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Dan Kamin event will unlock the secrets of Chaplin

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Chaplin

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By Andrew McGinn, Staff Writer Updated 3:37 PM Friday, February 19, 2010

SPRINGFIELD — Dan Kamin is standing over a man laid out on a cold metal table.

He raises a voice recorder to his mouth.

“The subject is 5 feet, 6½ inches tall and 120 years old.

Correction.

Would’ve been 120 years old.

He’s wearing a derby and holding a cane.

His feet are turned out.

The subject has big teeth, all the better for ‘a radiant smile that lights up the screen,’ and soft, fleshy hands, whose ‘smallness accents the delicacy of his touch.’

Subject, it should be noted, also sports a neatly trimmed mustache in the shape of a perfect square.

Now, I will begin the dissection with the area around his humerus — and we’ll hopefully find out why, Mr. Chaplin, you were so funny.”

Kamin’s most recent book, “The Comedy of Charlie Chaplin: Artistry in Motion,” is no mere book.

It’s an autopsy.

He slices and dices the Tramp, picks his brain, looks into his heart and performs the most conclusive examination yet into why this guy, who indeed would’ve been 120 had he not expired on Christmas Day 1977, is still so funny.

A physical comedian himself in the vein (no pun intended) of Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Kamin will return to Springfield for a residency that features three public events — must-see events that will cut deep if you’re serious about Chaplin, the silent days of Hollywood or just comedy in general.

At 63, Kamin is the go-to guy for all things Chaplin and slapstick — the man who trained Robert Downey Jr. for his Oscar-nominated starring role in “Chaplin” in 1992.

He then created Johnny Depp’s physical comedy sequences for “Benny and Joon” in 1993. Depp was nominated for a Golden Globe.

But when the Pittsburgh comedian set out to write his 2008 Chaplin book — his second attempt to reveal the inner workings of the legendary screen comic — he did so to answer a burning question.

“How come this stuff made in 1914 or 1915, his stuff, still actually makes you laugh?” Kamin wondered. “It’s not something for a class, where somebody has to explain what was funny.”

It’s not like Shakespeare.

While Shakespeare is beautifully written, you have to admit we don’t use a lot of those words anymore.

A Chaplin film — the earliest of which is almost 100 years old — is still just so funny.

Let’s face it, it’s not every day that you, your 90-year-old grandmother and some kid speaking Mandarin Chinese in Shandong province could share a laugh.

But Chaplin, Kamin writes, “speaks the primal language of movement.”

Simple as that.

“It’s a kind of comedy executed with amazing physical skill,” he said. “With Chaplin, you’re blown away by the way this guy moves.”

It’s the big difference between the silent comedy of Chaplin and Keaton and the comedy of today.

“They all had these physical quirks we wanted to see,” Kamin said. “With Ben Stiller or Will Ferrell, it’s more attitude.”

Of course there’s more to it.

But always the entertainer — regretfully a few generations late to have starred in silent comedies himself — Kamin didn’t want his book to come off like, well, an autopsy.

Nor will his events here, he insists, come off like a lecture.

One event, on Feb. 27 in Turner Studio Theatre, should make comedy fans drool, as Kamin shows film clips and demonstrates how Chaplin did what he did.

And if anybody has unlocked the secrets of physical comedy, it’s Kamin, who even created the Martian movement for Tim Burton’s “Mars Attacks!”

“The old book read like a medical autopsy,” he confessed.

However, it was that first 1984 book, “Charlie Chaplin’s One-Man Show,” that brought Downey calling.

“I was younger,” he explained. “It read like a dissertation. When you’re talking about something as ethereal as movement, it’s difficult not to start sounding like some ponderous, academic tome.”

Ever since seeing “The Gold Rush” at a campus screening at Carnegie Mellon University back in the late ’60s, Kamin has been trying to figure out what makes Chaplin still so funny when so many of his peers no longer aren’t.

True, his body itself plays a big part.

Chaplin, Kamin writes, had an “emotionally expressive trunk.

“If Chaplin beckons us into his filmic world with his eyes and the movements of his head,” Kamin writes, “he uses his trunk to engage us on an emotional level, eliciting trust, sympathy and empathy for his character.”

Well, that, and he was just sorta funny looking — “oddly proportioned” is Kamin’s way of putting it.

In the book, Kamin compares Chaplin to a fellow silent comic, Chester Conklin, who also wore baggy clothes.

“But Conklin’s body is normally proportioned,” he writes, “so the clothes simply look ill-fitting rather than animating any child-adult dichotomy about him.”

Chaplin’s comedy, however, wasn’t just physical.

If it was, then a good impersonator like Billy West would be more than just a cinematic footnote.

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Event schedule

Wednesday, Feb. 24: Dan Kamin will host a free screening of the 1992 biopic “Chaplin” at 7 p.m. at the Heritage Center.

Feb. 26: Kamin will perform his own one-man show, “Comedy in Motion,” at 7:30 p.m. in Turner Studio Theatre. Tickets are $15.

Feb. 27: Kamin leads “Funny Bones: The Comedy of Charlie Chaplin,” with film clips, demonstrations and a screening of “The Pawnshop” (1916) with live accompaniment by Springfield’s own Tim Rowe, at 2 p.m. in Turner Studio. Tickets are $7.

Tickets: Visit springfieldartscouncil .org or call (937) 328-3874

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