Welcome back to Internet Meme Monday! What is a meme you say? Well, as I understand it, a meme is similar to a gene, except instead of passing on genetic information it passes on cultural ideas. A meme can take many forms, from a catch phrase to a hand gesture, but the type of memes I’ll be looking at every second Monday of the month are “internet memes”.
On the agenda this month? I test how tired everyone is of The Lonely Island’s “On a Boat” by making a Buster Keaton music video for it!
I haven’t watched Saturday Night Live regularly for years, but every time I have caught a bit of it I’m reminded how painfully unfunny it has become. About the only skits I’ve seen that have been remotely amusing are the “digital shorts” where Andy Samberg and company sing pop songs like Lazy Sunday and Dick in a Box with ridiculous lyrics. At some point they became the band The Lonely Island and released such internet phenomenons as Jizz in my Pants and I’m on a Boat.
Today we are taking a look at I’m on a Boat and the art of setting silly songs to new images on youtube. I’m on a Boat is basically a send up of rap video cliches featuring dudes living large and acting hard. The video is full of silly images of the guys doing ridiculous things while they sing lines like “I’m riding on a dolphin, doin flips and shit” and “fuck trees, I climb buoys motherfucker!” Anyway, when I saw the video “Ponyo on a Boat” I finally had my meme to rip off. Take a movie you like, pull out all the clips of people on boats and set them to the I’m on a Boat song! Sure, it’s not exactly a meme that is really burning up the internet, but I say it counts.
Thus, I present, Buster Keaton on a Boat:
Those are clips from The Navigator, Steamboat Bill Jr., The Boat and The Love Nest. In case you couldn’t tell from the video, Buster Keaton was a real comedic genius and I highly recommend checking his stuff out. Our Hospitality, The General, and Steamboat Bill Jr. are probably his best, but really, almost all of his full length films are complete masterpieces. He’s just as brilliant as Chaplin, but with none of the eye rolling pathos…what could be better!?
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Too bad you didn’t have enough Earendil footage, eh?
Chaplin is awesome though. Props.
You mean Keaton? 😉 Chaplin is awesome too…I just prefer Keaton’s full lengths (though I like Chaplin’s short films over Keaton’s)
Maybe I’ll have to write some Earendil “On a Boat” fanfiction…
The only film by either Keaton or Chaplin I’ve seen is Modern Times, which I enjoyed. I was happy to see that several of Keaton’s most highly regarded are available for instant streaming on Netflix.
I can be kind of hard on Chaplin…it just annoys me where he will cram scenes of himself batting his eyes at a poor blind girl or something into what was otherwise a perfectly funny movie. Keaton’s full lengths tell stories and are just as psychologically complex, but he doesn’t resort to cheap pathos to get an emotional impact. And they are just as funny.
Chaplin’s Mutual shorts are some of my favorites from him 12 films all around 20-30 minutes…they are frickin brilliant…and it was back when he wasn’t afraid to play an asshole.
The Chaplin Mutuals are also available for streaming, so I might have to check those out, as well. And I agree; what this world needs is more assholes.
So I watched most of The General last night after work (still have about 20 minutes to go, I think). Like I said before, the only other film by either Keaton or Chaplin I’ve seen is Chaplin’s Modern Times. While I’ve enjoyed The General to an extent, I can’t help but notice that the physical comedy is very subdued compared to what I saw in Modern Times. It seems to lack the ingenuity, as well. Is that because The General came out nine years prior? Had this sort of comedy evolved a great deal in that time period? What am I missing here?
I don’t know that I can really say Buster is funnier than Charlie (or vise versa). I also can’t say that Buster makes finer movies (cinematically speaking) than Charlie (though I probably lean that way. I really have two problems with Chaplin’s full length films:
1. Chaplin didn’t use writers (at least as far as I know) while Keaton and Lloyd did. While it was badass to come up with everything himself, as his career went on he ended up recycling more and more gags from his early movies and Keystone/Essanay/Mutual short films, and while the gags became more and more polished, they also feel too rehearsed and lose the improvised spontanaity that is one of my favorite things about silent film. Of course, this is subjective, his gags are still great.
2. Pathos. I find it incredibly annoying that Chaplin always has to inject a health dose of ham fisted, sentimental pathos into his films. “Laying it on thick” does not make an “important movie”.
The real reason I prefer Keaton is that his films are actual movies, not excuses to do your favorite gags in between a bunch of sentimental pathos. The General is so detailed it seems like Buster actually inhabits that Civil War Era setting. Modern Times looks like a bunch of wild sets that Chaplin designed for the movie Modern Times. And that really isn’t a knock against Modern Times, it’s a bad ass movie, but I find myself rolling my eyes at all the social conscience elements whenever I watch it. I’ve never rolled my eyes at a Keaton film 😉
Also, I just love Keaton’s sense of humor…it isn’t fair to say The General is more memorable to me since I’ve seen it over and over, but even the throwaway gags are priceless to me. I love how he stomps on the bug while throwing sand on the tracks, or how the girl keeps handing him the tiny sticks while he frantically stokes the fire, or that brilliant cannon sequence, etc etc.
Modern Times is full of great sequences too, but I don’t think they are any more or less funny, and that’s even without my complaints at having seen many of the gags before (either in other director’s films like A Nouse La Liberte or in Chaplin’s earlier stuff like The Rink).
Not that silent films can’t copy each other/themselves, they all did that (Buster had a cannon pointed at him only a few years earlier in The Navigator for instance), but there is something to be said for new gags.
Also, Modern Times was not the peak of evolution of the silent comedy…in 1936, there handn’t been another movie like it made since Chaplin’s City Lights in 1931. People started making sound films around 1928 and with few execeptions it was all sound from then on out. And with sound the improvised silent comedy disappeared. Modern Times was an anachronism when it came out, more old fashioned than a cutting edge silent comedy. Not a knock against it, but it had to look like a dinosaur to audiences used to seeing stuff like Libeled Lady and Wife vs Secretary.
Of course, all that said, people have been debating the “Chaplin or Keaton” question for almost a hundred years…you might just be in the Chaplin camp… 😉
You make a lot of great points there. First of all, other than The Passion of Joan of Arc, The General and Modern Times are the only two silent movies I think I’ve ever seen. So when you talk about rehashing old gags and so forth, I might very well feel the same way if I were drawing from a deeper well of viewing experience.
One thing I will say about The General, it was definitely more compelling than Modern Times from a dramatic standpoint. It seemed more like a fairly serious movie with funny parts rather than, as you pointed out about Modern Times, a bunch of gags strung loosely across some skeleton of a plot. I was especially impressed with the climactic battle scene in The General (I thought it was bad ass when the burning bridge collapsed under the train).
Another thing I noticed about Keaton’s delivery in this movie is that sometimes I didn’t realize he was doing a gag until a few seconds had passed. The execution was much more subtle. It certainly helped maintain the coherence of the dramatic thrust, but I think their subtlety rendered them less laugh-out-loud funny.
At this point, I don’t feel like I’m in any position to say into who’s camp I fall. Modern Times and The General both did enough to make me want to see more from each of them.
I watched Steamboat Bill Jr. before work today and I’ve gotta say, I enjoyed it quite a bit more than I did The General. I think it played to a lot more of my expectations of what the genre should be like. The gags seemed more plentiful and out in front, for starters. I also really liked the dynamic between Bill Jr. and Bill Sr. at the beginning of the movie. The obvious disdain this big, burly bastard had for his dandy son from Boston was amusing. The hat scene was hilarious, especially after it blows right off his head after walking outside and he puts on his original. I was wondering about the whole “window of the house falls down right over the hero” thing in the wind storm scene – was Keaton the first to do this?
I’m not sure about the falling house gag, I swear I’ve seen that somewhere before, but either way Keaton was the first to do it that spectacularly. Still, I’d be surprised if it hadn’t been done before since that was such a late movie. Most of the famous gags had their roots way back. Trying to see who did the first “mirror routine” etc is always almost impossible to figure out.
But yeah, I love the hat scene…very subtle. And that final hurricane sequence is always really impressive, so much creative destruction.
That’s the other thing about Buster…he was a force of nature…walking through the world as it went crazy around him.