ZaSu Pitts and Slim Summerville — Is it Sad to be Funny? (1933) 🇺🇸
Two of the greatest comedians on the screen have the longest faces in Hollywood! Zasu Pitts might break into a shower of tears any given moment without changing her facial expression in the slightest, and there would not be the slightest incongruity. Slim Summerville, from the dolorous visage which tops his six-feet-something could qualify during his most comical moments as one who had just lost his last friend. Why?
No one can say definitely, but the lanky Universal comedian surprises with an opinion of philosophical proportions. "It's because only a hairline separates a laugh from a tear," advances Slim Summerville. Comic situations, he believes, by a slight twist could be transformed into tragic ones in almost every case. "In fact," says Summerville further, "most comedy situations are based on actual tragedy which becomes funny because it is either exaggerated or burlesqued."
Of course all this doesn't explain why the facial lines are long on the screen and off in the expressions of these two ludicrous players who can merely walk across a scene and be pursued with bounding laughter by the audience.
Buster Keaton rose to comedy prominence through his "dead pan" expression. Chaplin has always been essentially forlorn. Yet if you called either anything but a comedian you, in turn, would be called insane.
Real comedy artists have almost made it an axiom that "it's sad to be funny." Superficial slapstick exponents grow boring, but Chaplin, Keaton, Summerville, Pitts and their dreary-countenanced ilk go on forever, which ought to prove something about the merits of their class.
Zasu Pitts would tend to bear out the contention of the beanpole Summerville, that comedy and tragedy are not widely divorced. The weary-handed actress is completely at home in either' type of role. The world apparently prefers her as a comedienne, although such an exacting director as Erich von Stroheim has remarked that she is one of the most capable tragediennes on the screen.
Neither Summerville nor the inimitable Zasu have any actual cause for their long faces. Both are in demand at top salaries in Hollywood. Neither has had any particular hard struggle to attain success, or any real life tragedies to mold their forlorn expressions. Asked this question on the set of "They Just Had to Get Married" at Universal recently, both were unable to give any reason for their sad eyes. In fact, both were rather surprised to learn that they looked that way all the time. They thought they were rather normal appearing persons off the set. Their humorous natures might have prompted such a statement, however.
Anyway, one of Hollywood's greatest paradoxes remains unexplained.
Come, come, folks, it can't be that tragic! Zasu Pitts and Slim Summerville are two of the most doleful-looking players on the screen, yet the mere sight of them sends an audience into gales of mirth. Here they are at their glummest. Below, with C. Aubrey Smith in They Just Had to Get Married.
Collection: Screenland Magazine, April 1933