When Comedy Was King

Culling together footage from features and short comedies of the silent era, this documentary is a showcase for the talents of Charlie Chaplin, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Buster Keaton, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and lesser-known actors. These slapstick clips, mostly from the 1910s and '20s, find humor in the mundane and the bizarre. In one bit, Chaplin gets in a hilarious bar fight, while another finds Arbuckle coping with the fact that his house is suddenly adrift in the ocean.