Some film makers can do action, others can do comedy but for 40 years the master of combining them has been Jackie Chan. These days there are a lot of comedies that combine funny scenes with fight scenes but even when the movie is good, the action scenes and comedic scenes seem to be from two different directors and two different styles. That’s what makes Jackie so interesting, in his style of action is comedy. His work shows that the same film making principles apply whether you’re trying to be comedic or show action. Jackie Chan is one of the most well renowned action stars of all time, there are not many action stars who can perform at such a high level as he has. However, most people see Jackie Chan as an action star, rather than a physical comedian. There is something interesting in his work in Hong Kong that differs from the ones he made in the west, it’s how much they have in common with the era of silent comedy. “I said look, why don’t we do everything the opposite of Bruce Lee. If he kicks high, I’ll kick low. When he punches something, and it doesn’t hurt, I’ll punch, and it show that it hurts my hand, just like a normal human being.”2 When Jackie started directing films in the late 70’s, he used comedy to differentiate himself from the works of his mentor, Bruce Lee. He took cues from Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, masters of silent comedy that Chan had idolized as a kid. When you watch is films very closely you realize that they are constructed just like silent comedies.
There are some film makers that are so influential that no matter where you look you see traces of them everywhere. You see their influences everywhere from Wes Anderson films, the expressions found it Bill Murray films, and even the acrobatic and stunts in action movies of Jackie Chan. This is of course in Buster Keaton and he is one of the world’s greatest silent comedians. Nearly one hundred years later he still has plenty to teach us about visual comedy. The first thing about visual comedy is that you must tell your story though action. Keaton was a visual story teller, and he never liked it when directors would tell story though the title cards. Keaton believed that each gesture you did should be unique, never do the same thing twice. Every single fall is an opportunity for creativity. Once you know the action, you come to the second problem. Where do you put the camera? Framing a gag to make it easy to understand is something that Keaton and Chan had mastery over. At its most basic level, comedy is surprise, it is the unexpected. “The unexpected is our staple product.” Many silent comedies have many of their jokes constructed the same way. The performer sets up an expectation, builds anticipation, then subverts the expectation with surprise. Take a sequence from Sherlock Jr. The set-up is that Busters rival has challenge him to a game of pool, having booby trapped the 13 ball with an explosive. The anticipation comes as buster makes a series of trick shots pocketing every ball without as so much touching the 13. We think that’s the joke, but then comes the surprise payoff, Buster casually pockets the 13th ball and strolls away; set-up, anticipation, surprise. As a choreographer Jackie derives his scenes the same way, like a scene from the film Rush Hour, where he tries to desperately save priceless Chinese artifacts from being destroyed. The set-up is that he must hold up a giant vase while fighting off two henchmen attacking him from both sides. The anticipation is to see if he can somehow manage to do both, which he does in spectacular fashion. The surprise payoff is that the vase he was trying so hard not to shatter ends up getting shot to bits by another henchmen off screen; set-up, anticipation, surprise. It all happens visually, sight gags don’t require any wordy explanation and can be appreciated for what they are without the need for context, which can also be said about action. Busters world was flat and governed by one law, if the camera can’t see it then characters can’t see it either. In Busters world, characters are limited by the sides of the frame and by what is visible to the audience and it allows him to make jokes that make sense visually but not logically. A lot of his gags are about human movement in the flat world. You can go to the right, to the left, up, down, away from the lens or towards it. Buster Keaton often found humor in geology, he often placed the camera back so you could see the shape of a joke. There are circles, triangles, parallel lines and the shape of the frame itself. Staging the frame like this is great because it allows the audience to look at everything in the frame and see the humor for themselves. Some of his gags have their root in vaudeville and are meant to play like magic tricks, and like all great magic tricks part of the fun is trying to guess how it was done. Keaton had a name for gags like these, he called them impossible gags, they’re some of his most surreal and inventive jokes but as a story teller he found them tricky because they broke the rules of his world. So instead he focused on what he called the natural gag, a joke that emerges organically from the character and the situation. Something Chan uses throughout his movies. Keaton’s most important rule, “never fake a gag” for Keaton it was important to him that the audience believed that what they were seeing was real he had to actually do it without cutting. How does Jackie use Keaton’s themes to direct his action sequences? Firstly, he gives himself a disadvantage. The story, and therefore the comedy isn’t drawn through dialogue but through characterization and situation. The character he plays always starts off as just a regular guy. A student, cleaner, someone on the lowest rung of the totem pole. From this simple framework he can always build simple permutations of a basic story, designed around whatever fight choreography or action set pieces he has devised for that film. No matter the film he always starts off at a disadvantage. He has no shoes, he’s handcuffed, he has a bomb in his mouth, from this point he has to fight his way to the top. Each action creates a logical reaction and by following the logic we get a joke. In movies that goes back to the silent comedians like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, but Jackie has distilled it down to one line of dialogue, “I don’t want trouble.” Since he is the underdog, he has to get creative he uses anything around him which is the most famous aspect of his style. Take something familiar and make it unfamiliar. He’s fought with chairs, dresses, chopsticks, keyboards, Lego’s, refrigerators, and even a ladder. Not only does this make each fight organic and grounded it also gives us jokes that couldn’t happen anywhere else. Jackie favors clarity he doesn’t do dark scenes. If his opponent wears black, he wears white. If his opponent is in white, he wears multiple colors. His framing is so clear that in every shot he is setting up the next bit of action. Busters world was flat and governed by one law, if the camera can’t see it then characters can’t see it either. In Busters world, characters are limited by the sides of the frame and by what is visible to the audience and it allows him to make jokes that make sense visually but not logically. A lot of his gags are about human movement in the flat world. You can go to the right, to the left, up, down, away from the lens or towards it. Buster Keaton often found humor in geology, he often placed the camera back so you could see the shape of a joke. There are circles, triangles, parallel lines and the shape of the frame itself. Staging the frame like this is great because it allows the audience to look at everything in the frame and see the humor for themselves. Framing and composition were incredibly important. Keaton would often place his camera further back away from the composition than usual so that audiences could orient themselves and see the entire set that the gag used, and he rarely cut away, so the audience could see the whole scene play out. Buster’s motto of, “never fake a gag” was spun by Jackie in a different way, “stuntmen don’t get laughs”. Like Buster, Jackie places his camera at a distance so that we can see the entire stunt playout within the frame. He’s one of the most spatially aware directors around and uses every inch of his locations and of the frame itself to perform his stunts. He does this for one reason, to show us the audience that what we are seeing is real. “There’s a rhythm to the way they shots are performed and also the way they’re edited, and Jackie said something interesting that the audience don’t know the rhythm is there until it’s not there.” Jackie’s fight scenes have a distinct musical rhythm, a timing her works out on set with the performers even experienced martial artists have trouble with it. In his earliest films you see him learning the timing from Yu Hoongin and it’s very much reminiscent of Chinese opera. However, by the mid-eighties and working with his own stunt team he had something totally unique. Chan held their shots long enough for the audience to feel impact of what was happening and allowed them to feel the rhythm.
Silent comedians were famous for their remarkable physical stunts. Jackie Chan takes this to a whole other level. Other than Chan, no one else has even come close to performing the stunts the Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd have done. Jackie loves this kind of stunt work so much, that he often pays direct tribute to these comedians in his own films. In the film, Project A, a film he directed in 1983, he pays tribute to all 3 silent comedy masters in a single fight scene inside a clock tower. First, he gets caught up in gears much like Chaplin in Modern Times, then after escaping to the outside of the clock tower he dangles dangerously from the clock’s hands just like the iconic scene from Lloyds Safety Last, then for the final gag the surprise pay-off he falls into 2 verandas straight to the ground in a brilliant tribute to Keaton’s three ages. Three incredible physical stunts in the span of less than three minutes of screen time. All in tribute to his silent comedy heroes.
When you think of the genius of Charlie Chaplin you think of his famous bowl hat and cane, famous gags, and some of the most hilarious and heartwarming films from cinema history. But perhaps his most important contribution to cinema is the invention of combining drama and comedy. In 1921 Charlie Chaplin directed and starred in his first feature length comedy, “The Kid” and started with an intertitle stating, “A picture with a smile – and perhaps, a tear.” It was this sentiment that make “The Kid” one of the most successful comedies of the silent era and made Charlie Chaplin one of the most famous people in the world. It was one of the first films to mix comedy and drama. Chaplin wrote about the film and said, “there had been satire, farce, realism, melodrama and fantasy, but raw slapstick and sentiment, the premise of the kid was something of an innovation.” He was right, to understand how the kid changed cinema, we need to understand about comedy. What Chaplin realized is that making someone laugh is easy but if you want to make a film that is truly enduring you need to give the audience an emotion connection to the character. Film makers use the combination of drama and comedy to explore meaningful themes such as poverty and paternal love while at the same time keeping the film light and engaging. But why do we as the audience find the mix of comedy and drama so effective? It allows us to find humor in our vulnerability. This is another core of Chan’s director styling. Not only is there comedy in the action, but there is always an emotional driving force behind the simple character than Chan plays in his movies. It always shows Chan as human, not some invincible god. He also portrays his characters as the underdog, someone to root for because of they are. He adds these foils to his characters because if they were invincible, it wouldn’t be realistic. It would take away a level of humor that comes with Chan’s films. Jackie understand much like Keaton and Chaplin that in order for comedy to flourish from a character that the character needs to be able to resonate with the audience. While Bruce Lee’s characters always portrayed a stoic hero, who was always sure of himself, Chan’s character portrayals are the opposite. He is that unfortunate character, the last person you would want or expect help from. The combination of comedic and emotional scenes is perhaps more reflective of real life than comedy or drama on its own. One of the most effective ways to create surprise is by taking something familiar and making it unfamiliar, turning the everyday into the extraordinary is one of Jackie’s signatures. Whether he’s fighting with a bowl in Drunken Master, with a ladder or a chair or a shopping cart, he loves to take an item from everyday life and recontextualize it. For action or for comedy. This was something all the silent comedians did, without the ability to verbally explain for a set-up decontextualizing something audiences already knew from their ordinary life was a great shortcut to surprise. Unlike a lot of action stars who try to look invincible, Jackie gets hurt. Half the fun of his work is that not only are the stunts impressive, there’s always room for a joke. Pain humanizes him because no matter how skilled he is, he still gets smacked in the face. In fact, Jackie’s fact may be his most important aspect. Many times, the look he gives is all he needs to sell a joke. Like when he does an entire fight scene holding a chicken. Or dressed as Chun-Li. Lastly Jackie’s style always gives the audience a payoff. By fighting his way from the bottom, he earns the right to a spectacular finish. He doesn’t win because he’s a better fighter, he wins because he doesn’t give up. This relentlessness makes many of his finales really impressive and really funny. By showing us that to show us the audience that what we are seeing is real Jackie shows that much like the characters he plays he is not an indestructible god, he’s just a normal human being albeit one with an unbreakable spirit, and the determination to keep trying until he gets it right. That’s exactly the dynamic that Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd nurtured for their own characters.
One of the greatest silent comedians to inspire Chan was that of Harold Lloyd. Lloyd was made famous by his death-defying stunts that made Lloyd memorable. A man wearing glasses and a straw hat, dangling from a clock atop a tall building this image of Harold Lloyd, the King of Daredevil Comedy, remains the single most famous and enduring scene from any silent film ever made.
Harold Lloyd actually hated heights but realized that movie audiences would be as frightened watching his “thrill films” as he was making them. He also realized that to be truly frightening, the experience had to be real or seem real. There was no trick photography employed in the making of “Safety Last!” neither during shooting nor during post-production. Not mirrors, not animation, not glass shots, not double exposures, and not rear-screen projection of previously photographed backgrounds. They are meant to be scary, and hilarious all at the same time. They push the boundaries of realism and make you question if what you’re viewing is real. All of these aspects have found their way into Chan’s films in some shape or form. Like in his film, Who Am I, where he slides down 21 stories on a glass window on the side of a high-rise building without wires, Or in his other film Winners & Sinners where he is navigating through a highway traffic on a pair of roller skates, and perhaps one of his most dangerous stunts that he has ever attempted his descent down a pole that was covered in lights and breaks his fall in glass shack in the film Police Story. Which resulted in burning all the skin off of his hands and a dislocated pelvis. Chan was inspired by the very physical and demanding stunts that Lloyd put himself through and sought to add that level of realism into his films.
Jackie Chan may not seem like a physical comedian, he may just seem like a simple action star who used to direct when he was younger. This could not be farther from the truth, just as the greats like Buster Keaton had mastery over a film scene and composition, Charlie Chaplin was able to interject a life into his comedy by portraying the underdog, and how Harold Lloyd performed death-defying stunts to entertain the droves of people who watched his films, so too had Jackie Chan. Chan’s mastery of all these elements often gets overlooked due to the fact that no one regards him as a comedian, and he doesn’t carry himself as one. His comedy comes from the use of characterization and situation and understand being able to be relatable. Throughout his entire filmography he has strived to create and refine by reflecting the elements that have purveyed in the silent comedy era. At the end of the day, through all of his characters he had one consistent through line, at the end of the day he is human. Through his characters he portrays and unbreakable spirit and a willingness to do things until he gets it right. That’s exactly the dynamic that Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd nurtured for their own characters. That’s why Jackie has been so successful for five decades.