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hat did Hollywood’s Golden Age comedians and filmmakers do, exactly? More importantly, why and how were they able to do it? Why has no one been able to do it quite like that since then? And what, if anything, can these funny people teach us about vice and virtue, and the role of psyche and spirit in artistic creation? Is their comedy in any way redemptive, compared to the comedy of today, and does that even matter?

Or are those all loaded questions? Was there really a Golden Age of film comedy? Isn’t now a Golden Age? Aren’t we surrounded by more comedy and comedians now than ever before in human history? Look at the sheer proliferation of standup shows, improv shows, sketch shows, and that most American of comedic staples, the sitcom. Not to mention today’s film industry, which industriously cranks out things it calls comedies every week—things with titles like “Jackass Forever” “Hocus Pocus 2” and “Legally Blonde 3.” After all, humor is so subjective. Who’s to say these cinematic confections will not be regarded as classics 50 or 100 years from now? What’s more, classics that can teach us just as much about the world we live in, the human condition, and yes, vice and virtue, as the comedies of some mythical Golden Age?

Who’s to say? I am.

I’ve spent a lifetime studying comedy in all of its forms, in all of its historic phases. I’ve spent decades writing comedy for all mediums. Like many honest, thinking persons who have made this journey through America’s ways of being funny, I have concluded that there was indeed a Golden Age of screen comedy. In fact, the conclusion is so glaringly obvious as to be inescapable. If we were on Zoom right now, I could gladly prove it to you with a collection of unrivalled film clips, and this essay would become not merely instructive but highly entertaining.

As it is, for the sake of argument we will have to assume the premise of the Golden Age as a given. I will use this time instead to tell you what and when the Golden Age was, who created it, why their work resonates so much more meaningfully with a healthy spiritual worldview, and why, sadly, we will never see their like again. And lest you feel completely cheated, yes, along the way I will touch on vice and virtue.

I wish I could forego a brief history lesson, but frankly this era is now so completely forgotten that it is necessary to recap it a bit in order for you to make sense of the rest of my essay.

Film as a medium was invented in the late 19th century. It became a popular art form in the first decade of the 20th century, and by the second decade it began to discover its own potential for the intersection of popular art with high art. D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation is generally regarded as the turning point (never mind the racism, ugh!). Soon film comes to resemble the other great American inventions in popular art which mix high and low with such gusto: the comic strip, jazz, the Broadway musical, and more recently rock and roll.

Depending on how you define it, the Golden Age of screen comedy began in about 1915 and lasted 30 years, until roughly 1945.

It started with Charlie Chaplin around 1915. It continued with Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon and especially Buster Keaton and Laurel & Hardy in the 1920s. Then came Al Jolson and sound in The Jazz Singer. If you’ve seen Singing in the Rain, you’ve seen a nostalgic comic perspective on the chaos this caused. But there was nothing comic to the artists whose careers vanished overnight. Chaplin was virtually finished. First he made a couple of sound features that were really silent films with music and sound effects (City Lights and Modern Times). Then he simply self-destructed as an artist, silenced by the death of his natural medium, the silent film. Buster Keaton was also destroyed both professionally and personally, descending into alcoholism and madness, both of which I’m happy to say he eventually recovered from. Langdon and Lloyd were totally erased from memory. The only silent comedians who made the transition to sound seamlessly, becoming even more successful than before, were Laurel & Hardy.

The Golden Age of screen comedy in the 1930s centered around three distinctly different forms of genius: the now-talking Laurel & Hardy, the maniacal anarchy of the Marx Brothers, and the misanthropic misadventures of W.C. Fields, in my opinion the greatest comic mastermind on film. Then in the mid-1930s a new kind of screen comedy appeared—screwball comedy—which depended more on the writer and director and where the major roles were usually taken by actors, not comedians. Some say the first screwball comedy was Twentieth Century directed by Howard Hawks in 1934. Some say it was My Man Godfrey directed by Gregory LaCava in 1936. Interestingly, they both starred Carole Lombard, so one thing everyone can agree on is that she was the first screwball actress.

By 1940 every one of the original Golden Age comedians had either stopped producing good work or stopped working altogether. Screwball comedies were now the main venue for humor in Hollywood. Howard Hawks and Gregory LaCava were joined by such brilliant directors as George Cukor, who gave us Holiday and The Philadelphia Story, Frank Capra, who did You Can’t Take It with You and Arsenic and Old Lace, and Ernest Lubitsch, who did Carole Lombard’s final film To Be or Not to Be (NOT the Mel Brooks version!). But the one creator of screwball comedies whose name outshines all others is Preston Sturges, the first filmmaker in Hollywood (after Chaplin) to receive a writer-director credit. Sturges made Sullivan’s Travels, The Lady Eve, and half a dozen other incomparable comedies in just five short years, then for all intents and purposes simply vanished from the face of the earth. Although I consider Sturges the finest comedic screenwriter of all time, I’m afraid that the screwball comedy portion of the Golden Age will get short shrift here. Again, there just isn’t time, and for reasons that will become apparent, it falls outside the main focus of my essay.

The end of the Golden Age was nearly as glorious as the beginning. It was the “Road” pictures starring Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour, starting with The Road To Singapore in 1940 and continuing on with The Road To Zanzibar, The Road To Morocco, and on and on into the 1950s and even a comeback picture in 1962, The Road To Hong Kong, which should be avoided at all costs. The “Road” pictures that matter were made in the 1940s. Hope also starred in a number of great solo comedies, and if all you know of him is his watered-down television specials or his USO shows, you don’t know Bob Hope at all. At his best, he was one of the best.

How strange—and yet, given all this, how understandable—that the same Golden Age comedians who conquered vaudeville and then film were also the pioneers of radio and television comedy. I’m thinking of Jack Benny, Milton Berle, and Burns and Allen, among so many others. Fields did vaudeville, film and radio (the latter most memorably with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy), and he would’ve done television too if he didn’t drink himself to death in 1946. In a way, he did do television anyway in 1933, because the then-new invention was the focus of the film International House, which he steals from all of his co-stars.

So much for the historical outline.

The comedy of the Golden Age is a better embodiment of a healthy spiritual worldview largely because, like Christianity as originally conceived, it is incarnational: that is, it embraces the physical without demeaning or degrading the spiritual. By contrast, the comedy of today either ignores or downplays the physical, or embraces the physical while demeaning both it and the spiritual.

One example: Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp yearns for love and sex, in that order, though the sex is merely implied and we never see him get any. The characters on Two and a Half Men—or almost any other contemporary sitcom or film—yearn for sex, sex, sex, and sex, in that order. They do more than yearn for sex, they get it endlessly, in endless combinations, with anyone who happens to be handy, without reference to the characters or to the character of the characters. But despite their apparent embrace of the physical, the focus is on their talk. And the tone of their talk is demeaning—leering and suggestive without being truly witty or insightful. Instead of a carefully crafted human comedy that is about the whole person, and which can engage our whole person, we get a loosely connected stream of wisecracks aimed at one organ—unfortunately, not the heart or the brain. One wants to say to the writers, in the words of Gandalf to the Balrog, “You shall not pass!”

Incidentally, I must add for those who might infer that I am some sort of prude, no, I am not. I enjoy the profane in humor as much as anyone. I love Lenny Bruce, both the early clean Lenny and the later dirty Lenny. I enjoy the “Hangover” movies, vulgarity and all, mostly because they have a lot of heart as well as a lot of smut. And I yield to no one in my adoration of Derek and Clive (Peter Cook and Dudley Moore), because the profanity and filth emerge largely from the mind of the most intelligent and talented comedian ever born, Cook, and along with the filth there is always genuine wit and insight. Louis C.K. he most definitely is not. Of course in an age of wokeness run amok Pete and Dud are totally beyond the pale, even in their cleaner material, and I will perhaps be hung up by my thumbs for mentioning them.

Even when it is artfully done, the physical humor of the Golden Age frequently encounters an irrational prejudice from contemporary viewers. It has often been said that the two lowest forms of humor are puns and slapstick. Whoever said that didn’t know anything about humor. A brilliant pun is brilliant. The fact that it’s a pun is irrelevant. By the same token, not only is slapstick not a lower order of humor, but properly done it is perhaps the most difficult form of humor to pull off. If you think it’s easy to lie sideways on the floor while doing windmills with your feet and going "Woo woo woo woo woo!" like Curly of the Three Stooges, think again. Or check out Buster Keaton in his masterpiece The General, a silent Civil War comedy that takes place mostly on a hijacked runaway train. There are a few camera tricks, but for the most part Keaton is doing his own stunts, live—amazing, hilarious, unbelievable stunts that no stuntman would dare do today, let alone a leading man. The unions and insurers would never allow it.

Yet slapstick is frequently looked down upon for being so, well, physical. I sense an elitist, Gnostic impulse in such sneering. And in both cases it is an impulse to reject the truth of life on earth. The slapstick of the Golden Age comedians reminds us again and again that we are creatures with bodies. Because we are fallen creatures in a fallen world, much of their humor comes from what happens to our bodies when our fallenness catches up with us. To be fully incarnational in such a world is to be taught over and over that pride and vanity and stupidity goeth before a fall—literally.

Another bugaboo about slapstick that arises from our contemporary plague of political correctness is that it is too violent. No kidding! Yet what the thought police seem to miss is that slapstick violence—at least the Golden Age kind—is cathartic without being deadly. Just as in a Roadrunner cartoon, characters are almost never killed or even seriously injured by slapstick, even when anvils fall on them or when Oliver Hardy runs the teeth of a saw across Stan Laurel’s head. Indeed, in so many of these Golden Age comedies we can feel the sheer joyfulness, the exuberance that accompanies the often-outrageous physical clowning. It is the uniquely worldly spiritual joy of reveling in the body . . . even a body that sometimes walks through plate glass windows for our amusement.

Not to stretch the parallels too far, but in their denial of the finality of death, these comedies contain more than a hint of resurrection as well. There is a reason why Dante called his magnum opus “The Divine Comedy.”

Something needs to be said about another aspect of the slapstick that resonates with the spiritual virtues: its fundamental dignity. I know that seems paradoxical, and I don’t mean it to be, but I’m talking about the way classic slapstick is performed. When two or more Golden Age characters are inflicting outrageous actions upon each other—cutting off each other’s ties, spraying each other with garden hoses, slapping each other with loaded paint brushes—the humor is greatly heightened by the deliberate, measured way in which these insults are usually delivered.

One example: In the Laurel & Hardy two-reeler Towed In A Hole, when Ollie wants to pour cold water inside Stan’s overalls, he fills the bucket, gives Stan the bucket to hold . . . and Stan holds it! Meanwhile, Ollie gets a piece of wood so he can prop the front of Stan’s overalls open while he pours the water in. In classic slapstick style, Stan watches these proceedings with interest, but no alarm. When the tables are turned and Stan is inflicting an outrage on Ollie, the result is the same. It is still a tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye, but a very dignified, unflappable eye for an eye.

Of course all this makes the comedy funnier, but it has another effect, too. It is almost a way of saying, This is how to meet the outrages of life: With dignity, with civility even in our fallenness and our desire for revenge, and with a smile.

The incarnational aspect of Golden Age comedy leads us ineluctably to other questions that must be asked, such as: Why is this comedy so artfully physical? How did it get that way? Why is there almost nothing like it today? And here we get to the heart of our subject.

The answer is simple yet to our age mysterious: vaudeville. Before DVDs or Blu-rays, before streaming, before television, before radio, before film, there was vaudeville. For decades, vaudeville was the main means by which people across the country could see something more entertaining than their own family members (in England it was the music hall, a similar yet different tradition). It was an immense traveling theatrical circuit, with stages in almost every American town, and several key impresarios and many smaller ones in charge of booking the talent.

And what did that talent consist of? Imagine one of the old television variety hours like the Ed Sullivan Show or the Dean Martin Show, only two or three times as long, with no commercials, and anywhere from a dozen to several dozen very diverse acts on the bill: singers and musical groups of every age, gender and nationality; dancers; magicians; jugglers; acrobats; novelty acts; animal acts; serious actors doing everything from brief monologues to entire plays; and yes, comedians.

It’s no accident that every one of the original Golden Age comedians got their start in vaudeville. Their screen personas were all formed in vaudeville. All of them brought their most successful vaudeville sketches and bits of business to the screen, sometimes repeatedly. The famous golf sketch of W.C. Fields is performed in no less than four different films! Such was his love for the vaudeville stage that Fields even incorporated large parts of the vaudeville staple The Drunkard—originally a 19th century morality play—into his film The Old Fashioned Way, which is itself a fascinating look at the vaudevillian’s life on the road.

The Old Fashioned Way is one of the precious few direct documents we have of what vaudeville was like. Another is the biographical picture The Great Ziegfeld, which includes both authentic and recreated vaudeville performances. The connection is that each year impresario Florenz Ziegfeld cherry-picked the best of vaudeville and brought it to Broadway in his perennial Ziegfeld’s Follies.

In a very real sense, however, all the comedies of the Golden Age are simply the antics of vaudeville transferred to the new medium and captured forever on celluloid. The first Golden Age comedian, Charlie Chaplin, was born in Britain but got his start in American vaudeville. Guess who his vaudeville understudy was? Another Englishman, Stan Laurel. As a child, Buster Keaton was part of a family vaudeville troupe whose act concluded by throwing young Buster into the orchestra pit. What physical stunt for a film could possible scare him after that?

But so what? Who cares where these comedians learned their art? What difference could this accident of history possibly make to the quality of their work? It makes all the difference. There are three primary reasons why.

The first key thing about vaudeville, as opposed to starting out as a comedian in today’s standup or improv comedy clubs, is that you had to entertain an entire theater full of people, most of whom probably had not come to see you, or even to see comedy in general. This is a completely different level of challenge from a comedian in a comedy club today, where people come expecting or at least hoping to laugh. To meet the challenge of vaudeville, a comedian had to make his or her work as universal as possible, and that meant using every weapon in his arsenal, including every funny thing he could do with his body.

The vaudeville performers had a built-in advantage in meeting the challenge. Fortunately, the solution was partly contained within the problem. If you think of vaudeville as a kind of showbiz university, everyone on this very diverse bill was in effect getting a free master class in every conceivable type of performing art. This is one of the main reasons the vaudevillians are so well rounded when they get to the silver screen. The singers learned how to juggle and tell jokes. The comedians learned how to dance and sing and mime. Conversely, in today’s comedy clubs, the six or seven comedians on the bill get to see six or seven other comedians who are very much like themselves. They learn nothing. We don’t learn much from those who are exactly like us. Diversity is built into the very structure of reality. It’s foundational. The only entertainment outlet offering anything like this kind of diverse education today is Cirque du Soleil.

A second key aspect of vaudeville was that it took many years to rise to the top, far longer than it does in today’s fast-moving multimedia entertainment world. Both the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields spent decades in vaudeville honing their craft. Fields didn’t utter a word in his first 15 years on-stage! He was a silent comic juggler, the most famous one in the world. He and the other vaudevillians spent decades in front of every kind of audience, in every size of city, in every area of the country, at every hour of the day or night. Decades following every kind of act, including some of the biggest stars of their day. (Incidentally, the one act W.C. Fields admitted he could not follow was the Marx Brothers. As he put it, when they finished with an audience, there were no laughs left in them.) The long climb to the top meant that vaudeville performers didn’t generally achieve fame until they were hitting on all cylinders and doing their best work. This is a far cry from someone like Jim Carrey becoming famous for something like Ace Ventura.

The virtue in question here, of course, is patience. No matter how long it may last, life on earth is a marathon for anyone interested in following a spiritual path, the path every genuine artist is on for sure. Sprinting will not get it done. There is much we can learn in this regard from the plucky vaudeville troopers who became the great Golden Age comedians.

Finally, unlike film or radio or television, vaudeville did not constantly chew up material. In vaudeville you didn’t keep changing your act every week or even every year. Most performers toured with the exact same act for years, or again, even decades. Rather than making performers stagnant or uninventive, this had the counterintuitive effect of making them absolute masters of their craft. It was like Glenn Gould practicing Bach’s Goldberg Variations for his entire life. When he died, you can be sure he knew that piece of music better than anyone on earth. And because of that, mysteriously, he knew music itself better than anyone on earth. The same could be said of Monet and his water lilies, or Oliver Hardy and his pratfalls.

This discipline, this doggedness and determination that marked the great vaudevillians who became the great Golden Age comedians, has tremendous implications for the spiritual life, particularly in the avoidance of vice and the pursuit of virtue. We do not wake and greet the world each morning eager to practice some novel and yet-to-be-revealed collection of virtues. Each day, if we are decent human beings made of anything more solid than tissue paper, we seek to know truth and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Two simple, easily comprehended tasks. And yet they are the hardest things any human being will ever do, and if we perform this bit of material every day for the rest of our lives, we will die still not having learned everything there is to know about it.

The fact that the vaudevillians didn’t change their act every week has another impact on the film comedy they ended up created during the Golden Age. While these films are very much of their time, and frequently contain a number of topical and politically incorrect references, they are not topical in the sense that almost all comedy is today. That’s another whole essay, a very sad one, and you won’t read it today. The point is, the Golden Age comedies tend to be based on universal human needs and concerns and situations, and their humor revolves around universal truths of human nature. And this makes their humor not only universal, but evergreen. Chaucer would have loved it.

And in fact, the Golden Age comedians have much more in common with Chaucer and Shakespeare and Dickens and Austen than they do with the comedy of today. For one thing, unlike our 21st century comedians, who seem to have studied only the collected works of Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt, the Golden Age comedians had actually read the great writers. Neither W.C. Fields nor Groucho Marx finished high school, let alone college, but both of them traveled with trunks full of books and spent most of their free time reading. Fields was a friend and frequent guest of H.L. Mencken, arguably the most learned man of letters of his generation, and a man whose inimitable prose style exerted a major influence on every intelligent person who had anything to do with comedy.

A word should be said about the technical medium of the Golden Age comedies, black-and-white celluloid. There are many people today who find it difficult to watch black-and-white films, because black-and-white means “old,” and “old” is bad, or because the world is in color, and black-and-white isn’t a fitting way to depict reality. Yet I find in black-and-white another Golden Age paradox and another parallel to the healthy spiritual life. Just as silent comedies are universal because they transcend the barriers of language, black-and-white comedies are universal because they eliminate nonessentials and allow us to focus on what matters. What matters in a comedy is character, situation, timing, laughs, the element of surprise—not costumes, color, set design or cinematography. I contend that the people in a black-and-white film are one step closer to being universal archetypes just by virtue of the medium itself.

In a similar way, part of the genius of the great spiritual leaders is not simply that they tell the truth, but that they tell the most essential truth, the black-and-white truth that we so often seem to miss: the reality of our finite, fallen and often misdirected nature, and the necessity of turning away from that and walking into the light (whatever that is for you) to achieve anything worthwhile in life. Everything else is window dressing. It’s a nice sort of validation that nearly all major religions and philosophies share a similar moral code, the same golden rule.

Some might consider the art of film comedy to be a lowly one. I do not. Like Shakespeare—with whom, obviously, I have very little else in common—I feel comedy occupies a role as central as tragedy and history (if indeed those are separate things). Whenever we want to be reminded of the joys of it at its very best, the work of the Golden Age comedians is there. They have joined the immortals and are busy giving a hot foot to the gods.