two kinds of comedians: fast or f—ed. I never liked that kind of cursing in my presence, but Mack didn't care, any more than he cared about calling me Fatty. That explained another Fun Factory fact: Keystone spent more on bandages than on makeup. We were usually shooting on some hill on Manzanita, Hyperion, or Effie, or down in Echo Park, so whoever got gandied that day would recline in the sun back at the studio, which would turn into a Red Cross center. Somebody was always hobbling around the Keystone lot on crutches or nursing a fresh bloody nose. The injured would try to lure a bathing beauty over to clean their wounds. This was as much as Mack was willing to provide in the way of balm for the wounded.
Did I describe the Keystone stage already? The whole thing was nothing but three exterior walls with muslin slung over the top, for filtering. The worst job in the studio was moving that muslin sheet on the roof. After a rain, it stayed mildewed for weeks, and the pigeons who called the lot home liked to relieve themselves on it. Why am I telling you this? Because, if for some reason Mack wanted to shoot inside and needed to alter the light, he'd assign whoever he hated that week to Sheet Duty. My first months at Keystone, I got used to coming home with pigeon poop on my kneecaps.
Pain Lessons
What Sennett said over and over was that comedy was not about being funny. It was about being desperate. What, besides desperation, could make a person walk on telephone wires 30 feet off the ground, then smash through a skylight and bang off a busted-out mattress 20 feet below? They weren't doing it to be funny. They were doing it because, in the movie, they had to! You can watch that wire-to-mattress sequence in Fatty's Tintype Tangle and say "That's one brave fat man!" But maybe the fat man doesn't think it's particularly brave. Maybe he thinks that's what he has to do to keep his job.
No matter. After 20 years of struggling, Movie World magazine called me an overnight sensation. They declared my face "more familiar than the president's!" President Who?
Back then, Minta would always tell me that I worked like a man being chased. Sometimes she'd ask me what was chasing me. All I could think to answer was, "I won't know until it catches me. That's what scares me . . ."
She told me to read Freud.
Mabel-and-Fatty Magic
Here's the funny thing. After the first three Mabel-and-Fatty pictures— Passions, For the Love of Mabel, and The Waiters' Picnic —audiences went berserk. They could not get enough of us. But even after I knew Mabel and I were making hits, I didn't know what it meant. Not really. I knew I had steady work. I knew that after six years of marriage, I was finally able to buy my wife flowers. That every morning, Minta, who'd gotten a job at Keystone thanks to Mabel, would wake up, make me a breakfast of eggs and bacon and a tureen of coffee and ride the streetcar by my side to the lot. I had a future, even if it wasn't the future I'd imagined. What did I know? I'm a fat kid from Kansas. My own good luck scared me. Life seemed unbelievably livable.
Then the fan letters started. Every day, a limping Irish girl who called herself Harvey would bring me a stack of fan letters and I'd go around the back of the stage, sit on a barre, and try to read them. "Dear Fatty, Me and my sister think you're Tops. She's got the goiter . . ." "DEAR FATTY, I DON'T HAVE A DAD, BUT YOU WOULD BE SWELL . . ."
One time I made the mistake of showing a note to Minta, from a Greek boy with tuberculosis. Naturally, the next day we took the train to the hospital, and when I walked in the room he had my photo in his pale little hand. I said, "How are you, scooter?" The kid just smiled. Pink lips in a little gray face. Then his mother, a nervous woman who kept wringing her apron, whispered something to the father, a big bald moussaka with arms like pylons. Dad looked at the floor and asked if I would mind touching his boy on the head. I was
Did I describe the Keystone stage already? The whole thing was nothing but three exterior walls with muslin slung over the top, for filtering. The worst job in the studio was moving that muslin sheet on the roof. After a rain, it stayed mildewed for weeks, and the pigeons who called the lot home liked to relieve themselves on it. Why am I telling you this? Because, if for some reason Mack wanted to shoot inside and needed to alter the light, he'd assign whoever he hated that week to Sheet Duty. My first months at Keystone, I got used to coming home with pigeon poop on my kneecaps.
Pain Lessons
What Sennett said over and over was that comedy was not about being funny. It was about being desperate. What, besides desperation, could make a person walk on telephone wires 30 feet off the ground, then smash through a skylight and bang off a busted-out mattress 20 feet below? They weren't doing it to be funny. They were doing it because, in the movie, they had to! You can watch that wire-to-mattress sequence in Fatty's Tintype Tangle and say "That's one brave fat man!" But maybe the fat man doesn't think it's particularly brave. Maybe he thinks that's what he has to do to keep his job.
No matter. After 20 years of struggling, Movie World magazine called me an overnight sensation. They declared my face "more familiar than the president's!" President Who?
Back then, Minta would always tell me that I worked like a man being chased. Sometimes she'd ask me what was chasing me. All I could think to answer was, "I won't know until it catches me. That's what scares me . . ."
She told me to read Freud.
Mabel-and-Fatty Magic
Here's the funny thing. After the first three Mabel-and-Fatty pictures— Passions, For the Love of Mabel, and The Waiters' Picnic —audiences went berserk. They could not get enough of us. But even after I knew Mabel and I were making hits, I didn't know what it meant. Not really. I knew I had steady work. I knew that after six years of marriage, I was finally able to buy my wife flowers. That every morning, Minta, who'd gotten a job at Keystone thanks to Mabel, would wake up, make me a breakfast of eggs and bacon and a tureen of coffee and ride the streetcar by my side to the lot. I had a future, even if it wasn't the future I'd imagined. What did I know? I'm a fat kid from Kansas. My own good luck scared me. Life seemed unbelievably livable.
Then the fan letters started. Every day, a limping Irish girl who called herself Harvey would bring me a stack of fan letters and I'd go around the back of the stage, sit on a barre, and try to read them. "Dear Fatty, Me and my sister think you're Tops. She's got the goiter . . ." "DEAR FATTY, I DON'T HAVE A DAD, BUT YOU WOULD BE SWELL . . ."
One time I made the mistake of showing a note to Minta, from a Greek boy with tuberculosis. Naturally, the next day we took the train to the hospital, and when I walked in the room he had my photo in his pale little hand. I said, "How are you, scooter?" The kid just smiled. Pink lips in a little gray face. Then his mother, a nervous woman who kept wringing her apron, whispered something to the father, a big bald moussaka with arms like pylons. Dad looked at the floor and asked if I would mind touching his boy on the head. I was
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