The Best Man

For some reason, the ever careless Billy Bevan is THE BEST MAN at Vernon Dent's wedding. This allows Bevan to lose the wedding ring, strip off Dent's clothes, destroy a car, and douse multiple people with water.

It's always nice to find a Sennett short that lives up to the studio's reputation as a no hold barred dispenser of slapstick and actually succeed at being consistently funny. This one manages the task by an accumulation of quite funny gags, which, atypically for cinema, ends up creating slapstick comedy during the wedding ceremony itself. (The off color gag during the ceremony is crude but priceless). A second part features Bevan demolishing a wedding reception, and then having his elderly car fall apart in amusing fashion. The gags, though they end up in the usual Sennett places, are quite inventive.

This one is obscure, because Bevan is a second-level comic, and was a bit player after sound came in. But it's a good reminder that not every great silent comedy came from Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd. There was a lot of hilarity elsewhere.