Stars of Vaudeville #175: Harry Langdon

Something about this part of the west produced a lot of silent comedians: Buster Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle were both born in Kansas. Harry Langdon came from Council Bluffs, Iowa. Born in 1884, he ran away at age 12  to join Dr. Belcher’s Kickapoo Indian Medicine Show. Over the next few years he worked a variety of medicine shows and circuses, doing acrobatics, singing in blackface, and performing lightning sketches (drawing pictures really fast). In 1899, he entered vaudeville with a chair balancing act. climbing to the top of a mountain of chairs and bottles, and making the whole assemblage sway back and forth precariously.

In 1903 he launched the act for which he was famous over the next twenty years: “Johnny’s New Car”. With his wife and partner Rose Frances Mensolf, Langdon would appear onstage in a stalled car, and attempt to get it going again. The crux of the act was that it was a special gag car, which progressively broke into pieces as the act went on, until it was just a pile of parts on the stage by the end.

As clever a gimmick as this is, the real attraction was Langdon, a funny little man with a baby face and a slow reaction time, forever scratching his head and pursing his lips in underplayed consternation while appalling things happened around him. He began to bring this quality to the screen in 1923 in a series of shorts for Principal Pictures. The following year he was traded to Keystone and that is where he became a star. Working with director Frank Capra, Langdon developed his character further, into a sort of “baby man”, a very strange clownish character that had some of the qualities of a child and some of an adult. (Some assert that his character was the basis of Stan Laurel’s more famous later work; I think there is a strong argument to be made that this at least partially true). In the late twenties, Capra and Langdon began to do features. The first three The Strong Man; Tramp, Tramp, Tramp; and Long Pants) were very successful, but then Langdon, who’d let success go to his head, fired Capra and began to direct on his own. But while he might have been a rival to Chaplin in front of the camera, behind it he was no competition. His career rapidly went into the toilet. He continued to work in talking shorts for Columbia in the later years, but these never caught fire. He died in 1944.

To find out more about these variety artists and the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

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