She Could Be Chaplin! The Comedic Brilliance of Alice Howell by Anthony Slide (review)

Some twenty years ago, I bought a VHS tape that contained a wonderful surprise. The film was Laurel and Hardy's Swiss Miss (1935). The surprise came after that film ended. It was another film: Thelma Todd and Patsy Kelly (billed as the female "Laurel and Hardy") in Hot Money (1935). I knew, of course, that there were two major and a few minor comediennes in the early days of film. Everyone who studied early comedy knew of Mabel Normand, and there was also Mae West, of course, beginning early in the sound era. But for the most part, Normand and West were seen as exceptions, two of the very, very few successful women to star in early Hollywood comedies. And so I began a wonderful and rewarding journey of discovering just how many more funny women helped shape Hollywood comedy in its earliest days. Several other historians, including Anthony Slide, had already undertaken a similar journey.

What has been revealed over the years can be seen as pieces of a complex and beautiful puzzle. The subject of that puzzle is the role of comediennes and the scope and style of female comic performance in early Hollywood. Investigations of individual performers and films make up the pieces. And this puzzle has many, many pieces. Anthony Slide's She Could be Chaplin! fills in one substantial piece of this puzzle.

The picture that is still emerging is far more complex than was thought even a decade ago. Recent historians have added hundreds of names to the canon of female comic performers who worked in the silent and early sound eras. Most of these comics make only minor contributions to our understanding of the scope and role of women in comedy. Yet female performers were instrumental in far more than making audiences laugh. As so-called New Women, and later, flappers, they helped redefine gender roles in the new century. Their physical, sometimes acrobatic, and even slapstick performances, often enacted in the public sphere, expanded the boundaries of what was considered acceptable behavior for women.

In a relatively short film career, which lasted little more than a decade (1914–28), Alice Howell (1886–1961) appeared in approximately 150 film comedies. For a very brief time, she was one of the top comediennes in Hollywood. In She Could Be Chaplin! The Comedic Brilliance of Alice Howell, Anthony Slide makes a bold argument, writing in the book flap that Howell is "arguably the most important slapstick comedienne of the silent era." He begins the book by laying out the terms of this assessment, drawing vaguely defined distinctions between "comediennes," "female comedy players," and actresses "adept at comedy." This loose taxonomy allows him to discount the comic contributions of quite a few performers and thus enables him to posit that Howell is one of only a few true comediennes worthy of discussion. He then provides an historical overview of Howell's life and career.

Howell, according to Slide, developed a unique, recognizable, and consistent style. She wore "grotesque, ill-fitting, and ill-suited" attire befitting a slavey or scrub lady, a character she often portrayed. Her hair was piled "into a mass (and a mess) of golden curls, and usually topped with the most unsuitable of hats" (16). Her face was more mature and wholesome than that of her contemporaries, whose appearance tended to be more gamin-like. Slide refers to her facial features as "Rubinesque [sic]," with "large, round, expressive eyes … often set in a vacant stare" (15–16). Her eyebrows were often overemphasized with makeup, and her lips were painted in the bee-stung style common in the 1910s. Much of her humor came from subtle changes in facial expression, which Slide sees as somehow unique to Howell. He then argues that this aspect of Howell's performance is what sets her above her contemporaries. Yet such expressiveness can easily be seen in performances by a number of other comediennes...