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1. Harv — this may increase your estimation of the Bust-man:

   In June 1918 I was drafted into Uncle Sam’s World War I Army as a thirty-dollar-a-month private and assigned to the infantry. My salary [at the studio] by that time had been raised to $250 a week, and [studio head] Joe Schenck generously sent my parents twenty-five dollars a week during all of the time I was in the Army.
   …My folks returned to Muskegon where Pop quickly got a job in a munitions plant that was making artillery shells. Ignoring the fact that I was in the infantry Pop wrote in white chalk on every shell he worked on,
   “Give ’em hell, Buster.”

   Our outfit was the Fortieth Division, which was nicknamed the Sunshine Division. I was sent to Came Kearney, near San Diego, where I had one of the briefest spells of boot training in American military history. After a few days in quarantine I was given shots in double doses. We were to be shipped to France, everyone said, as soon as transportation could be provided. They weren’t kidding. I had only ten days of drilling on the Awkward Squad, or just long enough for me to learn to obey the commands of “Salute!” “Halt!” and “Forward March!” This with arms benumbed by those high-powered injections.
   I was then put in with my regular squad. . . .

   I took being a soldier quite seriously, studied the Morse code regularly, also map reading and semaphore signaling. On mastering these subjects I discovered that I was the best-informed private in my outfit. While in the Service, in fact, I never met an enlisted man, including some who had joined up during the Spanish-American War, who had more than glanced occasionally at an Army training manual.
   We were shipped East and quartered at Camp Upton, Long Island. There we were kept up for three days and three nights while being equipped for overseas duty. We also received additional medical shots.

   …

   During my seven months in France as a soldier I slept every night but one on the ground or on the floor of mills, barns, and stables. There is always a draft close to the floor of such farm buildings, and I soon developed a cold which impaired my hearing.
   In that war we saw little but rain and mud….
   … I had become almost stone deaf due to my being exposed to floor drafts each night. Before I was overseas a month my superiors had to shout orders at me. Late one night I had a narrow escape while coming back from a card game. A sentry challenged me, and I didn’t hear his demand for the password or the two warnings he gave me after that. Then he pulled back the breech of his gun, prepared to shoot. My life was saved by my sixth sense which enabled me to hear that gun click — and stopped me dead in my tracks.

   — Buster Keaton, “My Wonderful World of Slapstick,” 1960

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2. He never used a stunt double.. things like that police motorcycle gag were actually performed as seen!! IF ONLY our politicians, “civic leaders”, and reporters felt the need to do their jobs as well !

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3. Heh. Thanx for the high praise.

   When talking about comedy, I sometimes have to explain the concept of cascading gags. The idea is you use one gag as a set up for the next one. Each payoff seems funnier than the last because it builds momentum. Keaton was a master at this; some of the sequences in The General pursue this aggressively. (Trying to load and fire the mortar on a moving train is a good example.)

   I don’t see cascading gags all that much in modern comedy. I guess it’s a matter of taste…

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4. @Apostic:

   Another tremendous cascading gag from the same film:

   The enemy train’s boxcar appears in front of him, then disappears from his view, then reappears when it veers onto and off of a side spur. No one who’s seen that sequence can ever forget the belly laugh as he stares at it and doubts his own sanity.

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5. P.S.:

   I had a film teacher who told us “Chaplin made difficult things seem easy; Keaton made easy things seem difficult.”

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