The Keystone Cops starred in silent movies made by Canadian-born and American-based director and actor Mack Sennett (1880-1960) between 1912 and 1917. Sennett's company in 1912 was called Keystone Pictures Studio; hence, "Keystone Cops."
Slapstick--humor involving someone who, by his or her own clumsiness or ineptitude, becomes the butt of the joke--is as old as comedy. Someone on stage or film slips on a banana peel or takes a custard pie in the face or gets a whack on the rear end and we laugh uproariously. If we have gone out of our way to refine our sensibilities, we laugh uproariously, but still feel bad about making fun of our hapless victim.
The term "slapstick" comes from the battachio of Italian Commedia dell'Arte, a wooden prop of two slats held together at one end so that when one player smacks another player, the battachio makes a loud noise that sounds like it hurts, but does not.
To show slapstick in movies, Sennett used some special effects. He filmed at slow speed so that the action looked faster than it was, and he had every fourth frame of film edited out so that the action looked jerky. I ran into a YouTube clip of a remastered Sennett film, which remastering in part involved fixing filming speed. But if these editors took out Sennett's special effects, I'm thinking that Sennett would not have wanted fixes like that.
In the Keystone-Cop version of slapstick, uniformed policemen chase a bad guy, but instead of calm thinking, quick action, and speedy resolution, they run off in all directions in disarray. The Keystone Cops first appeared in a comedy short, Hoffmeyer's Legacy, 1912 and became popular after their appearance in another short, the Bangville Police, 1913. Starting 1914, they no longer played starring roles, but became a background troupe for Charlie Chaplin and other silent-film stars.We know the names of the actors who played the first Keystone Cops, but the cast changed from movie to movie.
Here is the logo for Sennett's company in 1912:
Slapstick--humor involving someone who, by his or her own clumsiness or ineptitude, becomes the butt of the joke--is as old as comedy. Someone on stage or film slips on a banana peel or takes a custard pie in the face or gets a whack on the rear end and we laugh uproariously. If we have gone out of our way to refine our sensibilities, we laugh uproariously, but still feel bad about making fun of our hapless victim.
The term "slapstick" comes from the battachio of Italian Commedia dell'Arte, a wooden prop of two slats held together at one end so that when one player smacks another player, the battachio makes a loud noise that sounds like it hurts, but does not.
To show slapstick in movies, Sennett used some special effects. He filmed at slow speed so that the action looked faster than it was, and he had every fourth frame of film edited out so that the action looked jerky. I ran into a YouTube clip of a remastered Sennett film, which remastering in part involved fixing filming speed. But if these editors took out Sennett's special effects, I'm thinking that Sennett would not have wanted fixes like that.
In the Keystone-Cop version of slapstick, uniformed policemen chase a bad guy, but instead of calm thinking, quick action, and speedy resolution, they run off in all directions in disarray. The Keystone Cops first appeared in a comedy short, Hoffmeyer's Legacy, 1912 and became popular after their appearance in another short, the Bangville Police, 1913. Starting 1914, they no longer played starring roles, but became a background troupe for Charlie Chaplin and other silent-film stars.We know the names of the actors who played the first Keystone Cops, but the cast changed from movie to movie.
Here is the logo for Sennett's company in 1912:
As for the significance of the keystone in the logo, I will take that up in a later post. For now, let me just remark that Sennett probably chose "keystone" because it is a weighty term from classical architecture. The keystone is the final piece that allows a keystone arch to stand alone, without the scaffolding needed to construct it.
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