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234 PROBLEM OF THE SOUND COMEDY
If we see something incomprehensible, perhaps in darkness or in a dream, such a thing may still be uncanny and frightening. But if words are incomprehensible, they are robbed of every possibility of being terrifying. They turn into empty, conglomerates of sound which convey nothing and rouse no associations of any kind in us.
Convincing historical proof of the great difficulty of talkie comedies is the fact that with the emergence of the talkie the already very well developed American slapstick comedy almost completely disappeared. None of the world famous great masters of this genre could retain their popularity in the world of sound. Neither Buster Keaton nor Harold Lloyd survived because they were unable to distort their voices and speech to harmonize with the funniness of their visual appearance. Char-, lie Chaplin is an exception and he will be discussed later in this connection.
PROBLEM OF THE MUSICAL GROTESQUE
The basic principle of the musical grotesque is also that a sound is made grotesque by the fact that its quality is at odds with the nature of the instrument producing it. In Alexandrov's film Jazz Comedy, a musical farce, the shepherd taps the peasant jugs and plays on them as on a musical instrument. But the melody he thus produces is not at all grotesque. What is grotesque is the surprising fact that he is able to produce such a not-at-all-distorted, even pleasant melody, by tapping earthenware jugs. If we were not shown the funny source of this music, we would see nothing funny in it at all. Thus a beautiful melody may strike us as funny if it emanates from objects which do not seem suitable to produce it. The musical clowns of the circus ring have used this effect from time immemorial. When a clown takes a broomstick, a pig's bladder and a piece of string and turns them into a string instrument from which he evokes the mellow sounds of a violoncello, then what is funny is not the sound of the cello but the fact that it is produced by a broomstick and a pig's bladder.
Another basic principle of sound distortion is that the fact and intention of distortion should be manifest. This is possible