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Hi my name is Tony
and this is Every Frame a Painting.

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There are some filmmakers
who are so influential

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that no matter where you look,
you see traces of them everywhere.

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I see this filmmaker's framing
in the works of Wes Anderson.

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His acrobatics and stunts
in Jackie Chan.

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And his deadpan posture
in Bill Murray.

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He, of course, is Buster Keaton,
one of the three great silent comedians

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"He was, as we’re now
beginning to realize...

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...the greatest of all the clowns
in the history of the cinema."

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And nearly a hundred years later

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I think he still has plenty
to teach us about visual comedy.

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So today, let’s take a look at
how the master builds a gag.

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Ready?

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Let's go.

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The first thing you need to know
about visual comedy

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is that you have to
tell your story through action.

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Keaton was a visual storyteller
and he never liked it

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when other directors told their story
through the title cards.

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-"The average picture used
240 titles...

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"...that was about the average."

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-"240 was the average?"
-"Yes. And the most I ever used was 56"

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He avoided title cards by focusing on
gesture and pantomime.

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In this shot, you never find out
what these two are talking about.

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Everything you need to know is conveyed
through the table & their body language

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"But what you had to say...

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"You had to communicate
to the audience in only one way..."

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-"Through action"
-"Right. We eliminated subtitles..."

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"...just as fast as we could
if we could possibly tell it in action"

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Keaton believed that each gesture
you did should be unique.

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Never do the same thing twice.

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Every single fall...

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is an opportunity…

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for creativity.

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But once you know the action
we come to the second problem:

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Where do you put the camera?

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Visual gags generally work best
from one particular angle.

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And if you change the angle...

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then you’re changing the gag
and it might not work as well.

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Finding the right angle
is a matter of trial and error.

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So let’s take a look at two possible
camera placements for the same joke.

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Here’s the first one.

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And here’s the second.

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You’ll notice in first angle,
the car takes up most of the frame

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and we don’t get a clear look at Buster
until he turns around.

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But in the second angle,
the car’s placed in the background

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and we always have
a clear view of his face.

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This split second, where he doesn’t know
what’s happening but we do...

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...that’s much better from over here.

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And in the first angle,
the framing splits our attention.

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Our eyes want to look at his face
and the sign at the same time.

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But after reframing the scene...

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Our eyes naturally look at him...

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then the sign

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then back to him.
Much better.

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Now we come to the third question...

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What are the rules of
this particular world?

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Buster’s world is flat
and governed by one law.

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If the camera can’t see it,
then the characters can’t see it either.

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In Buster’s world, the characters are
limited by the sides of the frame

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and by what’s visible to us,
the audience.

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And this allows him to do jokes
that make sense visually

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but not logically.

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A lot of his gags are about
human movement in the flat world.

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He can go to the right...

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to the left...

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up...

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down...

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away from the lens...

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or towards it.

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Look familiar?

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-"She’s been murdered.
And you think I did it."

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-"Hey!"

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Like Wes Anderson,
Buster Keaton found humor in geometry.

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He often placed the camera further back
so you could see the shape of a joke.

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There are circles...

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triangles...

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parallel lines...

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and of course, the shape
of the frame itself: the rectangle.

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I think staging like this is great
because it encourages the audience

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to look around the frame
and see the humor for themselves.

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In this shot, think about
where your eyes are looking.

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Now where’s he?

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Some of these gags
have their roots in vaudeville

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and are designed
to play like magic tricks.

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And like all great magic tricks

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part of the fun is
trying to guess how it was done.

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Keaton had a name for gags like these.
He called them “impossible gags.”

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They're some of his
most inventive and surreal jokes.

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But as a storyteller,
he found them tricky

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because they broke
the rules of his world.

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-"We had to stop doing impossible gags,
what we call cartoon gags."

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-"We lost all of that when
we started making feature pictures."

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-"They had to be believable
or your story wouldn’t hold up."

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So instead, he focused on
what he called the natural gag.

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The joke that emerges organically
from the character and the situation.

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Consider what he does with this door.

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Keaton claimed that for visual comedy...

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you had to keep yourself
open to improvisation.

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-"How much of it was planned and
how much came out in the actual doing?"

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-"How much was improvised, you know?"

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-"Well as a rule, about 50 percent…"

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-"...you have in your mind
before you start the picture..."

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-"...and the rest you develop
as you’re making it."

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Sometimes he would
find a joke he liked so much

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that he would do a callback to it later.

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But other times, jokes that he’d planned
beforehand wouldn’t work on the day.

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So he would just get rid of them...

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-"...because they don’t stand up
and they don’t work well."

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-"And then the accidental ones come."

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He was supposed to make this jump.

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But since he missed...

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He decided to keep the mistake
and build on it.

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-"So you seldom got a scene like that
good the second time."

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-"You generally got em that first one."

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-"Maybe that’s one of the reasons..."

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-"...there was so much laughter
in the house the other night."

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-"I mean, the younger people
and I had this feeling..."

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-"...that what we were seeing
was happening now."

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-"That it had happened only once..."

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-"...It was not something that was
pre-done and done and done."

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And that brings us to the last thing
about Buster Keaton

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and his most famous rule.

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Never fake a gag.

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For Keaton, there was only
one way to convince the audience...

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...that what they were seeing was real.

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He had to actually do it…

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...without cutting.

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He was so strict about this
that he once said...

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“Either we get this in one shot…

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...or we throw out the gag."

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And it’s why he remains vital
nearly 100 years later.

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Not just for his skill
but for his integrity.

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That’s really him.

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And no advancement in technology
can mimic this.

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Even now, we’re amazed
when filmmakers actually do it for real.

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But I think he did it better
95 years ago.

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So no matter how many times...

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you’ve seen someone else
pay homage to him…

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Nothing beats the real thing.