Dough and Dynamite

For those who are familiar with later Chaplin films, this is interesting in a film-school sort of way. Chaplin was working with a script by Mack Sennett, and the story and gags follow the high-speed comedy methods favored by him; yet the gags and the situations were re-used by Chaplin in later films, from THE PAWNSHOP through MODERN TIMES. The difference is that when Chaplin was working for Keystone, he turned out 35 short films, about nine hours of screen time, in one year. By the time he did his later films, he would take several years for each, rehearsing and perfecting each gag through sometimes hundreds of takes.

In this film, we see them in in primitive form. They lack the polish and grace that would make them so very funny in later films, but they have their own charm, if you feel that speed and destruction are the basics of good film comedy.