Well, I'd say that the minute sound came in, it was everybody talking their heads off and going for dialogue laughs. All your writers did the same thing. Once that started, it took years to ever get anybody even to touch that old type of material again

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

No man can be a genius in slapshoes and a flat hat

Life is too serious to do farce comedy

I'm so sorry I fell down

Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot

From the time I was 7 or 8 years old, we were the roughest knockabout act that ever was in the history of the theater, not only in the United States but all over Europe as well. We used to get arrested every other week--that is, the old man would get arrested. The first crack out of the box here in New York state, the Keith office raised my age two years, because the original law said that no child under 5 could even look at the audience, let alone do anything. So they said I was 7. And the law read that a child can't do acrobatics, can't walk a wire, can't juggle--a lot of those things--but there was nothing said in the law that you can't kick him in the face or throw him through a piece of scenery. On that technicality, we were allowed to work, although we'd get called into court every other week, see

Is Hollywood the cruelest city in the world? Well, it can be. New York can be that, too. You can be a Broadway star here one night, and something happens, and out--nobody knows you on the street. They forget you ever lived. It happens in Hollywood, too