every time they go to a theatre . . . that they know most of the gags before they are finished.
"The talkies gave a big boost to the comics. Adding funny lines to pantomime has given us a new field, new tools. We can inject new life in the old gags by adding sound and voices to them. But, I suppose, when the novelty wears off, we’ll all be back in the same state again.”
Buster says that tragedians and the straight dramatic actors are the best laugh-audiences.
“Lon Chaney is the best audience a comedian could find,” Buster remarked. “He laughs easily and whole-heartedly. So do Lawrence Tibbett, Charlie Bickford, Lewis Stone, and the others. But try to get a real laugh from Bill Haines or Laurel and Hardy, or any of the other professional funny men. They’ll laugh, of course, being gentlemen, and courteous, but you know that they are thinking of the hundreds of times they have heard the same story or seen the gag in some form or other.
“It’s kind of tragic sometimes to be a comic .... in an age of wholesale laughter.”
Trying to get a reaction on "Dead Pan Buster" Keaton is about as easy as turning back the universe. When Will Rogers can't do it, no one can.
It's in the pocket that is, Buster's new comedy, "War Babies," is going to be the outstanding giggle-fest of the decade so they say out at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.