Slapstick Comedy Films

Slapstick comedy films were popular in the earliar silent films, as they didn't need sound to be effective, and they were also viewed by non-English speaking audiences in metropolitan areas.

The term slapstick was taken from the wooden sticks that clowns slapped together to promote audience applause.

Slapstick comedy has broad, aggressive, physical, and visual action, including harmless or painless cruelty and violence, horseplay, and often vulgar sight gags (e.g., a custard pie in the face, collapsing houses, a fall in the ocean, a loss of trousers or skirts, runaway crashing cars, people chases, etc).

Slapstick often required immaculate timing and well-train performance skills. Typical  examples of slapstick comedy are the films of Laurel and Hardy, The Three Stooges, the stunts of Harold Lloyd, Abbott and Costello, W. C. Fields, and Mack Sennett's silent era shorts (for example, the Keystone Kops).

Slapstick was reborn in the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s, more recent examples of slapstick are :

* Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)

* Mr. Hulot's Holiday (1953, Fr.)

* A Shot in the Dark (1964)

* Ace Ventura, Pet Detective (1993)

and The Mask (1994).

Cartoons are the essentialy form of slapstick, i.e., the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote, and others.