Ageless Gags

Instinctively, we all know what’s funny. If we’re not laughing, it isn’t funny. The same thing goes if someone else is laughing and we’re not. It still isn’t funny. Funny is as incontrovertibly subjective as a quirk of sexual attraction or the taste for boiled cabbage. It is all in the response: our response. My response. As far as funny goes, the only laughter that really counts is mine.

In The 100 Greatest Silent Comedians, an exhaustive, piercingly observant and mercifully often really funny book about who did and did not make James Roots laugh over the course of a half century in thrall to a period (roughly 1910 to 1925) and style—which the author interchangeably calls both “slapstick” and “silent comedy”—the matter of funny is both implied and embedded in the ranking. “Funny” is the uppermost of the six numerical categories he applies for a possible total score...