Modern Times

Charles Chaplin, 1936, (suom. "Nykyaika")

This is my favorite from Chaplin and in my liking the masterpiece of the black-and-white comedy era. Then again, comparing any Chaplin film to any Marx brothers or Buster Keaton film is like comparing any Leone Western to any John Wayne one. Both can be epic, historical, innovative and well-directed, but the latter one lacks something in comparison - exactly like a party can be fun in the sense that there was all kinds of crazy stuff going on that is funny to you 'cos you finally manage to sneak out to a party from an overly protective father that you stand 'cos he sits on top of the family money chest you want to get your hands into someday, or it can be fun in a sense that people were enjoying a moment of liberty from the accepted norms of society in the form of expressing their genuine selves in a warm environment. What I think gave Chaplin's comedies a distinctive character was the bold political stance for the sake of good, a strong leftist message, and to appeal to the poor takes a big amount of humility instead of just technical or linguistic wit. His trademark tramp was a very exceptionally lovable character and therefore had an unusually broad comical repertoire with universal human appeal. The tramp would accidentally drift into his dreams every now and then, dancing around shining like the sun... now, how many comedy characters can genuinely reach that human side (outside Homer who is the main ingredient in the extraordinary popularity of The Simpsons)? Then again, love, or at least showing loving or lovable emotions, is not everyone's treat, but then again, the vast majority of the world, and the consensus of scholars dealing with the topic of healthy emotional and social life, seem to see something important in it.

Chaplin's characters and themes were chosen defending the rights of the oppressed and less fortunate, and, the way I see it, is that his films contained (in Kierkegaardian terms) a lot of humor targeting contemporary social phenomena, as opposed to mere irony or sarcasm. In Kierkegaard's hierarchy of existential levels, a capability of humor is the final stage after a capability of first sarcasm and then irony. To try and express this in an understandable way (that Kierkegaard always isn't to the best extent), humor contains a certain element of dealing with something that one wouldn't want to accept otherwise, and the humorous approach actually is a part of the possibility of accepting it. For example "Modern Times" targets the prevalent negative outcomes of industrialization: poor treatment of workers, crazy new machines replacing human labor, poor people being mistreated while trying to survive in the middle of the industrializing society, demonstrations being dispersed by the police by imprisonment of their leaders et cetera. These phenomena were the negative face of a change in society that was inevitable, and showing all this in the light of humor made it easier for everyone to deal with. Thus his work was a work of genius with an ethical motive underneath, not just the motive of a clown making people laugh in order to put food on his table.