Eric Stone

International History of Film

Final Paper
The Visual Comedy of Buster Keaton:
An Examination of Sight Gags in Sherlock Jr.
The sight gag is a notably common trope in comedy, on both stage and screen.
From slipping on a banana peel to the most absurd situations, visual humor can be
unquestionably effective at provoking laughter, if the gag is cleverly conceived and
carefully executed. While these types of jokes cannot function so well in verbal forms,
the visual of language of cinema allows whimsical events to unfold without need for any
textual explanation, instead constructing humor with the immediacy of an image. Just
as verbal jokes function in diverse ways, visual gags rely on different filmic devices, all
aimed at producing the intended comedic effect. The comedies of the silent era offer
an abundance of sight gags, especially the films of Buster Keaton. In his early silent film
Sherlock Jr, Keaton employs sight gags that explicitly address the new visual
possibilities offered by the film medium.
In his essay Notes on the Sight Gag, Noel Carroll outlines the various forms of
visual jokes in the cinema, but more importantly, he defines the cinematic mechanism
that is crucial to producing this style of comedy, namely how the humor is generated by
the misperception or misinterpretation of the filmed event. More specifically, as he
describes, The sight gag is a form of visual humor in which amusement is generated by
the play of alternative interpretations projected by the image or image series (Carroll
146). Elaborating the numerous ways this play of interpretation can achieve its comedic

effect, Carroll consistently defines the visual gags in contrast or comparison to their
verbal analogues - for example, referring to mimed metaphor as a visual simile and
a switch gag as a visual pun. Critical to these distinctions is the audiences relation to
the misperception of the event. If the film is showing a character that is oblivious to an
ironic fact of the situation, the audience is amused at the characters misperception.
Rather, if the misinterpretation that the film constructs is in the audiences minds, the
comedic effect is produced in a different way, following a different filmic logic. This
latter type can be expressed more effectively in a single shot, while the former can be
drawn out over long sequences of shots.

In his 1924 film Sherlock Jr., Keaton employs both these forms, while also
offering an astute commentary on an audiences relationship to the film they are
watching. Keaton plays a young "moving picture operator" working in a theatre, who
also dreams of becoming a great detective. One day, while projecting a film, he falls
asleep and dreams himself, his love interest, her family and his rival into the film. With
this, Keaton comments on the immersive capacity of the cinema, physically entering
the screen and becomes the hero of the film, solving the mystery, thereby winning his
sweetheart. The whole dream narrative seems to be a play on the imaginative power of
the cinema, but Keaton makes this point even more salient by masterfully subverting
the expectations and interpretations of his audience.

In one part of the dream sequence, the dapperly dressed Keaton, now dreaming
himself as the titular Sherlock, is checking his attire in front of what appears to be a
large mirror (fig. 1). After adjusting his white tie and top hat and buttoning his gloves,
his assistant hands him his walking stick, and he subsequently leaves the room through
the mirror (fig. 2). To underscore the precise expectation the gag subverts, the
confused assistant follows him through the mirror-door, standing in the opening with
one leg in each room.

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

In this single shot, Keaton conjures the audience's interpretation of the scene,
specifically that he is looking at himself in the mirror. Without cutting to a different
shot, Keaton immediately breaks this assumption, by transforming what was thought
to be a mirror, given his own interaction with it, into a doorway. This gag functions well
in a single shot because the misperception it subverts is the audiences own
interpretation of the image. As Carroll would describe, this gag functions like a verbal

joke, in that it involves a set-up followed by a clear punchline, a comedic short-circuit

that shocks the audience into a different understanding of the situation.

Yet Keaton was also a master of extended or running sight gags, often editing
together long chase sequences, unifying each particular shot or gag under an
overarching misperception of a character involved. This trope, truly pioneered by
Keaton, has become a classic feature in more recent comedies, from Austin Powers to
Mr. Magoo. Sherlock Jr. provides an excellent example of this comedic structure in that
same dream sequence. Racing in an attempt to save the woman he loves, Keatons
Sherlock jumps on the front of a motorcycle as the driver navigates through traffic.
Eventually, the driver gets bumped off the seat of the motorcycle into a large puddle,
but Sherlock remains ignorant of this new development. Occasionally, through the use
of intertitles, Sherlock even speaks with the non-existent driver, ironically telling him to
watch where he is going. The sequence ties together many different gags, comprising
the particular obstacles Sherlock through which navigates while remaining oblivious to
the larger danger. We see Keaton narrowly miss a train, dodge traffic, and even cross a
fallen bridge atop two trucks, but in each case the central comedic mechanism remains
the characters misperception that there is someone driving behind him, responsible for
his safety. This gag can function in this sequential fashion because the running joke
relies only on the ignorance of the character, allowing the audience to revel in the
absurdity of his obliviousness. In Carrolls terms:

The relevant conflict of interpretations emerges from the disjunction of the

character's point of view - which is a function of the situation being laid out in
such a way that the spectator can see why the character fails to see it properly and the way the situation is. (147)
Rather than subverting the audiences understanding of the situation, here the humor is
derived internally, within the context of the films dream sequence, allowing the joke to
continue on ad infinitum.

Contrasting these two scenes from Sherlock Jr., while both employ a certain
play of interpretation that Carroll describes, this comedic mechanism is achieved in
markedly different ways. The first example, Sherlock walking through door that
seemed to be a mirror, plays with the audiences misinterpretation of the setting. This
effect could only be realized in the form of a single shot, for it depends on a careful
staging of the camera in relation to the room. The cameras point of view seems
inconspicuous until the moment Sherlock crosses the room, and the trick on the
audience is revealed. This joke could not be effectively represented in a series of shots,
because the camera angle is paramount to the audiences misperception of the rooms
dimensions. Certainly, this misinterpretation is in part generated by Keatons own
casual glances in that direction, treating the doorway as though it were a mirror, but
the singularity of the shot is its most crucial visual feature in producing the comedic
effect. Because the butt of the joke here is not Sherlock but the audience, this sight

gag functions more like a verbal joke, setting up an audiences expectations only to
immediately subvert them with a punchline, all in one concise statement.

Alternatively, the extended gag in which Keaton rides on the handlebars of a

motorcycle demands a myriad of shots, each playing off the specific instances of his
character narrowly escaping danger. In comedy, this convention is referred to as the
rule of a million, as it implies that these types of jokes become funnier as each instance
becomes more and more absurd. The audience, in this case, is aligned more with the
joke-teller than the subject of the joke. The spectator is fully aware of the situation in
which the character is obliviously situated. This disjunction of interpretations or
perception of incongruity is the audiences main source of amusement, according to
Carroll (146-7). With each instance of the gag, the image of Sherlock remains essentially
the same, no matter where the camera is situated. Allowing the camera to move freely
and cut across different points of view, we are able to see how close Sherlock comes to
hitting a moving train just as well as the specific moment when the driver falls off the
back of his motorcycle. Therefore, this gag depends on the freedom and possibilities
that cinema provides the filmmaker to show different perspectives. Hence, the visual
treatment of each shot in the sequence must be tailored to the specific instance of the
gag, necessarily requiring multiple shots and points of view.

As a film that comments on the cinema and the audiences relation to it,
Sherlock Jr.s many experiments with sight gags proves to be an important feature of

the film. Subverting the audiences expectations just as well as indulging them,
Keatons film serves as a brilliant example of how the strictly visual language of film can
be just as expressive, inventive, and most importantly funny as verbal language.

Works Cited

Carroll, Nol. Theorizing the Moving Image. Cambridge University Press,

1996.