Silent Comedy - Modern Era

Modern Era

In the early years of "talkie" films (beginning in 1927, see The Jazz Singer) a few actors continued to act silently for comedic effect, most famously Charlie Chaplin, whose last great "silent" comedies City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936) were both made in the sound age. Another late example was Harpo Marx, who always played a mute in the Marx Brothers' films.

Another important legacy of silent film comedy was the humor in animated cartoons. Even as live-action comedy moved towards a focus on the verbal humor of Abbott and Costello and Groucho Marx, animated cartoons took up the entire range of slapstick gags, frenetic chase scenes, visual puns, and exaggerated facial expressions previously seen in silent comedies. These devices were most pronounced in the Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies cartoons from Warner Brothers directed by Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones, and Friz Freleng and in the MGM Cartoons of Tex Avery and the "Tom and Jerry" cartoons of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera.

An early television show that featured exaggerated visual humor was the Ernie Kovacs program.

During the 1960s and 1970s, several films made homages or references to the silent era of film comedy. It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World performers and gags form the era and Blake Edwards' The Great Race and Mel Brooks' Silent Movie were full-length tributes. Peter Bogdanovich's What's Up, Doc? also featured slapstick gags and Keystone-style chase scenes, ideas that prefigured much of the humor in The Blues Brothers and Airplane later in the decade.

An episode of The Brady Bunch featured the family making a silent comedy filled with pie-throwing.

Few feature films today exploit the genre of silent comedy. Occasionally comedy teams will use a silent character for comedic effect. The most consistent—and also the most famous—is Teller from Penn & Teller.

Rowan Atkinson had huge success in the 1990s with the character Mr. Bean.

Shaun the Sheep is a British stop-motion animated children's television series which also uses silent comedy.

Techniques employed by silent comedy, however, continue to influence talkie comedies, mainly through silent comedy's development of the older art of slapstick and through artistic reference to the trademark gags of famous silent comedians.