Buster Keaton
Buster Keaton
Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton was an American actor, director, producer, writer, and stunt performer. He was best known for his silent films, in which his trademark was physical comedy with a consistently stoic, deadpan expression, earning him the nickname "The Great Stone Face". Keaton was recognized as the seventh-greatest film director by Entertainment Weekly. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Keaton the 21st greatest male star of Classic Hollywood Cinema. Critic Roger Ebert wrote of Keaton's "extraordinary period from...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionComedian
Date of Birth4 October 1895
CityPiqua, KS
CountryUnited States of America
What really got my goat at MGM were comedians like The Marx Brothers who never wrote their own jokes.
All my life I have been happiest when the folks watching me said to each other, `Look at the poor dope, wilya?
They say pantomime's a lost art. It's never been a lost art and never will be, because it's too natural to do.
I don't act, anyway. The stuff is all injected as we go along. My pictures are made without script or written directions of any kind
The funny thing about our act is that dad gets the worst of it, although I'm the one who apparently receives the bruises . . . the secret is in landing limp and breaking the fall with a foot or a hand. It's a knack. I started so young that landing right is second nature with me. Several times I'd have been killed if I hadn't been able to land like a cat. Imitators of our act don't last long, because they can't stand the treatment.
Charlie Chaplin and I would have a friendly contest: Who could do the feature film with the least subtitles?
I`ve had few dull moments [in my life] and not too many sad and defeated ones. In saying this I am by no means overlooking the rough and rocky years I`ve lived through. But I was not brought up thinking life would be easy. I always expected to work hard for my money and to get nothing I did not earn. And the bad years, it seems to me, were so few that only a dyed-in-the-wool grouch who enjoys feeling sorry for himself would complain.
Like everyone else, I like to be with a happy crowd.
No man can be a genius in slapshoes and a flat hat.
Silence is of the gods; only monkeys chatter.
A comedian does funny things. A good comedian does things funny.
Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.
We didn't stick to any format. We would just get an idea, and once you started on the idea it would lend itself to gags and natural trouble of any kind. There was no format.
You could write the whole plot on a postcard. We do the rest.