How Chaplin Used Satire in His Films

Charlie Chaplin and Modern Times

With industrialization came a whole slew of social, economic, and political problems in America. Migration increased as people from other parts of the world came to the land of the free seeking opportunities. Urban squalor increased as those opportunities were loaded with pitfalls and traps. Machines replaced human labor in many ways, and people without skills often went without work. Most movies in Hollywood at the time focused on providing distractions from all these problems: the silent films of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd did not delve into social commentary on the problem of modernity. But one comic actor of the silent era did produce films that could be called critiques of modern times—in fact, he even starred in a film entitled Modern Times that both lamented modernization and drew attention to “class disadvantage.”[footnoteRef:2] That actor was Charlie Chaplin. Charlie Chaplin used a light form of humor in filmmaking to aid in government and industrialization satire. Chaplin poked fun through his films regarding how modernization and automation was not best for the average citizen.[footnoteRef:3] Ultimately, Chaplin’s point of view and concerns over the culture of dehumanizing industries were easily conveyed in a comical but yet truthful manner. [2: Howe Lawrence. “Charlie Chaplin in the age of mechanical reproduction: reflexive ambiguity in

“Modern Times.’” College Literature 40, no. 1, (winter 2013), 45.] [3: Faure, Elie. “The Art of Charlie Chaplin.” New England Review (1990-) 19, no. 2 (spring 1998), 147.]

What set Chaplin apart from others and why did he critique modernity in films like Modern Times? One explanation is that Chaplin recognized the threat to his own career that modernity represented: the first “talkie” film The Jazz Singer came out in 1936 and threatened to revolutionize cinema.[footnoteRef:4] Chaplin produced silent comedies and was a silent film star. If “talkies” took over Hollywood, his celebrity and status would be displaced by others. Thus, one reason Chaplin critiqued modernity was that he took it personally as a threat. [4: Howe Lawrence. “Charlie Chaplin in the age of mechanical reproduction: reflexive ambiguity in

“Modern Times.’” College Literature 40, no. 1, (winter 2013), 45.]

At the same time, Chaplin was an actor, producer, writer and director, and he knew how to give audiences what they wanted. He saw that jazz was very popular with audiences and had widespread appeal during the Great Depression because it did enliven things and bring joy to people’s lives.[footnoteRef:5] People wanted distraction during a time when so many audiences were downtrodden. It was the Great Depression in America when Chaplin was at his greatest, and he produced light-hearted comedies centered on his “tramp” persona—a destitute, penniless clownish character who was often in over his head facing some predicament but who tended to come out on top in the end. Chaplin also understood how audiences in particular were affected by the Great Depression. Many people in America had lost jobs, had lost work, had lost homes, had lost loved ones, and were in despair. He knew that one of the big causes of all this loss was the people leading the nation. The barons of industry had put profits before people and it was now hurting society. As a writer, Chaplin wanted to reflect common people’s own issues in film but in a light manner so that the comedies could still give people some enjoyment and take them out of their pain for a moment.[footnoteRef:6] [5: Berish, Andrew. “Great Depression, the.” Grove Music Online. 25 Jul. 2013] [6: Faure, Elie. “The Art of Charlie Chaplin.” New England Review (1990-) 19, no. 2 (spring 1998), 148.]

Chaplin also saw industry as de-humanizing. He had experienced the fallout of modernization directly in his own life.[footnoteRef:7] His father had abandoned the Chaplin family when Charlie was still young, and this shaped much of his adulthood; Chaplin was always getting into trouble, suffered from depression, and had control issues throughout his career.[footnoteRef:8] At the root of these problems was the lack of a solid and foundational family life. Charlie himself was divorced multiple times, and his own parents were separated. The family unit in his life was unstable, and this was seen as being one of the effects of modernity, in which families were disintegrated and torn apart.[footnoteRef:9] [7: Kuriyama, Constance Brown. “Chaplin’s Impure Comedy: The Art of Survival.” Film Quarterly

45, no 3. (spring 1992), 26.] [8: Kuriyama, Constance Brown. “Chaplin’s Impure Comedy: The Art of Survival.” Film Quarterly

45, no 3. (spring 1992), 26-27.] [9: Kuriyama, Constance Brown. “Chaplin’s Impure Comedy: The Art of Survival.” Film Quarterly

45, no 3. (spring 1992), 27-28.]

Modernity led to the first of the great wars that was World War One, and this war introduced new weapons and it helped to harm an entire generation. It also led to a riotous style of living in the 1920s, which then led to a great collapse at the end of the 1920s. The Great Depression followed, and America was in a bad state. Chaplin could have given up like many Americans did, but he wanted to keep making films that would help entertain people and lift them up while also acknowledging the struggles everyone was going through.[footnoteRef:10] [10: Faure, Elie. “The Art of Charlie Chaplin.” New England Review (1990-) 19, no. 2 (spring 1998), 149.]

Chaplin used physical comedy, often in a way in which his very real tramp character interacted with a very inhuman machine, as in Modern Times. The factory scene in Modern Times literally has Chaplin’s character falling into an automated conveyor belt system with Chaplin’s tramp going through the grinding gears of the monstrously large machine. When Chaplin is pulled back out of the machine, he has his wrenches in his hands and swings them around as though he were out of his mind. He wrenches the nose of a co-worker and then dances around, wrenching the nose of the foreman and another co-worker in the process. The idea is that the machine that has just literally ground him up has also de-humanized him so that he now sees other human beings as inhuman machines that simply need to be wrenched about a bit in order to be fixed.

Admittedly, modernity had arrived with a lot of uses and utility, but this utility was really a double-edged sword. For instance, the audio dramas produced during WW1 provided a new kind of entertainment for people who could now hear staged productions over their radios; but this technology also made it easier for states to spread their own propaganda over the entire population.[footnoteRef:11] One the one hand, modernization had allowed for new machines and technology to create a more comfortable existence for those who could afford the luxuries that industrialization provided: cars, clothes, creature comforts, and more were all made possible thanks to industrialization. But there was another side to this story—a darker side about the destruction of the family, and Chaplin knew this side well. His own home had been affected by separation of parents, and in his own life he failed at one marriage after another.[footnoteRef:12] In his films, he reflected the dehumanization at the heart of modernity, often using an orphan in the picture to show how industrialization served to separate parents from children in what should have been a natural union or bond but wasn’t because modernity was constantly pushing people away from one another in a materialistic environment that always put profits above people. It is why Chaplin’s screen heroines were always so unique and different from other screen heroines: they are real life women with problems, such as Georgia in The Gold Rush, whom Chaplin’s tramp tries to woo away from a life of dance-hall prostitution.[footnoteRef:13] In fact, Chaplin’s own mother may have served as the model for Georgia, since his mother had too been in a gold rush and may have been a prostitute on the frontier.[footnoteRef:14] The plight of these heroines reflected the plight of so many real-life women at the time that had Chaplin not infused his films with comedy and light-heartedness they might have been seen as tragedies.[footnoteRef:15] [11: Crook, Tim. “Vocalizing the Angels of Mons: Audio Dramas as Propaganda in the Great War of

1914 to 1918.” Societies 4, no. 2 (2014), 180-181.] [12: Kuriyama, Constance Brown. “Chaplin’s Impure Comedy: The Art of Survival.” Film Quarterly

45, no 3. (spring 1992), 27-28.] [13: Weissman, Stephen M. “Charlie Chaplin’s Film Heroines.” Film History 8, no. 4 (1996), 439.] [14: Weissman, Stephen M. “Charlie Chaplin’s Film Heroines.” Film History 8, no. 4 (1996), 439.] [15: Weissman, Stephen M. “Charlie Chaplin’s Film Heroines.” Film History 8, no. 4 (1996), 440.]

What was the solution to the problem of modernity? Was it more machines and more inhumanity? Chaplin saw that inhumanity was the main issue in modernity, and this is reflected in Modern Times but also in films like The Gold Rush. Society was putting profits before people and this meant that people were not seeing one another as people but as obstacles in the way of profits. The big businesses were seeing workers as cogs in a machine, and that is why Chaplin showed the characters in Modern Times as nothing but poor cogs working an automated system that devalued human life.

The art of Chaplin was such that he saw how special life was—after all, the ability to make audiences laugh and smile and feel happy was based on this belief that life was special; and Chaplin was able to turn even something as horrifying as the modern machinery of the factory into a funny sequence using physical humor and light-hearted touches. He was in this sense like a great artist in any other era of human history—even those of the Renaissance.[footnoteRef:16] He reflected the world around him and did so with honesty but also with an ability to poke fun at it all and remind audiences of the good things—like humanity—that the modern world was losing touch with. [16: Faure, Elie. “The Art of Charlie Chaplin.” New England Review (1990-) 19, no. 2 (spring 1998), 149.]

Thus, Chaplin was able to give his audiences a good time in the theater while at the same time helping them to deal with the world that they had left behind them outside. By applying humor to the situation of modernity, Chaplin was applying a kind of balm. It did not necessarily solve the social, political and economic problems of modern times, but as a film actor, writer, producer and director he was not really in a position to solve anything. All he could do was reflect the world around him and its struggles in an artistic manner—and as a comedian he could do so with humor and light touches to help give people back some joy in their lives.[footnoteRef:17] [17: Faure, Elie. “The Art of Charlie Chaplin.” New England Review (1990-) 19, no. 2 (spring 1998), 150.]