The King Of Laughs Rides Again
Overcome by a strange fit of inspiration, I’ve recently finished my latest steampunk yarn, The Great Man’s Iron Horse, which features a decidedly Fieldsian protagonist: Eufimus T. Broadsnatch, engineer, entrepreneur, and inventor extraordinaire. In 1867, in the isolated, remote town of Dewlap Junction in western Kansas, Broadsnatch, determined to thrill and awe the world with his one hundred fifty hands high mechanical steel horse, makes extravagant claims he can reach San Francisco in three days by means of his new continent spanning invention. Broadsnatch’s dreams of rapid transit without rails will all be for naught if Jonah Carriot, manager of the Union Atlantic railroad, has anything to say about it. Will the nation’s most prominent proboscis triumph or will his schemes be brought to ruin by Carriot’s catspaw, the malicious Sniggering Dick Weed and his band of outlaws? The answer can only be found in The Great Man’s Iron Horse.
As you can gather from the previous hyperbole, my admiration for W. C. Fields is extravagant, but I’m not alone. It wasn’t me who gave him the appellation The Great Man. Fields was an enormously gifted physical clown, able by his extraordinarly timing and coordination (he was at one time the most famous juggler in the world) to pull off some simply hysterical stunts: pratfalls, double takes, and flying pies to match any antics of the Three Stooges and Laurel & Hardy. Yet there was a great deal more to Fields than that. He had a keen eye for human foibles, a knack for pointing out pomposity and deflating pretense. Filtered through his decidedly misanthropic viewpoint, the human comedy becomes an extended, continuous round of nasty, selfish, stunted behavior with Fields at the center, often the victim, but also frequently an offender himself. One of the most amusing aspects of his worldview to me is the fact that he usually gets the worst of it himself as the protagonist (overlooking the eventual triumph at the end, of course). Either as a hapless, henpecked husband or a conniving carnival barker, Fields was always beset by rancourous rivals and enemies, frequently his own family members. A loving daughter occasionally shows up (I have one in my story), but the wife is invariably nothing but a shrew with the mother-in-law being even more venomous. I’m thinking of The Bank Dick, which I saw again recently.
Another very interesting feature of Fields is how very hard he worked at the craft of comedy. Like his contemporary, the tragic Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle (a nickname that Arbuckle hated), he made a systematic, methodical study of comedy, breaking down jokes and bits into their smallest component parts. Fields analyzed, refined, and re-wrote material constantly, always striving for that new yuk or the more boffo gag. Like someone once wrote, someone can play a trumpet and hit the high note once, but it takes a professional to do it over and over again. Fields deserves a great deal of credit for his professional dedication. This is a good thing since in his personal life he wasn’t the most admirable man, either by contemporary standards or those of his own day.
For those interested in learning more about Fields, a good place to start is The Man On The Flying Trapeze by Simon Louvish. The author does a fascinating job of research, analysis, and description of the roots of Fields’s humor, even citing obscure joke books printed shortly after the Civil War. The link below is to the Amazon webpage for the book: