Classic Silent Comedy: Never Weaken

Harold Lloyd plays a peculiar sort of protagonist in the silent comedy Never Weaken.  He starts out slightly duplicitous — even if it is for a good reason.  His girlfriend works for a doctor, and since business has dropped off, unless a flood of new patients suddenly turns up, the doctor will be forced to let her go.

Fortunately, Lloyd has a plan.  He hits the streets with an acrobatic friend who has agreed to fake a series of spectacular falls.  After each fraudulent accident, Lloyd rushes forward and administers a series of bizarre chiropractic twists and stretches.  When the acrobat springs up and walks away good as new, Lloyd immediately hands out cards with the doctor’s name and address on them to a receptive crowd that has gathered.

Later in the film, Lloyd mistakenly believes his fiancée no longer wishes to marry him, and he decides to take his own life.  Although each effort meets with failure, he continues to try and commit suicide in a series of increasingly complicated attempts.  Not surprisingly, Lloyd eventually finds himself high above the city (as he so often does) in a precarious situation–in this case, it’s the skeleton of a high-rise building under construction.  With his life in imminent danger, all thought of suicide vanishes as he desperately clings to a suspended iron girder.

Now what about this mildly criminal, suicidal, cowardly character makes him a silent comedy hero?  While he doesn’t arouse the sympathy felt for Chaplin’s tramp or demonstrate the amazing athletic abilities of a stone-faced Keaton,  Lloyd still possesses the one quality a silent comedian must have if he’s to become a hero:  he challenges the status quo in some way (even if it’s inadvertently, entirely by mistake) and upsets the apple cart of daily routine.

Silent comedy, with its gag-driven imperative and its sense of economy and rhythm, demands that every situation be mined for every possible variation and laugh before moving on to the next set up.  An unintended by-product of this structure is that ordinary situations are injected with a dizzying variety of possibilities, revealing in the dull routine of life a world that is more playful, dangerous, and surprising than most people have the courage to challenge or even acknowledge.

The joke-driven logic of silent comedy also expresses itself in a kind of spontaneous, rapid-fire karmic justice.  The relentless set up/payoff, set up/payoff rhythm creates a world of instant reward and punishment.  Every action has a reaction.  Bad actions are ultimately punished.  Good actions rewarded.  Joke after joke after joke drives this point home.  Occasionally, there’s even a pause for a kind of comedic grace.

You know Harold Lloyd is the hero in Never Weaken because he’s the one moving forward, meeting each new twist and turn with ingenuity, giving himself over to the spontaneous, but always thinking on his feet–adapting, reacting, always moving forward.  At the end of the film, it actually doesn’t make much sense that Lloyd gets the girl.  He certainly hasn’t done anything in a narrative sense to deserve it.  But by his ingenuity, his inventiveness, and his insistence on never giving up, of hanging in there until the seemingly arbitrary casino logic of the possible finally pays off, Lloyd reveals himself to be a classic silent comedy hero.

And so he gets the girl.

But make no mistake about it.  Never Weaken isn’t about anything but being funny.  It has a single, burning question at its center: how many jokes can be crammed into a single 40 minute film?  Still, like all good silent comedies, Never Weaken can’t help but reveal a world of unlimited possibilities, surprises, and laughter.