"The Old Barn" was one of the earliest talking shorts produced by the Mack Sennett studios, and unfortunately it leaves much to be desired. The plot, such as it is, is that some vaguely-identified people sit around in a hotel, then get scared that "Strangler Dan" might be in the area, then somebody shows up who might be Strangler Dan.
This ingenious sequence of events isn't really enhanced by a strong vein of comedy. The actors seem to have no sense of comic timing, and deliver their lines stiffly and hesitantly, as if perhaps they haven't quite finished learning them. This is with the exception of reliable comedians Vernon Dent and Andy Clyde, who has a funny characterization as a sheriff, but doesn't get much to do with it.
Typical Sennett comedies were fast paced and full of wild stunts and sight gags. This one is glacially paced and relies on verbal humor -- badly. The short alternates between the characters sitting around not doing much, and the characters stiffly and inappropriately reciting bad jokes to each other. I don't just mean the jokes are old or punny or silly. They're legitimately bad jokes. For instance, one character is eating soup loudly. Another asks, "Is that compulsory?" and the first replies "No, it's vegetable." They're on that level. It's as if the filmmakers realized they could now use sound to tell jokes and didn't think it mattered HOW they used sound to tell jokes.
The rest of the short seems to rely on characters acting scared for comedy, which I never think works, and a so-called payoff that consists of people revealing that they weren't actually who they said they were (if they said they were anybody) out of the blue and without much humor.
Talkies from 1929 can be forgiven a certain amount of stiffness and uncertainty stemming from the newness of sound in movies, but that doesn't excuse plain bad comedy writing.
