If you’re more than a casual fan of the comedies of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, you might know Bobby Burns as a supporting player in their films. There was a time, however, before Laurel and Hardy’s stardom, when Burns was the star and Hardy supported him. Resurrected from the mists of time and nitrate comes Pokes & Jabbs: 12 Comedy Shorts, a Blu-ray or DVD collection of 12 silent shorts starring two utterly forgotten comics.
Bobby Burns played Pokes as a mustached fellow who wears a formal top hat and tails about three sizes too big for him. He’s continually falling into backflips. Walter Stull plays Jabbs, equally mustachioed, whose distinguishing feature is that he wears a checked suit. Besides these qualities, the short films rescued here from 35mm nitrate prints don’t show much consistency of character, nor any regular relationship between the two figures. They’re often rivals for a young woman’s affection, and that’s pretty much it.
This weak or uneven characterization probably contributes to their largely forgotten status. Frankly, Pokes & Jabbs were no Laurel & Hardy, nor were they like the team of Fatty Arbuckle and young Buster Keaton. They’re certainly not like the Three Stooges, despite the promised poking and jabbing. Nevertheless, as the devisors and directors of their own shorts, Burns and Stull had something to offer, and the films in Pokes & Jabbs: 12 Comedy Shorts boast several laugh-out-loud moments.
At a mere five minutes, the earliest and shortest Pokes & Jabbs piece is among the most conceptually brilliant and hilarious in the whole set. A Visit to Lively Town (1912) exists prior to the Pokes & Jabbs personae. Instead, the fellows play two hayseeds who leave their farm to taste the delights of Atlantic City, and what follows is a masterpiece of simplicity shot on location.
The Atlantic City sequences are undercranked, meaning we see the people and cars zipping across the screen in fast motion. In the middle of this dizzying speed, our two rubes are the only figures moving at normal speed, or even more slowly. The viewer instantly understands and is delighted by how this was done. Pokes & Jabbs moved with extraordinary slowness, matching each other like robotic soldiers as they set their feet up and down flatly, so that they come across with off-kilter normality while everyone else is a blur. This simple trick remains ingenious and original.
A Visit to Lively Town is produced by pioneer Siegmund (or Sigmund) Lubin. Most of the other films are made by Vim. This short-lived company relocated from New Jersey to Jacksonville, Florida, during the time when many companies were moving to Florida for the weather and to remove themselves further from Thomas Edison’s Film Trust. Hollywood eventually proved the most popular location. Vim went bankrupt in 1917, according to Wikipedia, after Oliver Hardy discovered the owners were skimming from the payroll.
A Pair of Birds (1915) teams Burns with Billy Ruge instead of the absent Stull. They play striped jailbirds who escape, steal an enormous man’s suit, and wear it around Palisades Park with two young lovelies who don’t realize two men are in one suit. The action is founded on this hilariously grotesque imagery, especially when one of the men pops his head out of the chest now and then.
This is the type of sublime nonsense prized by the Surrealists. Could this be the film that gave Burns the notion that Pokes should always wear too-large suits? IMDB falsely claims not only that Stull is present in this film, but that Oliver Hardy is the obese man; more reasons not to believe what you read on the internet.
Pressing Business (1915) mostly concerns a chase through a hotel with Burns in only his underthings. Ups & Downs (1915) is the only film in the set to feature Hardy. He plays a parodic villain who tries to get Pokes to throw a bomb at the checker-suited Jabbs. By now, the films are solidly shot in Jacksonville.
Behind the Footlights (1916) finds Jabbs as an escape artist, like Harry Houdini, whose sealed-in-a-barrel act is foiled by stage manager Pokes. The big visual idea here is the use of stop-motion to have the barrel travel through the streets.
A Dollar Down (1916) finds the protagonists as rivals for a woman’s hand. Pokes tries to woo her with a new piano bought for a dollar down and one dollar a week. When he thinks the house is on fire, he puts her down and saves the piano first.
Wait a Minute (1916) takes place in a Wild West where a woman serves as the sheriff, fire chief, and justice of the peace. She deputizes Pokes to replace her while she’s away, and his actions are split among all three duties.
This film is notable for the presence of a black piano player in the saloon. It’s also among many silent comedies to use the sight gag of a black man turning white with fright. I suppose we could try for an essay on the implied fluidity of racial identity, but let’s save it for another day.
Strictly Business (1916) finds Pokes as a janitor who gets fired by Jabbs. He takes revenge by becoming a pesky book salesman who harasses him to the extreme. This short uses clever reverse-motion shots.
Pokes & Jabbs are dogcatchers in Hot Dogs (1916), which is mostly an excuse to show lots of cute dogs. One of the pretty dog owners is future Harold Lloyd co-star Jobyna Ralston. The more monumental change is that Jabbs isn’t wearing checks. This short film suffers notably from missing footage.
The Property Man (1916) has many antics behind the scenes of a vaudeville theatre, including a cross-dressing dwarf as a little girl. As Pokes struggles with various trunks, we see more stop-motion of objects.
Jolly Tars (1917) finds the comics at home in a new company, Jaxon, and they’ve devised the great idea of behaving team-ishly. The boys play sailors who charmingly break into coordinated hornpipe dances about once a minute. They attend a fair with archery gags, dwarfs, and ostriches.
Are we meant to conclude that one of the tars gets eaten by a bear? For the record, Laurel & Hardy played sailors in Two Tars (1928), though the shorts have little in common. We may assume that even though Hardy wasn’t in Jolly Tars, he remembered when Pokes & Jabbs made it.
The most aesthetically kitchen-sinkish and go-for-brokish of these Pokes & Jabbs shorts is Deviled Crabs (1917), a piece of dream-surrealism that throws in 360-degree pans and extreme tilts to express inebriation. That’s before Jabbs shows up as “his Satanic Majesty”, and then we get lots of camera trickery of appearances and vanishings.
The most amazing miracle is that Pokes’ suit fits him. Leaving Florida behind, this Jaxon joint was shot in Rhode Island.
Bonus segments are fragments of odds and ends, plus one hayseed comedy in which Pokes pretends to be a scarecrow. That Wizard production, In Clover (1915), has its nitrate thoroughly mottled.
One curious fact about these shorts is the plethora of women who throw themselves all over the screen with as much energy as the men. Ethel Burton, Edna Reynolds, and Pearl Shepard are frequently featured along with supporting males, Billy Ruge, Billy Bletcher, Harry Naughton, and Frank Hanson.
Burns and Stull appeared as Pokes & Jabbs in nearly 100 films from 1915 to 1917, mainly at Vim but also at Jaxon and Wizard. Of course, the majority of these short films are lost, including most of those with Hardy, and we’ll never see what they had to offer. What isn’t lost forever deserves to be remembered both for its pioneering value and because of those ideas that still provoke surprise and laughter.
While Walter Stull seems to have left the film industry by the start of the 1920s, Bobby Burns played in bit parts through the 1950s. It can’t have been the same knowing that once he was a star and director and was now showing up for the odd breadcrumb, but it’s like that old punchline: “What, and quit show biz?”
Pokes & Jabbs: 12 Comedy Shorts is the debut release of a new silent film label called Split Reel, which is really a book publisher on silent film topics. Publisher and disc producer Rob Stone wrote a 2023 book called Pokes & Jabbs: The Before, During and After of the Vim Films Corporation, and this new disc functions as a kind of companion to illustrate what he’s talking about. I won’t be surprised if the Blu-ray’s circulation among silent film buffs leads to greater interest in reading about the team who pre-dated Mr. Hardy meeting Mr. Laurel.
The mostly 2K scans on this Blu-ray come from variable prints, ranging from watchable to very clear, courtesy of the Library of Congress or the British Film Institute. Andrew Earle Simpson plays new piano scores on all.