Mr Hammer Is Supper Nice

About 90% of my DVDs are currently cheesed off, sitting on the shelf gathering dust and complaining that they’re not getting the airing they deserve. It’s the 90% that was made after about 1923 and I think they’re planning a revolution against the old folks.

The thing is, I’ve suddenly got no desire to watch anything longer than about half an hour and that doesn’t feature Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd falling over, getting kicked up the arse or failing to impress a lady. And as The Incredible Suit is a public service I’m sharing the joy of silent comedy with you guys, by which I mean I’m going to relentlessly force it down your throat till my blog has fewer readers than Vanilla Ice’s. Although having said that, it is almost certainly already the case.

Incidentally, Vanilla Ice’s blog is every shade of amazing. Here are some highlights from his recent meeting with former rapper and proponent of the Hammerpants, MC Hammer:

“Hammer and I had a nice talk backstage. He was supper nice and cool and I now have new respect for him.” Good to know that Mr Hammer is supper nice, which I think means ‘as nice as a late evening snack of biscuits and Ovaltine’.

“We did talk about doing a WORLD TOUR, and he said he was all in 100%. I think the world need's it. There has been nothing hit on the impact level of what we did 18 years ago.” Damn right, Iceman. I can literally think of NOTHING AT ALL from the last 18 years as important as Ice Ice Baby, U Can’t Touch This and all those hundreds of other epoch-defining records you guys made. The world need’s a WORLD TOUR more than it need’s lesson’s in how apostrophe’s should be use’d.

Almost as hilarious as Vanilla Ice’s blog is A Dog’s Life, one of Charlie Chaplin’s 1918 shorts which I watched again the other day. Chaplin got a bit mawkish in later films but he kept his shorts (films, not trousers) light, zippy and crammed with gags till the seams popped, especially in those he made between 1916 and 1923 when he was under unimaginable pressure to succeed - at this time he was probably the most famous person in the world; kind of like a Vanilla Ice for the 1920s.

You can watch A Dog’s Life on YouTube (in four parts), but if you haven’t got half an hour to spare then a) you work too hard, and b) here’s a 2½ minute master class in comedy timing to take away the acrid taste of all that Metal Molten Hip Hop, as Vanilla describes his parpings.


I’ll be lobbing more silent comedy grenades your way in the future, so get yourself a sturdy chuckle helmet, dig a giggle trench and pile the guffaw sandbags high.

Apologies for stretching that metaphor out to Partridgesque lengths.

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