Thu May 11, 2017 10:15 am
It's interesting that old habits die so hard— even in a thread that's called Smashing Agee's Pantheon of Comedians, we still wrestle with the question of whether Langdon belongs with the so-called big three.
Again, my point in the original article is that Agee skewed us to look at feature comedians. Which to some extent means looking at the comics whose talents lent themselves best to full-length stories; it also means comedians of the 1920s, since features barely existed in this genre until then.
But far more of comedy was in shorts, for longer, and while the big money may have been in being a feature star, plenty of comics were satisfied working in shorts, in vaudeville, in circuses, in silent and sound shorts, on radio... there were any number of choices out there for a career making people laugh and they weren't sitting there going, "How can I make sure I get into Andrew Sarris's Pantheon by making features?" Or, "How can I make people laugh in 100 years?" for that matter.
I really feel like the idea of silent comedy has been so deformed by Agee's desire to create a Mount Rushmore set of four, mostly for his own purposes of bashing his present day. But that's not how the field shaped itself in the day. Langdon was Langdon; he doesn't have to be measured against John, Paul and George, because they weren't in a band together.
Also, Langdon's best film is definitely Tramp Tramp Tramp, not The Strong Man which really isn't that funny.
“Sentimentality is when it doesn't come off—when it does, you get a true expression of life's sorrows.” —Alain-Fournier