Silents are Golden: Slapstick By The Sea – 8 Edwardian Comedy Shorts

Slapstick By The Sea: 8 Edwardian Comedy Shorts

The women may not have worn bikinis and the men might not have gone around shirtless, but Edwardians enjoyed a sunny day at the beach just as much as we do today. By the 1910s the best beaches abounded with beautiful resorts, and seaside amusement parks like Coney Island enticed people to spend their free time by the water. Role models like the swimmer Annette Kellerman made swimming increasingly popular for fitness, and soon lighter (but still quite modest) bathing suits were becoming more common.

Naturally, all of this meant that some of our earliest silent comedies would find plenty of trendy material at the beach, whether they focused on water-centric gags, mishaps with goofy swimwear, or flocks of playful Bathing Beauties. Here’s just a few of the many Edwardian comedy shorts set “beside the seaside, by the beautiful sea!”

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8. By the Sad Sea Waves (1917)

Filmed around the time his popular “Lonesome Luke” series of 1916-17 was coming to a close, By the Sad Sea Waves features one of Harold Lloyd’s earliest appearances sporting his iconic round glasses. Lloyd plays a beachhound who sees all the girls fawning over a lifeguard and decides he should impersonate one himself. Naturally he’s thrown for a loop when an unfortunate swimmer is in need of saving. Much of this goofy short involves characters running around the beach in old-timey striped bathing suits, throttling each other, flirting with pretty girls and falling into the ocean. It’s a bit of fast-paced slapstick silliness that just might make your day.

7. Hearts and Flowers (1919)

This two-reel Sennett is an excellent go-to if you want to see his famous Bathing Beauties in their heyday. Ford Sterling, Phylis Haver and Louise Fazenda are the stars, with Ford playing a vain orchestra leader who goes after pretty Phylis while daffy flower girl Fazenda longs for him from afar. Soon everyone heads to the seashore, where Phylis sports a chic bathing suit and joins a group of cheeky Bathing Beauties playing sports on the beach. It’s a great example of how the Beauties were used in these comedies, where they were like a gang of mischievous sprites frequently laughing at the main characters’ blundering.

6. By the Sea (1915)

One of Chaplin’s simplest Essanay shorts merely shows him wandering around a seaside resort. His hat, held on with a string to withstand the sea breezes, gets tangled up with another fellow’s hat that’s similarly fastened. They soon lose patience with each other and a battle ensues. Peacemaking efforts in the form of getting ice cream cones lead to another brawl when they can’t decide who gets the honor of paying. Simple indeed, but well-paced with clean, sunny cinematography.

5. Miss Fatty’s Seaside Lovers (1915)

During his time at Keystone audiences always got a kick out of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle in drag, so the studio decided to really amp up the laughs and have him play the noticeably burly daughter of a “mothball magnate.” They arrive at a resort where three flirts immediately start vying for the “buxom heiress.” The action soon moves to the beach, with Arbuckle wearing a loud striped bathing suit with striped bloomers and a parasol. It’s all good, silly fun, and Arbuckle seems to be having a ball.

4. Neptune’s Naughty Daughter (1917)

With a waddling walk and hair piled high on top of her head, Alice Howell was a popular slapstick comedienne who looked like an early prototype of Lucille Ball. In Neptune’s Naughty Daughter she plays the underappreciated daughter of a boorish fisherman. She tries to make friends on the beach but gets rejected, but then she meets a young sailor and they fall for each other. Unfortunately the menacing Captain Brawn also wants to win her affections, and she gets kidnapped and taken to his ship. It’s a quick-moving short with some wonderfully cartoony gags.

3. The Water Nymph (1912)

This little split-reeler, one of the Keystone Film Company’s very first releases, is credited with kicking off a certain famous trend in silent comedies. It starred Mabel Normand, Mack Sennett as Mabel’s love interest and Ford Sterling as Mack’s father. When everyone heads to the beach the young couple decide it would be really funny to have Mabel “vamp” the father, who evidently hasn’t met her yet–a prank which works a little too well. The real excuse to work a beach into the plot, of course, was to show Normand in a one-piece black bathing suit (with matching tights) performing several diving tricks. Legend has it that the popularity of this short gave Sennett the seed of the idea for his famous Bathing Beauties.

2. Coney Island (1917)

After Arbuckle left Keystone he started his own company, Comique…and hired the legendary Buster Keaton as one of his supporting players. The wonderful Coney Island, filmed on location, is one of the many gems the two appeared in together. The “one thing leads to another” plot shows Buster, Arbuckle, and the wiry Al St. John vying for Alice Mann’s affections. It’s hard to resist the sight of Al and Buster weaving their way along the “Witching Waves” or Roscoe and Alice barreling down the “Shoot the Chutes”–and of course, Roscoe includes a few funny scenes where he has to don a woman’s bathing suit.

1. The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916)

Too bizarre not to include on this list, The Mystery of the Leaping Fish is a two-reel Sherlock Holmes spoof that relies heavily on the trivia about Holmes using a “seven percent solution” to focus his mind. Yes, this is a zany Edwardian short revolving around…narcotics hijinks, starring Douglas Fairbanks as “Coke Ennyday,” a brilliant cocaine-addled detective (he can never seem to quite make eye contact with the camera). He investigates an opium smuggling ring who hides the substance in inflatable beach toys called “Leaping Fish.” It’s certainly a short that must be seen to be believed…or so the saying goes. Did I mention it was directed by none other than Tod Browning of Dracula (1931) fame?

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–Lea Stans for Classic Movie Hub

You can read all of Lea’s Silents are Golden articles here.

Lea Stans is a born-and-raised Minnesotan with a degree in English and an obsessive interest in the silent film era (which she largely blames on Buster Keaton). In addition to blogging about her passion at her site Silent-ology, she is a columnist for the Silent Film Quarterly and has also written for The Keaton Chronicle.