Needing laughs big time today, along with guffaws, chortles, chuckles, giggles and howls, so slapstick scenarios involving funny fat guys falling down sound FANTASTIC! Thankfully, film historians, authors and silent movie experts have posted a bunch of pratfall-packed Ton Of Fun 2-reelers from the late 1920's on YouTube.
These slapstick flicks star the rousing and rotund trio of Kewpie Ross, Frank Alexander and Hilliard Carr, a.k.a. Ton Of Fun, and were produced by former Vitagraph star Joe Rock (from the comedy team of Earl Montgomery and Joe Rock) for Standard Film Corporation/F.B.O.
Do the cheerful yet corpulent stars of the Ton Of Fun comedies remind this always too-enthusiastic slapstick fan of any funmakers from more recent memory? YES - this guy!
While Mr. Farley loathed and detested being typecast as a “fat comic”, he was an inspired slapstick performer who, like fellow comedians Roscoe Arbuckle and John Candy, left us way too soon.
We're thrilled and delighted that the exploits of A Ton Of Fun still survive 100 years after they were first produced. Historian Dave Glass has posted a bunch of the trio's absurdist adventures on his silent movie-filled YouTube channel.
Our only unfulfilled slapstick wish here is that the very funny plus-sized comedienne Babe London, hilarious in the role of Oliver Hardy's fiancée in Our Wife (1931), did not co-star with Carr, Alexander and Morgan in Ton Of Fun adventures.
As remains the case with the "slapstick ballets" by Comique Productions co-starring Roscoe Arbuckle, Buster Keaton and Al St. John, these comedies deliver numerous sight gag-filled belly laughs.
Along with the slapstick series he and Earl Montgomery co-starred in for Brooklyn's Vitagraph Studios, Joe Rock is best known for the twelve Stan Laurel solo comedies he produced in the mid-1920's. He would go on to produce documentaries in the sound era.
These Stan Laurel solo comedies featured talent both behind and in front of the camera who would subsequently be key contributors to the Hal Roach Studio's Laurel & Hardy series.
Hopefully, these vintage comedies shall be enough to tide us over until National Silent Movie Day this fall.
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