Silent Comedy
see all genres ›What many still consider the "Golden Era" of film comedy took place during the silent years when a stellar lineup of comedic talent (most famously Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd) churned out umpteen funny shorts and features. Considered disposable entertainment then, they've by and large stayed remarkably fresh over a century's course since.
Watch Silent Comedy Films
Genres / Silent / Silent Comedy
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Cops
One of Buster Keaton's greatest and most famous comedies, COPS is universally enjoyed for the inventive comedy and amazing chase sequences. However, its darker aspects (Keaton's use of an anarchists bomb risked painful reminders of the horse and wagon, similar to the one Buster drives, that...Watch Movie
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Number, Please?
Arguably one of Harold Lloyd’s best two-reel comedies, NUMBER, PLEASE? takes place at a Los Angeles amusement park. It’s an unusual day: Mildred Davis is with another man, Harold is desperate to find her lost dog and Harold and Roy Brooks vie to take Mildred for a balloon ride. In the midst of...Watch Movie
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Ghosts Before Breakfast
The Dadaists were closely attuned to cinema's native surrealism. And so it is fitting that Hans Richter's GHOSTS BEFORE BREAKFAST should return to so many of the medium's first loves: trick shots, fisticuffs and slapstick are all thrown in the dada blender, unfettered from the...Watch Movie
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What's the World Coming To?
This zany Hal Roach production of WHAT'S THE WORLD COMING TO? takes place in a future "one hundred years from now, when men have become more like women and women more like men." The film opens with the "blushing groom" approaching the altar where his tuxedoed bride awaits to...Watch Movie
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How a Mosquito Operates
The first example of "personality" animation, in which an animated character appears to think and exhibits individualism through his actions. The beginnings of a type of animation that reached its apex in Walt Disney's SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS twenty five years later.Watch Movie
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The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog
One of several Edison films from this period that used animated intertitles. It continued "a popular fad which has been widely advertised by lithographs and souvenir mailing cards." These postcards showed portraits of various members of the Dam family, with their names: I. B....Watch Movie
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Fantasmagoria
Émile Cohl was already 50 by the time he made his first breakthrough work for Gaumont. FANTASMAGORIA's squirmy chalk drawings are infused with the same anarchic spirit which inspired his earlier work as a caricaturist and art provocateur. Pointedly crude, the animation skewers a bourgeois lady at...Watch Movie
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Too Much Johnson
In 1938, three years before CITIZEN KANE, New York theater tyro Orson Welles filmed comedy sequences for his stage production of TOO MUCH JOHNSON, a rapid-fire farce of mistaken identities. The slapstick prologue features Joseph Cotten doing Harold Lloyd antics through the...Watch Movie
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An Eastern Westerner
Rural comedy abounds in this romp as young upstart Harold (Harold Lloyd) is shipped to his uncle’s ranch out west. There, he meets Mildred (Mildred Davis), assists her in staving off the unwanted affections of rogue Young (Noah Young) and, after a wild altercation with a gang...Watch Movie
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The Railrodder
In one of the last films of the comedian's long career, Buster Keaton stars as a "railrodder" crossing Canada from east to west on a railway track speeder. As might be expected, the film is full of sight gags as Keaton putt-putts his way to British Columbia. Not a word is spoken throughout and...Watch Movie
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Grandma's Boy
One of Harold Lloyd’s personal favorites of his films, GRANDMA'S BOY is a beautiful tale of self-discovery with a bounty of comic overtones. Sonny is a self-professed coward who balks at the sight of the town tramp (Dick Sutherland). Armed with a lucky charm given to him by his grandmother (Anna...Watch Movie
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Airy Fairy Lillian Tries on Her New Corsets
A heavyset young woman asks for help in fitting into a new corset but it proves a challenge even for two assistants in this unattributed 1905 comic short from New York-based American Mutoscope and Biograph. The company was founded in 1895 originally to produce flip-card movies...Watch Movie
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Two Gun Gussie
When Sheriff Whooping-Cough Charlie mistakes Harold Lloyd's hapless piano player for a gunslinger, Lloyd learns that being a tough dude is all an act. That is, until he runs into the real thing at the bar! The place goes to pieces, but there's time for a kiss before this wild one-reeler is through.Watch Movie
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Gertie the Dinosaur
Premiered in Winsor McCay's vaudeville act as a multi-media performance with McCay in person cracking a whip while commanding his cartoon dinosaur to obey him. A triumph of personality animation that inspired a generation to enter the movie cartoon field, among them Paul...Watch Movie
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White Wings
Stan Laurel eludes a doddering cop across an array of vintage Los Angeles locations in this energetic comedy of false appearances. The trouble starts when Laurel accidentally snatches a baby. Pretty soon he’s being mistaken for a statue, amputee and dentist. Who knew yanking teeth was a spectator...Watch Movie
