Stop Kidding

I've enjoyed the half-dozen or so silent comedy shorts I've seen starring Bobby Verson, a cherubic-looking, acrobatic young man who reminds me a bit of Martin Short in character. In this one, Bobby's friend has convinced his uncle that he and his wife have a child when they don't. As the father expects to see his grand-nephew, the friend convinces Bobby Vernon to impersonate the child! So Vernon puts on a Fauntleroy suit (for me, anytime an adult puts on a Fauntleroy suit, it's hilarious--Huntz Hall used this routine as late as the 1950's!) and pretends to be the child. But Uncle brings along the LARGE young lady Lena, who seems to be a late teenager but dressed and acting like an eight-year old (played by former child star Ella McKenzie, who was probably in her late teens herself)at her most obnoxious. The sight of these two grown people dressed and acting like children is positively surreal and great fun. Of course, the plot is complicated when Vernon's girlfriend arrives on the scene, and Vernon gets a kid from the neighborhood to put on the curly wig and Fauntleroy suit and pretend to be HIM pretending to be a child! Vernon is a wonderful physical comedian, and McKenzie is simply outrageous and over-the-top as the 250-pound over-aged child. A wonderful short, and now I'm going to have to dig out some of my other Bobby Vernon shorts. Vernon's career dated back to the teens and lasted until the mid-30s (he wrote some of Harry Langdon's shorts in the early sound era, also). This was the companion short with Grapevine's DVD release of the 1928 canine feature TRACKED.