Mack Sennett Research Papers

Comedy played a large role in American cinema's early films. Mack Sennett was instrumental in defining the role of comedy in these films. This paper will outline the origins of Mack Sennett's film style as well as the historical impact of his work. This outline will include brief discussions of the actors that became famous under Sennett's direction, including those whose work also affected the course of comedy and film. This examination of Mack Sennett's contributions to film will demonstrate the historical significance of his work. Furthermore, it will contend that Sennett's influence is still evident in film today.

Canadian-born Mack Sennett was a working for silent movie pioneer D.W. Griffith as an actor before he began making movies. Sennett founded Keystone, an independent production company, and released his first silent films in 1912. Keystone became a source of the slapstick comedy that would be a hallmark of Sennett and American film for years to come.

His early work, including thirty-four short films with Charlie Chaplin in 1914, featured comedians who are still appreciated today. Sennett created the necessary scripts and environment for comedians such as Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, Fatty Arbuckle, Harry Langdon and many others to make their own marks on comedy and film history. For Sennett, comedy and film were closely related. His films defined a genre of the most outrageous, slapstick comedy ever produced. In the silent films, this was accomplished by necessity and exaggeration, but Sennett carried the same crazy hyperbole and ridiculous scenes involving water splashed in faces, tree limbs banged on heads, and fiends kicked in the belly in later films.

Even though the comedy in his films was often derived from unlikely scenarios, Sennett believed that the funniest humor came from a "degree of probability and sequence," and he was more concerned with a "continuous forward flow" than jokes. He was interested in the individual jokes and skits, many of which had been used in burlesque clubs years earlier, but his comedies, taken as whole films, were among the first to demonstrate a continuity that set them apart from burlesque and made them ideal for film.

Sennett did not simply produce comedy films by a formula. According to Hampton, he was a workaholic who had a team of writers and several directors under him.

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