In the first couple pages of the introduction of his book “Machine age-comedy“, Michael North talks about Benjamin and how he is “fascinated by the traces of mechanical reproduction written into the performance style of comedians“: Benjamin mentions Charlie Chaplin and his comic style, which “arises from repetitive, machinelike movements“. Repetition has always been one of the essential and vital comedic devices, from early silent cinema to today’s cartoons.
Italian actor Antonio De Curtis, known by his stage name “Totò”, uses mechanical repetition as a form of comedy as well; his type of repetition is not pure and simple though, but it is more like a repetition of something that should not be repeated: just like Chaplin in “Modern Times” (1936, dir. Charlie Chaplin), in the stamp scene of “Totò looks for a house” (“Totò cerca casa“, 1949, dir. Mario Monicelli) Totò simulates the repetitiveness of the machine: he goes to the stamp office to put the “correct” stamp on his document at first, but then he starts adding more and more until he gets caught up in a total frenzy and starts stamping everything with increasing speed and with a diabolical look on his face.
I would like to make a comparison between this scene and the factory scene from “Modern Times“, where the tramp gets swallowed by the factory machine while he is working on the assembly line. First of all, the order of the two scenes is similar: the characters’ behaviours are both “rational” at first but they then become so frantic that they both fall into madness and end up making gestures so extreme that they become comical themselves. Even the mechanisms are similar: we laugh at the characters when they lose their mind and when they then fall into madness; they merge the rational and the unexpected and it is this very combination that is funny itself.
I really like this comparison not only because it has introduced me to a filmmaker I was hitherto unaware of! What I find most interesting from these clips is the universality of their humour. I imagine that the crazed stamping of Toto and the hijinks of the Tramp were met with similar bouts of laughter from adults, children , clerks and factory workers. I agree that we laugh at characters when they fall into madness and it interests me that the appeal is universal.