Harold Lloyd: Slapstick and the American Success Story

"Comedy comes from inside. It comes from your face. It comes from your body."
—Harold Lloyd

The cinema of the 1920s is often referred to by historians as the Golden Age of comedy. It was during this time that three extremely talented film comedians were at the height of their popularity and prowess. This trium­virate of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd reflected in their films the changing social conditions of the period. Chaplin's Little Tramp appealed to the large population of newly arrived, and often impoverished, immigrants who were forming the manual work force of an expanding industrial society. Keaton represented the new class of the technocrat and many of his finest films concerned the battle between man and machine. Lloyd, however, did not concern himself with either poverty or machinery. He was the clown prince of America's first generation of aspiring managers.

The 1920s was a time of economic growth and the aggressive expansion of business. The Horatio Alger myth, in which the right combination of hard work and good luck would result in great financial reward, prevailed in pop­ular culture. Lloyd's films embodied this belief and their humor is derived from the increasingly bizarre means by which his character achieved success.

The archetype of Lloyd's films is perhaps Safety Last (1923). Lloyd's character is that of a young man from a small town who has gone to the big city to achieve his fortune in the world of business. His job, however, is that of a clerk in a department store and his only chance for advancement is through a death defying promotional stunt for the store. Lloyd's hero ultimately achieves his dream of success, but he achieves it through guile and
extraordinary good luck rather than hard work.

In spite of their belief in the American success story, Lloyd's heroes rarely succeed through merit. A polite degree of deceit and trickery is pre­sented as a moral necessity for his characters' survival. At the climax of Safety Last, for example, Lloyd's hero is the one who finally climbs the sky­scraper when his plan to secretly change places with a professional building climber backfires. He scales his way to the top, but only because he is tricked into doing the stunt himself.

This idea of deceit as the means to success appears in many of Lloyd's films. The world of boxing presented in The Milky Way (1936) is one of fixed fights and tightly scripted bouts. Further, Lloyd's milkman-turned-pugilist is launched on his career due to a feat he didn't actually perform. The hero of The Milky Way has only one vital move as a boxer, an incredibly fast abil­ity to duck, and it is on the basis of this minor skill that he attempts to win fame.

This contradiction in Lloyd's films was repeatedly expressed by the dual nature of his characters. His screen persona was that of a basically lik­able, average man who contained a striking degree of optimism and innocence about the world. This same man, however, was also capable of conman ship and his repeated display of ingenuity was concerned with avoiding the legitimate ways he was supposed to perform his tasks.

This recurring narrative pattern, in which the hero must deceive in order to win, is a major theme in such fairy tales as Cinderella, which was the original inspiration for Lloyd's The Kid Brother (1927). The family of women in Cinderella is changed to a family of men in The Kid Brother. The bucolic landscape presents a world that is almost as remote to the urban sensibility as the mystical kingdom of the original story. Unlike the fairy tale, how­ever, Lloyd depends upon his wits rather than magical intervention in order to claim his new position within the rural society of the film.

The Kid Brother creates a highly romanticized statement on the American success story and it was one of Lloyd's personal favorites. The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1946) attempted a more satiric, critical look at the assumptions which under lied his screen persona. Not surprisingly, it was one of Lloyd's least favorite films.

Certainly, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock represented an unusual collabora­tion between two very different comic minds. The film was written and directed by Preston Sturges and his more flippant, caustic sense of humor contrasted with Lloyd's image of eternal optimism. Despite their use of deception and guile, Lloyd's heroes viewed society as being essentially good. Sturges did not particularly believe in goodness and his characters knew how to lie, cheat, and steal and then argue that anyone who didn't lacked ambition. Lloyd was like a shy smile and a glass of milk; Sturges was more like a leer with a scotch chaser.

Sturges's viewpoint is best represented by the opening and ending scenes of the montage sequence which begins The Sin of Harold Diddlebock. At the be­ginning, a young Diddlebock sits at the desk of his new job with his hands poised, eager to start working on an account ledger. His eyes are fixed on a calendar portrait of President Warren G. Harding. The year is 1923, the year Lloyd made Safety Last. At the end of the scene, twenty-two years later, an older, extremely frayed Diddlebock sits at the same desk with the same ledger and stares in shock at the calendar portrait of President Harry S. Truman. No longer an aggressive young man, Diddlebock has been stuck in the same posi­tion for his entire career.

Despite his slapstick presentation of the American dream, Lloyd was an idealistic believer. Sturges was not and he seemed to have been interested in Lloyd's persona primarily to discredit it. The tension between these two opposing views in The Sin of Harold Diddlebock created a strange, and not un­interesting, battle concerning the myth of the American success story.