THE WAR ON CHAPLIN

Why the Tramp had to be brought low.

- LOUIS MENAND

The Tramp was born in the wardrobe department of Keystone Studios, in Los Angeles. The year was 1914, and Charlie Chaplin was a twenty-four-year-old contract player. Keystone was known for its slapstick comedies, and pantomime was more Chaplin’s comic genre. At first, nobody seemed sure what to do with him. Then one day the head of the studio, Mack Sennett, sensed that a scene they were shooting needed some funny business. Chaplin happened to be standing nearby. Sennett ordered him to put on comedy makeup “anything will do.”

On his way to wardrobe, Chaplin decided that everything should be a contradiction: a coat and hat that were too small, pants and shoes that were too big. Since the character was not supposed to be young, he added the mustache— very small, so it wouldn’t hide his expression. He performed the scene; Sennett loved it; and the Tramp was launched on his brilliant career.

In the earliest Tramp movies, “Mabel’s Strange Predicament” (seventeen minutes long) and “Kid Auto Races at Venice” (about six minutes), the Tramp character is annoying and disruptive. He smokes and he drinks. (Chaplin had sometimes played a drunk on the vaudeville stage.) But the character was popular, and after Chaplin added the Pierrot element, the touch of poetry, the Tramp as we know him came into being.