You Have to Laugh

A new biography takes on Charlie Chaplin.

- By Adam Gopnik

The job of World’s Most Popular Entertainer is not one that seems to lead to a modest estimation of one’s powers and a limited sense of self-worth. Elvis, a decade into his tenure, announced that he had seen Christ and Antichrist battling in the clouds above Graceland; John Lennon, six years into owning one-fourth of the title, was writing ballads about his imminent crucifixion; and Michael Jackson, keeping up the messianic ambitions, felt compelled to invent not just a new race but a whole new gender, of which he could be the only member.

That Charles Chaplin, who got this strange job first and held it longest, never went much beyond planning to cast himself in a movie about the life of Napoleon is, in a way, a tribute to his underlying sense of reality. (He had the stills made for the Napoleon picture; he looks good in the uniform.) Reading Joyce Milton’s new biography of Chaplin, though, which bears the title of “Tramp” (HarperCollins), you wouldn’t know that there was much of anything peculiar or out of the ordinary about Chaplin’s career. To the familiar biographer’s sin of underestimating the type to which her subject belongs, and attributing the habits of a whole class to the traumas of a warped individual, she adds the more original sin of completely missing what in Chaplin’s career was so peculiar that it’s a miracle he managed to emerge even as a normal mixed-up, egocentric artist.