Lloyd Hamilton and Bud Duncan made up a comedy team in the teens as 'Ham and Bud.' Ham was the big fat one, looking a little like a seedy Oliver Hardy with a bad walrus mustache, and Bud looking a lot like a seedy adult Micky Rooney. They played a couple of vicious tramps who wandered into random situations involving lots of violence. This was supposed to be funny. It usually wasn't.
So why search out their work? Because in the 1920s, Lloyd Hamilton became one of the great workers in short comedy. His character, a 'poor soul' to whom everything happened, was a brilliant blend of characterization and comedy construction. It all ended in the mid '30s for Hamilton, who drank himself to death, and most of whose great works perished in a film fire. Perhaps fifty of his works survive, great movies like MOVE ALONG and awful crap like the Ham & Buds, full of empty mugging and bone-breaking, unfunny pratfalls.
Even this piece may not survive at all. Or it may survive in a fragment that appears on Disc 5 of A Collection issued in 2006 by Looser Than Loose -- aficionados should get themselves a copy. The producing company is on the Web. Look them up.
But for the rest of you, people who have wandered to this review by who knows what concatenation of coincidences, why should you care? All I can tell you is why I care: because the art of silent comedy, that amazing combination of pantomime and physical comedy, that flourished for perhaps 20 years in the early 20th century, is part of our history. With all the racist hatefulness, the obscure references and the bad puns in the titles, it is who we were -- and therefore part of who we are and will be.
There isn't much of it left. Whatever is left should be saved. Even if it is awful stuff like the early Ham & Bud shorts. Because, somehow, out of that, real art and constant laughter grew.
What's in this one? Not much. But when it's gone, there will be less.
