Could any other actor recycle the same character so many times and make it fresh and insightful each time? I think not. The Tramp (Chaplin) does what most people would really like to do to the assembly line that underpins modern industry that we love for its bounty and hate for its dehumanizing characteristics; he thumbs his nose at it. For that his character pays the price. And, yes, he pays the price for some of the usual perils of 1930s life -- its poverty and its desperation. He takes the blame for stealing a loaf of bread that a damsel in distress has stolen so that she could sate her hunger. Picking up a red flag that has fallen from a lumber truck, he becomes by accident a communist agitator who ends up in jail for what was then a serious crime. He keeps his humanity in a world that punishes assertions of humanity with hunger and humiliation.
To put it simply, Charlie Chaplin masters, as no comedian since has, the art of saying as much with the fewest words; insteadhe expresses himself physical comedy that nobody since can imitate. He demonstrates as nobody else could the absurdity of the harsh realities of the assembly line that dwarfed persons in his time -- and that there was still some life to the esthetic of the silent movie. He offers double-barrel laughter: we laugh at the circumstances, but laugh with him, with a twinkle and a trace of a tear. Nobody else has succeeded at that since.
Today we see more talking heads, more people resorting to body functions, more self-pity, and lots of four-letter words and blasphemy. Yet it is Chaplin who puts humanity into humor as few others before (Mark Twain? Will Rogers?) and few since could. We laugh with him, and laugh at the things at which he pokes fun.
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