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Eric Stone

International History of Film

Final Paper

The Visual Comedy of Buster Keaton:

An Examination of Sight Gags in Sherlock Jr.

The sight gag is a notably common trope in comedy, on both stage and screen.

From slipping on a banana peel to the most absurd situations, visual humor can be

unquestionably effective at provoking laughter, if the gag is cleverly conceived and

carefully executed. While these types of jokes cannot function so well in verbal forms,

the visual of language of cinema allows whimsical events to unfold without need for any

textual explanation, instead constructing humor with the immediacy of an image. Just

as verbal jokes function in diverse ways, visual gags rely on different filmic devices, all

aimed at producing the intended comedic effect. The comedies of the silent era offer

an abundance of sight gags, especially the films of Buster Keaton. In his early silent film

Sherlock Jr, Keaton employs sight gags that explicitly address the new visual

possibilities offered by the film medium.

In his essay Notes on the Sight Gag, Noel Carroll outlines the various forms of

visual jokes in the cinema, but more importantly, he defines the cinematic mechanism

that is crucial to producing this style of comedy, namely how the humor is generated by

the misperception or misinterpretation of the filmed event. More specifically, as he

describes, The sight gag is a form of visual humor in which amusement is generated by

the play of alternative interpretations projected by the image or image series (Carroll

146). Elaborating the numerous ways this play of interpretation can achieve its comedic

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effect, Carroll consistently defines the visual gags in contrast or comparison to their

verbal analogues - for example, referring to mimed metaphor as a visual simile and

a switch gag as a visual pun. Critical to these distinctions is the audiences relation to

the misperception of the event. If the film is showing a character that is oblivious to an

ironic fact of the situation, the audience is amused at the characters misperception.

Rather, if the misinterpretation that the film constructs is in the audiences minds, the

comedic effect is produced in a different way, following a different filmic logic. This

latter type can be expressed more effectively in a single shot, while the former can be

drawn out over long sequences of shots.

In his 1924 film Sherlock Jr., Keaton employs both these forms, while also

offering an astute commentary on an audiences relationship to the film they are

watching. Keaton plays a young "moving picture operator" working in a theatre, who

also dreams of becoming a great detective. One day, while projecting a film, he falls

asleep and dreams himself, his love interest, her family and his rival into the film. With

this, Keaton comments on the immersive capacity of the cinema, physically entering

the screen and becomes the hero of the film, solving the mystery, thereby winning his

sweetheart. The whole dream narrative seems to be a play on the imaginative power of

the cinema, but Keaton makes this point even more salient by masterfully subverting

the expectations and interpretations of his audience.

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In one part of the dream sequence, the dapperly dressed Keaton, now dreaming

himself as the titular Sherlock, is checking his attire in front of what appears to be a

large mirror (fig. 1). After adjusting his white tie and top hat and buttoning his gloves,

his assistant hands him his walking stick, and he subsequently leaves the room through

the mirror (fig. 2). To underscore the precise expectation the gag subverts, the

confused assistant follows him through the mirror-door, standing in the opening with

one leg in each room.

Fig. 1 Fig. 2

In this single shot, Keaton conjures the audience's interpretation of the scene,

specifically that he is looking at himself in the mirror. Without cutting to a different

shot, Keaton immediately breaks this assumption, by transforming what was thought

to be a mirror, given his own interaction with it, into a doorway. This gag functions well

in a single shot because the misperception it subverts is the audiences own

interpretation of the image. As Carroll would describe, this gag functions like a verbal

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joke, in that it involves a set-up followed by a clear punchline, a comedic short-circuit

that shocks the audience into a different understanding of the situation.

Yet Keaton was also a master of extended or running sight gags, often editing

together long chase sequences, unifying each particular shot or gag under an

overarching misperception of a character involved. This trope, truly pioneered by

Keaton, has become a classic feature in more recent comedies, from Austin Powers to

Mr. Magoo. Sherlock Jr. provides an excellent example of this comedic structure in that

same dream sequence. Racing in an attempt to save the woman he loves, Keatons

Sherlock jumps on the front of a motorcycle as the driver navigates through traffic.

Eventually, the driver gets bumped off the seat of the motorcycle into a large puddle,

but Sherlock remains ignorant of this new development. Occasionally, through the use

of intertitles, Sherlock even speaks with the non-existent driver, ironically telling him to

watch where he is going. The sequence ties together many different gags, comprising

the particular obstacles Sherlock through which navigates while remaining oblivious to

the larger danger. We see Keaton narrowly miss a train, dodge traffic, and even cross a

fallen bridge atop two trucks, but in each case the central comedic mechanism remains

the characters misperception that there is someone driving behind him, responsible for

his safety. This gag can function in this sequential fashion because the running joke

relies only on the ignorance of the character, allowing the audience to revel in the

absurdity of his obliviousness. In Carrolls terms:

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The relevant conflict of interpretations emerges from the disjunction of the

character's point of view - which is a function of the situation being laid out in

such a way that the spectator can see why the character fails to see it properly -

and the way the situation is. (147)

Rather than subverting the audiences understanding of the situation, here the humor is

derived internally, within the context of the films dream sequence, allowing the joke to

continue on ad infinitum.

Contrasting these two scenes from Sherlock Jr., while both employ a certain

play of interpretation that Carroll describes, this comedic mechanism is achieved in

markedly different ways. The first example, Sherlock walking through door that

seemed to be a mirror, plays with the audiences misinterpretation of the setting. This

effect could only be realized in the form of a single shot, for it depends on a careful

staging of the camera in relation to the room. The cameras point of view seems

inconspicuous until the moment Sherlock crosses the room, and the trick on the

audience is revealed. This joke could not be effectively represented in a series of shots,

because the camera angle is paramount to the audiences misperception of the rooms

dimensions. Certainly, this misinterpretation is in part generated by Keatons own

casual glances in that direction, treating the doorway as though it were a mirror, but

the singularity of the shot is its most crucial visual feature in producing the comedic

effect. Because the butt of the joke here is not Sherlock but the audience, this sight

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the film. Subverting the audiences expectations just as well as indulging them,

Keatons film serves as a brilliant example of how the strictly visual language of film can

be just as expressive, inventive, and most importantly funny as verbal language.

Works Cited

Carroll, Nol. Theorizing the Moving Image. Cambridge University Press,

1996.