Comedy & Laughter
Last Tuesday I watched a video of a golden retriever attempting to carry a stick that was, by conservative estimate, four times wider than the doorway he was trying to walk through. He tried from the left. He tried from the right. He backed up and reconsidered. He tried again at a slight diagonal. The stick did not fit. I watched this for six minutes. I laughed every single time.
There is nothing sophisticated about this. The dog is not making a satirical comment on human futility, though I suppose you could argue the clip functions as one. The stick does not represent anything. The dog just really wants to bring the stick inside, and the physics of the situation are working against him, and that is funny in the oldest and most reliable way that things can be funny.
This is slapstick. It is also, depending on who is classifying it, the oldest form of comedy in recorded human history — older than language-based jokes, older than satirical verse, older than most of the other things we call humor. And here it is in the twenty-first century, in high definition, still making us laugh with the same basic mechanism it used in ancient theatrical performances, in eighteenth-century commedia dell'arte, and in the nickelodeons of 1910.
The word "slapstick" comes from a specific prop: two flat boards joined at one end and hinged so that when they struck something, they produced an amplified smacking sound. Commedia dell'arte performers used these devices in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to make blows sound more spectacular without actually injuring anyone. The prop became so associated with a style of comedy that it eventually named the style itself.
But physical comedy predates the prop by millennia. Ancient Greek theatrical masks included exaggerated features that were inherently comic — enormous noses, wide eyes, distorted expressions — and the performance traditions that used them involved pratfalls, chases, and misunderstandings of a very physical nature. The Roman comedian Plautus, writing around 200 BCE, included scenes of characters being beaten, falling, and running into doors. The Romans found this funny. We still find it funny. This is either reassuring or deeply strange, depending on your outlook.
The golden age of cinematic slapstick ran roughly from 1910 through the late 1920s, and it produced work that film scholars continue to study with genuine reverence. The constraints of silent film — no dialogue, no sound effects recorded on set, limited editing options — pushed comedians to develop physical storytelling to an extraordinary degree.
Buster Keaton is the figure most serious film scholars point to as evidence that slapstick can achieve something beyond simple laughter. His films — The General, Steamboat Bill Jr., The Navigator — involve a stone-faced protagonist who encounters catastrophe after catastrophe and responds with methodical, unflappable problem-solving. He never smiles. He never panics. He simply keeps trying.
As the Smithsonian Magazine has written about Keaton's enduring legacy, the comedy in his films comes partly from the absurdity of the situations and partly from our admiration for a character who refuses to be defeated by them. The famous scene in Steamboat Bill Jr. where the front facade of a building falls directly onto Keaton — and he is saved only because he happens to be standing exactly where the open window passes — was performed without safety nets and remains one of the most audacious stunts in film history.
Where Keaton was impassive, Chaplin was expressive, and where Keaton played with machinery and scale, Chaplin played with social class and human longing. The Tramp is a figure of extraordinary pathos — always wanting things he cannot quite reach, always being pushed out of places where he briefly feels at home. The slapstick in Chaplin's films is often funny and sad simultaneously, which is a difficult trick to pull off and which he managed consistently for decades.
Cognitive scientists and humor researchers have proposed several overlapping explanations for slapstick's universal appeal. The most widely discussed is the "benign violation" theory, developed by psychologists Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren, which holds that humor arises when something is simultaneously a violation of our expectations or norms AND benign — meaning it doesn't actually cause harm or distress.
A fall is a violation: falls are dangerous, bodies are not supposed to move that way, the social dignity of the fallen person is momentarily shattered. But in slapstick, the fall is benign: the performer bounces back up, the fictional character is unhurt, the whole thing is obviously staged. The combination of violation and safety is what produces the laugh.
This theory also explains why slapstick stops being funny when it crosses into genuine harm. We stop laughing when the comedian actually breaks something. The moment the benign quality disappears, so does the comedy. NPR's coverage of McGraw and Warren's benign violation research remains one of the better accessible summaries of this framework.
The Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, Jerry Lewis, Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live, the pratfalls in every episode of I Love Lucy, the physical comedy of John Cleese in Fawlty Towers, the entire career of Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean — these represent not a series of separate traditions but a single unbroken one, each generation inheriting from the previous and finding new ways to fall down, run into things, and look baffled.
And then the internet, which has turned every household with a camera into a potential slapstick production studio. The cat knocking things off counters. The dog who does not understand glass doors. The compilation of people walking into walls while looking at their phones. These videos are watched billions of times per year. They require no translation. They are funny in every language, to every age group, across every cultural context.
If you have never watched a Buster Keaton film from beginning to end, I genuinely encourage you to do so. The General (1926) is widely considered his masterpiece. It is also available for free on the Internet Archive, in the public domain, and it runs about seventy-five minutes. You do not need any special knowledge of film history to appreciate it. You just need to watch it. A century after it was made, it is still very, very funny — and a little bit beautiful.