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New Review of Film and Television Studies
ISSN: 1740-0309 (Print) 1740-7923 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfts20
BATTERED CHILD
Peter Krämer
To cite this article: Peter Krämer (2007) BATTERED CHILD, New Review of Film and Television
Studies, 5:3, 253-267, DOI: 10.1080/17400300701670600
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17400300701670600
Published online: 23 Nov 2007.
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Peter Kra¨mer
BATTERED CHILD
Buster Keaton’s stage performance and
vaudeville stardom in the early 1900s
Using the meanings of Keaton’s nickname ‘Buster’ and long-standing debates about his
traumatic childhood as a point of departure, this paper focuses on the comedian’s early
years as a child star in American vaudeville. Promoted and widely recognized as the
main attraction of the family act ‘The Three Keatons’, Keaton performed a physically
extremely challenging routine, centring on mock fights with his father. The analysis of a
wide range of reviews and articles in newspapers and the theatrical trade press reveals
that the ludicrously exaggerated violence apparently inflicted on the child by his father
was central to the audience’s enjoyment of the act. Indeed, while elements both in the
performance itself (such as the boy’s happy smile) and in the publicity surrounding it
(such as its emphasis on his extraordinary talent and harmonious family life) allowed
spectators to dismiss the stage violence as unreal, they were also encouraged to identify
with, and participate vicariously in, the father’s convincingly staged, brutal treatment
of the child. The enormous success of this stage scenario of the battered child can partly
be explained with reference to public debates about corporal punishment and child abuse
in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century America.
It is easy to forget that ‘Buster’ was not the real name of the comedian universally
known as Buster Keaton. The inverted commas around this nickname have long
been dropped, the actual Christian names are rarely mentioned and ‘Buster’ has
been accepted as just another name, an evocative and resonant name for sure, but
one without any special significance that might require further investigation.
However, this name is neither natural nor coincidental; instead it was fabricated
and once served a precise professional function. In fact, ‘Buster’ was born Joseph
Frank Keaton on 4 October 1895 in Piqua, Kansas, while his parents, the variety
performers Joe and Myra Keaton, toured the rural Midwest with a medicine
show. In 1901, when the Keatons managed to establish themselves as a successful
act on the major urban vaudeville circuits, the parents featured the boy as the
main attraction of their stage routine under the name ‘Buster’.1
This nickname
New Review of Film and Television Studies
Vol. 5, No. 3, December 2007, pp. 253–267
ISSN 1740-0309 print/ISSN 1740-7923 online
ß 2007 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/17400300701670600
served as an official label, which was attached to the boy in order to announce his
special qualities to prospective employers and audiences in the world of variety
entertainment. In other words, the name ‘Buster’ served as the focus of Keaton’s
early star image, encapsulating his performance and his personality as a child,
much like the vision of his ‘stone face’ did for the mature Keaton from the 1920s
onwards.
A look at the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) reveals some of the meanings of
the word ‘buster’ that employers and audiences would have drawn on in making
sense of the label for the boy.2
Most generally, seen as a derivative of the verb ‘to
bust’, ‘buster’ associates a violent act, something breaking or abruptly coming to
an end. More specifically, in the 1890s, ‘buster’ was used as a term for a horsebreaker,
that is, a man taming wild horses. Together with the other slang
meanings of the word given by the OED (‘a roistering blade, a dashing fellow’),
this usage would suggest that a buster is someone who willingly, even eagerly
throws himself into violent and dangerous action, probably with an admiring
audience in mind. He is without fear of harm to his body and generally skilful
enough to avoid it, although occasionally he may be seriously injured. Moreover,
according to yet another meaning of the word, this person is promised to be
someone ‘great’, who ‘takes one’s breath away’ and ‘provokes excessive
admiration and amusement’. ‘Buster’ is a particularly apt name, then, for a
performer who became famous as one of the greatest acrobatic comedians of all
time.
Thus, when Keaton’s parents advertised their five-year-old son as ‘Buster’ in
1901, they made a promise to the readers of their advertisements: this boy’s
performance would be special, and breathtakingly so; the source of this
specialness would be the boy’s body, more specifically the sharp contrast between
its small size and childish vulnerability on the one hand, and the physically
demanding and potentially very dangerous action he would be engaged in on the
other hand. That the boy’s name was indeed understood as a promise for action,
which was then fulfilled by his performance, is indicated by one reviewer’s
remark about ‘the efforts of ‘‘the Buster’’, who carries out his name to the letter’
by getting into acrobatic fights with his father on stage.3
Carrying out Buster’s name to the letter, there on the stage right in front of
the audience, turned ‘The Three Keatons’—as the family act came to be
known—into one of the greatest attractions of American vaudeville and Buster
into a child star. This raises problems for commentators in more recent times,
sensitized as most of them are to the issue of the abuse and commercial
exploitation of children, and to the complicity of those who buy and enjoy the
fruits of children’s physical labour with those who are in the business of exploiting
children. Indeed, the violent nature of Buster’s performance as a child has given
rise to a debate about Keaton being a victim of child abuse. For example, in 1994,
two scholars proposed in Film Quarterly that Keaton’s films should be seen in the
254 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION ST UDIES
light of the abuse he suffered as a child (Sanders & Lieberfeld 1994). A group of
fans, critics and family members responded with a long letter to the magazine to
refute this interpretive approach and the claims about Keaton’s life it made
(Tobias et al. 1995/96). The scholars saw the films both as a reflection of
traumatic childhood experiences of physical abuse and as a kind of artistic therapy
which allowed Keaton to come to terms with the trauma. The respondents denied
that Keaton had been abused as a child and showed that some of the apparently
‘symptomatic’ features of the films were in fact generic rather than specific to
Keaton. They also resented the fact that Keaton’s art was being reduced to its
alleged psychological causes rather than being appreciated in its own right.
In fact, these issues have been discussed in Keaton criticism and biographical
literature for decades. Keaton’s first biographer Rudi Blesh based his book
(published in 1966 just after Keaton’s death) on the premise that a set of fateful
childhood experiences—notably an improbable series of dangerous accidents—in
combination with Keaton’s early stage training and his youthful interest in
engineering can explain the ups and downs of his film career and his private life
(Blesh 1966). Keaton’s childhood taught him about the disastrous interventions of
fate and the stoic outlook needed to cope with these interventions. So as an adult
he used his performance and engineering skills to stage disasters for the screen,
and he faced both these screen disasters and the disastrous developments in his
private life with a stonefaced demeanour. Keaton’s second biographer Tom Dardis
argued in 1979 that Keaton’s stoicism had a pathological element, and was in fact
the result of the abusive treatment the boy had received from his father both on
and off the stage (Dardis 1979). According to Dardis, this resulted in Keaton’s
tragic inability to take charge of his own life throughout his career and most of his
personal relationships, leading to the loss of his independence as a filmmaker and
of his creativity in the late 1920s, to divorces and alcoholism. For Dardis, as well
as for Keaton’s most recent biographer Marion Meade, Keaton’s art was
effectively destroyed by childhood trauma (Meade 1995). Yet, for psychoanalyst
Alice Miller (whose brief essay on Keaton was translated into English in 1990), as
for Blesh and the Film Quarterly writers, Keaton’s creativity was based precisely on
the necessity to come to terms with this trauma.
Thus, for 40 years, biographical writers have agreed on the presence and
crucial importance of traumatic experiences in Keaton’s childhood. They have
disagreed on the nature of the trauma (fateful accidents or physical abuse) and the
effect it had on Keaton’s career (as the very wellspring of his creativity or as the
cause of his inability to sustain his work). Despite such disagreements, these
writers have found it illuminating to look at Keaton’s films through the lens of his
childhood. What neither these writers nor other critics have fully acknowledged is
that the trauma, whose nature and effect are at the centre of this debate, was in
fact carefully staged for an appreciative audience in the early 1900s. Both the
violent stage performance and the stories about the many dangerous accidents that
BATTERED CHIL D 255
the young child only narrowly escaped were designed by his father, Joe Keaton,
for the entertainment of vaudeville audiences.
In this paper, then, rather than engaging in the debate about the nature and
long-term consequences of Keaton’s childhood experiences, I examine the ways in
which the stage scenario of the battered child was presented to vaudeville
audiences from 1901 to 1909 (that is, during the time when Keaton was between
the ages of 5 and 14),4
and the immediate and overwhelming impact it made on
them. I concentrate on the laughter with which audiences responded to the act,
understanding this laughter as a response to the act’s denigration of deeply held
values (such as the well-being of children). Through laughter audiences became
complicit in this denigration, indulging anti-social impulses carefully held in check
in everyday life. Yet their laughter also rejected such denigration as improper and
unreal, thus reasserting the values being denigrated (Stern 1980).
My main sources are a large number of newspaper and trade paper reviews of
the act. Reviewers reported both the audience’s reactions to the performance and
their own experiences of it. I assume that their statements, their conscious
observations as well as the perhaps less conscious revelations made through the
language they use, do indeed give us an approximation of the general experience
of most members of the audience. This reception study will then be
contextualized by an account of some of the historically and socially specific
beliefs and values of turn-of-the-century Americans concerning the treatment of
children as they have been reconstructed by social and cultural historians.
Buster
Reviewers of the Keaton act often registered their own overwhelming impression
that the boy was subjected to extremely dangerous and actually harmful routines
on stage. The harm which was apparently threatened to be inflicted on Buster
during the performance ranged from slight injuries to broken bones, maiming and
death. ‘One would think, to see the way he is thrown about, that it would hurt
the youngster’, remarked one critic.5
Another found that ‘it is a wonder he has a
whole bone left in his body’.6
It was also noted that ‘[t]he boy survives some falls
that would maim an ordinary person’.7
The most extreme statements directly
evoked the child’s death: ‘the marvel was how ‘‘Buster’’ ever managed to survive
the daily slamming’.8
Obviously, the shocking perception of threats to limb and
life was a crucial aspect of the audience’s reaction to ‘The Three Keatons’.
Reviewers observed a wide range of often contradictory emotional responses
to these threats among members of the audience. The most fundamental response
was a combination of fear and concern:
Perhaps the rough-handling he [Buster] experienced did him no harm, but the
spectators were kept on edge all the time the youngster was on stage …
256 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION ST UDIES
[They were] in constant fear that he [Joe Keaton] will break something with
the young man.9
At the same time, the very excessiveness of the father’s actions against his son
defied notions of proper behaviour as well as contradicting everyday expectations,
and thus formed the basis for a humorous response. The stage act ‘kept the
audience alternately shivering and laughing’.10
Part of the enjoyment of the act
derived from the tension between knowing that it was not actually harmful and
experiencing it as real violence. This tension could be resolved by laughing.
Through their laughter, audiences judged Joe Keaton’s attacks on his son as both
inappropriate and unreal.
Interestingly, reviewers often singled out people in the audience who were
taken in by the stage violence: ‘It’s a wonder to the uninitiated how the youngster
keeps from getting killed.’11
In particular, ‘[t]he women and children are apt to
think that the rough usage hurts the boy, and it does look that way’.12
Rather than
as an accurate description of those audience segments, I take these comments as an
expression of the reviewers’ own discomfort, and of their sense of superiority, of
belonging to the initiated. Joe Keaton played on the idea of the ‘duped’ spectator.
On one occasion, he rendered the story of having heard a woman ‘saying we were
the greatest exhibition of brutality she ever saw, and that she would like to
complain, etc.’13
Joe Keaton set this woman up as an ignorant fool who the more
experienced vaudeville audiences were meant to laugh at. Fools like this one
represented the initial state of shock experienced by audiences of the Keaton act.
Since spectators were meant to be able to transcend this shock through
understanding and laughter, to be incapable of this transcendence was seen to be
laughable in itself.
What kinds of knowledge could audiences use to rationalize the stage
violence? Most descriptions of the act’s violence were followed by assertions such
as this one: ‘the boy is a trained acrobat and knows just when and how to take a
fall’.14
Reviewers could draw on the publicity image Joe Keaton had constructed
for his son in numerous interviews: Buster, the indestructible child, the born
acrobat, the child raised on the stage. Typically, reviewers remarked that although
the stage violence ‘seems cruel’, a closer look immediately revealed that ‘the little
fellow is really a very clever acrobat and never gets injured’.15
Audiences were
relieved from their concern for the boy by the knowledge that Buster was ‘tough
as a hickory nut, a born comedian, and agile as a cat’, and ‘such an expert little
gymnast that no matter how his father throws him he lands in a safe position’.16
Furthermore, Joe Keaton promoted, and journalists willingly accepted, an
image of the Keatons as a happy and harmonious family, the parents taking good
care of their famous son and making absolutely sure no harm was being done to
him. One reviewer noted that calling the Keatons a ‘rough house family’ was not
meant
BATTERED CHIL D 257
to insinuate in the least that what they do on the stage is enacted when they
are in their home, for I know that of all the happy families it has been my
pleasure to know, Pa and Ma Keaton and their three children are in the first
class.17
Despite all the apparent violence on stage, Joe Keaton was in fact ‘a doting
parent’.18
Such statements often originated in interviews with Joe Keaton.
Occasionally, Buster would speak for himself, probably having been coached for
the interview by his father. One such interview resulted in an article entitled
‘Buster Laughs At His Bumps, Says His Tumbles Never Hurt Him, But He
Doesn’t Like Haircuts’.19
Furthermore, it was reported that Buster had originally
been integrated into the act as a toddler precisely because the parents wanted to
take care of him even during their performance and, of course, because he liked it
on stage.
Spectators did not have to rely exclusively on interview statements to validate
the boy’s enjoyment of his acrobatic comedy. During the performance itself the
most violent routines were followed by a sure sign of Buster’s pleasure: ‘The kid
seems to like it. His smile is happy.’20
The fact that ‘he comes up smiling every
time and invites other flings’ was seen as a proof that the routine ‘does not hurt
him a bit’.21
Few reviewers failed to point out that the kid was having fun.
Occasionally, their pronouncements had a defensive tone, as if the audience’s
enjoyment of the apparent violence inflicted on Buster needed to be justified: ‘the
boy … gets as much fun out of it as the audience’.22
‘[H]e enjoys all that happens
just as much as you do.’23
Reviews sometimes noted that the boy’s expressions of
joy were a mere device serving to reassure the audience: ‘Master Keaton has a
laugh all his own that he crackles at intervals just to show he’s still alive’.24
Yet,
reviewers did not object to being manipulated in this way, because the boy’s smile
and laughter registered both as spontaneous expressions of a child at play and as
clever devices employed by a professional performer.
Sometimes the Keatons changed their strategy and tried to enhance the comic
effect of the stage violence by having the child fail to respond to it at all. A solemn
expression was just as inappropriate a reaction to violence as a smile, and
therefore equally funny: when thrown around by his father, Buster landed ‘in all
sorts of ridiculous positions, and does it all with a solemnity that is convulsing’.25
Here, we can see the beginnings of the performance style that would much later
become so characteristic for Keaton. However, in these early years the deadpan
remained an exception, and it was received with considerable criticism: ‘The
youngster should be encouraged to smile. As things are his intense gravity is too
long maintained.’26
On the whole, audiences seem to have depended on the
reassurance provided by the boy’s smile.
In any case, both the smile and the solemn expression were recognized as
professional devices. In general, reviewers tended to emphasize the artificial and
258 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION ST UDIES
artistic nature of everything that was going on during the performance. Although
stage routines might draw on natural talents and playful instincts, they were
carefully rehearsed and coordinated with respect both to their physical execution
and to the emotional states projected by the performers. This applied as much to
the boy’s smile as to the father’s apparent anger. Even reviewers critical of the
Keatons’ lowbrow comedy acknowledged the artifice involved in staging its
violence and did therefore not object to the violence as such. Father and son did
not actually beat each other; instead they were just pretending by ‘representing
themselves as a proud but very abusive father and a solemn child’.27
This critic
also noted that Buster was equipped ‘with a suitcase handle between his shoulders
so that he can be flung about the deck without tearing his clothes’. Another writer
insisted:
It must be remembered that every move made upon the stage … is timed and
arranged for to just as much nicety as prevails in Goldin’s illusions. That’s a
part of the business … every stroke is prearranged.28
So far, I have analysed the types of knowledge audiences could draw upon in
order to see through the shocking violence of the Keaton act, to rationalize it and
detach themselves from it so that they were able to laugh about it. Audiences
were assured of the harmlessness of the stage violence by their familiarity with
Buster’s publicity image as an indestructible child and highly trained acrobat, by
reports of the Keatons’ happy family life, by the obvious signs of the child’s
enjoyment of his routine, and by their general awareness of the artifice of
vaudeville performances. However, there also is a darker side to the audience’s
emotional trajectory from initial shock to its subsequent resolution in laughter.
The battered child
There are many indications that spectators of the Keatons’ stage act were
complicit with Joe Keaton’s violent attacks on his son. This is indicated, first of
all, by the reviewers’ excessive use of dehumanizing terms for Buster: ‘human
mop’, ‘human broom’, ‘human rubber ball’, ‘boy made of India rubber’,
‘boneless India rubber personification’, ‘human ten pin ball’, ‘human football’,
‘human missile’.29
These epithets emphasized the extraordinary qualities of the
boy’s body which allowed him to endure and even enjoy the physically demanding
stage routines. Yet, they also objectified the child, reducing him to a thing which
could be battered and torn and thrown around in every possible fashion. At the
same time, these terms acknowledged that this ‘thing’ remained recognizably
human, and underneath the appreciation of physical comedy we can therefore
detect the audience’s pleasure in vicariously battering a child.
BATTERED CHIL D 259
This pleasure can occasionally be glimpsed in the wording of descriptions of the
act. One reviewer wrote, for example, that Joe Keaton was ‘made up as a grotesque
Irishman who takes infinite delight in tossing about his small son’.30
Furthermore,
reviewers emphasized that the scenario of the Keaton act was recognizable as a
mirror image—albeit a distorted one—of highly familiar domestic situations. To
begin with, the very name of the Keaton act and the accompanying publicity made
sure that audiences were aware of the fact that Joe and Buster Keaton were indeed
father and son, their real life roles merely being exaggerated in their stage
performance. The scenario they played out on stage was basically that of a father
trying to do his job (of entertaining the audience with a speech or song), and a son,
who was explicitly told to stand by quietly, yet instead fooled around and eventually
disturbed the father’s performance in a violent fashion. The son’s action was clearly
meant to be perceived as transgressive; the boy ‘must behave’, as the father
repeatedly stated, but the boy did not. Consequently, for disobeying his father and
for hurting him in the process, the boy was severely punished.
Reviewers frequently characterized the act and its performers in familial
terms. Buster was said, for example, to be ‘in enough mischief for two families of
Keatons’.31
He was ‘at the obstreperous age, and the reproofs his father is
required constantly to administer are a fund of humor’.32
Joe Keaton was merely
carrying out his task as a father, ‘sorrowfully reprimanding his son for his
pranks’.33
Occasionally, the stage behaviour of the Keatons was compared directly
to the everyday experiences of their audiences:
Few boys are handled as Pa handles Buster, and no boy ever seemed to enjoy
a general trouncing as Buster gets his.34
[Buster] stands more hard knocks from a kissing pater in the course of the
afternoon than most hopefuls of the masculine gender get in a whole school
vacation.35
The spectators were expected to recognize themselves in the general situation of a
conflict between father and son:
Buster is full of sarcastic sayings and the way he ‘joshes’ Keaton would make
people feel like spanking him if his remarks were not so funny.36
Thus, Joe Keaton’s violent treatment of his son was carefully motivated, both in
terms of a basic narrative sequence of events (prohibition, transgression,
punishment), and with reference to a situation familiar from everyday life. This
invited spectators to identify with the violence that was portrayed and to
participate vicariously in the father’s ‘infinite delight’.
Joe’s actions would sometimes appear as rational attempts by a father to teach
his son a lesson, before or after which he affirmed his affection with a kiss. At
260 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION ST UDIES
other times, however, the stage father appeared to be ‘irate’, his violence not
being in any way measured but apparently aiming at permanent damage to his
son’s body: ‘His father did his best to put the boy on the hospital list.’37
Thus, the
stage act evoked both the rational administration of corporal punishment and the
uncontrolled excesses of child abuse.
Of course, this was all perceived in the spirit of comedy and acknowledged as
professional acrobatics. In fact, the audience’s acceptance of, and complicity with,
the violence depended precisely on its comic exaggerations and surprise reversals
(the father’s tenderness being followed by an attack, the attack by the son’s
smile). Assured of the make-believe nature of stage events, spectators could safely
engage in the scenario of familial violence portrayed on stage. Through laughter
the audience negated both the father’s transgressive behaviour and their own
transgressive complicity with it, thus reasserting the values of harmonious family
life, of non-violent parenting, of a generally tender and caring attitude towards
children which had been temporarily denied by the initial transgression.
Child abuse
What made this particular form of comedy possible, and why was it such a big
success? It is difficult to imagine a similar performance taking place, let alone
being popular, in more recent decades. The values, whose temporary denigration
this comedy relied on, have become too deeply ingrained to be challenged
playfully in a physically explicit fashion. Beating a child has become too
transgressive an act to be enjoyed, even if it is only vicariously. Physically
executed in front of an audience, it would be merely offensive, an attack on values
which are beyond questioning.
When, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Keaton family act
highlighted the father’s violence against his son, the situation was less clear-cut.
The success of their stage act relied heavily on a widespread concern for the
violent treatment of children, and on the fact that the values at stake in this form
of treatment were still contentious. Ethical and emotional standards prohibiting
violence against children were a relatively recent and localized phenomenon and
hence could be explored and negotiated through comedy. The success of the
Keaton act derived precisely from the way it mobilized and resolved many of the
emotional and social tensions surrounding the issue of child beating.
Social and cultural historians have shown that, beginning in the 1830s,
middle-class writers used the new medium of a burgeoning literature of family
advice and popular fiction to launch a campaign against the feeling of anger and all
its expressions, especially the beating of wives and children.38
The control of
angry feelings was a cornerstone of a new conception of the family as a safe retreat
from the turmoil of a rapidly changing urban industrial world. In contrast to the
BATTERED CHIL D 261
public sphere of work and commerce with its aggressive competition and
anonymity, relations within the family were to be characterized by mutual
understanding, love and trust. In this context, the traditional view of children as
innately depraved and redeemable only through the violent breaking of their will,
gave way to the sentimental image of the child as a vulnerable and infinitely
malleable innocent. Parents were supposed to build up the child’s character
gradually through appeals to conscience and reason, through encouragement,
persuasion and good examples. Physical punishment had to be used only as a last
resort, and it would have to be administered calmly and rationally, parents
carefully explaining the reasons for this punishment and the lesson it was supposed
to teach, while also emphasizing the pain this very act of punishment and the
child’s initial transgression had caused them. In general, the authority of parents
was to derive from their emotional bond with their children, not from their
superior physical strength. By accepting and internalizing this authority, children
would effectively control themselves, being punished for any wrong-doing by selfgenerated
feelings of guilt rather than by their parents’ infliction of physical pain.
In practice, this educational ideal encountered many problems. Within the
middle-class family, the high standard of emotional self-control expected of
parents in their interaction with children (and each other) could not always be
upheld. In this context, popular entertainment—ranging from contact sports to
vaudeville comedy—served as an important outlet for the harmless release of
familial anger. The Keaton act, in particular, allowed adults the vicarious
enjoyment of the otherwise strictly prohibited violent expression of parental
anger.
However, the stage routine also addressed issues of a more public nature. The
middle class had an ambiguous attitude towards corporal punishment outside its
own homes.39
Throughout the nineteenth century campaigns against the violent
treatment of prisoners, sailors and school children attempted to transfer the moral
and emotional standards of the middle-class home to the public sphere.
Furthermore, there was great concern in the late nineteenth century about the
allegedly widespread violent abuse by immigrant men of their wives and children.
At the same time, the difficulty of maintaining public order, perceived to be
threatened precisely by immigrant violence, was cited by school superintendents
and legislators to justify, among other things, the beating of unruly school children
and the public whipping of wife-beaters. Thus, corporal punishment had
considerable middle-class support when directed at the lower orders.
The family life of immigrants was closely scrutinized and turned into a public
issue.40
After the foundation of the New York Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children in 1874, similar societies rapidly spread across the country so
that by the early 1900s several hundred organizations were reported to be
working in this area. They were almost exclusively concerned with immigrants,
their agents investigating the life of tens of thousands of families. After an initial
262 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION ST UDIES
period in which the activities and publicity of child protection societies focused on
cases of extreme physical abuse of children, on the punishment of violent fathers
and the removal of victims from abusive families, their agenda was broadened to
include a wide range of issues such as child neglect, child labour, juvenile
delinquency, mothers’ pensions, illegitimacy, alcoholism and poverty. By the
early 1900s child abuse in itself was no longer a widely debated issue. Instead of
exposing in gruesome details the brutality of parents and the injuries of children,
child protection societies reported that they had considerably reduced the most
violent forms of abuse and were now dealing with general family welfare.
Thus, when, from 1901 onwards, Joe and Buster Keaton, dressed up as
Irishmen, put their particular version of family violence before the public, they
encountered audiences that must have grown very familiar in previous years with
accounts of immigrant fathers’ abuse of their children. Yet, audiences had also been
assured that this real life cruelty to children had been brought under control, which
allowed them to perceive the Keaton act as a harmless form of comic entertainment
rather than being horrified and offended by its off-stage implications. The audiences
attending the high end vaudeville theatres (the so-called ‘big time’), in which the
Keatons mostly appeared, were comprised of both the middle class and an upwardly
mobile, largely immigrant working class.41
While middle-class audiences could
vicariously enjoy the otherwise forbidden pleasures of parental anger and then laugh
off their imaginary transgression, the laughter of upwardly mobile working-class and
immigrant audiences expressed their distance from practices that the lower orders
were associated with, and thus their own aspirations to middle-class status. In this
way, the disreputable violence of the Keaton stage act very successfully appealed to
the respectable audiences of vaudeville.
Conclusion
The above analysis of the Keaton stage act does not answer the questions of whether
Buster was abused as a child or whether his childhood experiences had a lasting
influence on his later work and life, and it is not meant to do so. Instead it suggests
that Keaton scholarship has a lot to gain from a reversal of its usual perspective, in
which the comedian’s early years are only of relevance in so far as they shed light on
his later development, and Keaton’s performance and personality are discussed in
terms of unchanging essences (most notably through the patently false assertion that
already as a child he stopped smiling). The close examination of the surprisingly rich
array of extant primary sources relating to Keaton’s work in variety theatre shows
him to be a highly successful and astonishingly accomplished comic performer long
before he ever made movies. It also reveals the sophisticated and complex fashion in
which his variety performance was staged and publicized (mainly by Joe Keaton),
and received (by reviewers and audiences), resonating strongly with important
BATTERED CHIL D 263
social and cultural issues in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America. This line of
inquiry can be pursued further, with reference, for example, to the popularity of the
figure of the ‘bad boy’ in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America (cf.
Kra¨mer 1998).
Paying attention to Keaton’s early performance in its own right does not
preclude Keaton scholars from investigating continuities between his early and
later work. Such investigations may well confirm the importance of the Keaton
family act of the early 1900s as a formative influence on his later development,
not so much because of its connection with presumed childhood trauma but
because it provided Keaton with a model for his film work in the 1910s and
1920s, which continued to foreground physical comedy and conflicts between
fathers and sons, and also integrated professional with familial relationships (most
notably in the figure of Joseph M. Schenck who was both Keaton’s producer and
his brother-in-law). As important as such continuities are, though, Keaton
scholars need to place more emphasis on processes of historical change, and to
make better use of trade papers, newspapers, fan magazines, press books,
contracts, memos, letters, scripts and other primary print sources documenting
the production, presentation and reception of Keaton’s performance as well as its
changing professional, institutional, economic and cultural contexts.42
Notes
1 For biographical details on Keaton’s early years, the most thorough and
reliable source is Meade (1995). In addition I have traced the breakthrough
of the Keaton act in vaudeville and the development of their routine as
well as its impact on audiences by going through the New York Dramatic
Mirror (NYDM), a leading theatrical trade paper, from 1900 to 1901, and
by examining hundreds of press clippings in the Myra Keaton Scrapbook
(MKS) at the American Film Institute, Los Angeles, and in the Locke
Collection Envelope no. 887A (LCE), Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New
York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
2 Since the OED refers to both British and American sources, I assume that in
general the meanings it outlines apply in both countries.
3 Unidentified press clipping from the early 1900s in the personal collection
of film historian and filmmaker Kevin Brownlow. For a detailed
description of the act, based on Myra Keaton’s recollections, see Blesh
(1966, pp. 30–32).
4 The year 1909 was a turning point in the development of the Keaton act,
because on 4 October that year Buster officially turned 16 (his father had
changed his birth date by two years in response to legal action against the
family by the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children,
the so-called Gerry Society). From then on, Buster was widely perceived
264 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION ST UDIES
to be a young man rather than a child, and the family act lost much of its
special appeal (Kra¨mer 1997, pp. 135–136).
5 Review of performance at the Salem Mechanic Hall dated 23 February
1904, MKS, p. 64 (most sheets in the scrapbook are paginated); cf. review
in Hartford, Connecticut, paper, dated 27 February 1905, MKS, p. 85:
‘How he escapes being hurt is a mystery.’
6 Unidentified clipping, c.1909, MKS, p. 124; cf. unidentified clipping,
c.1909, MKS, p. 150: ‘[Buster] comes up smiling when you expect to see
him a limp and broken boned kid.’
7 Unidentified clipping on unpaginated sheets in MKS.
8 New York Morning Telegraph, 17 October 1909, unpaginated clipping, LCE,
p. 16; cf. unidentified clipping, c.1909, MKS, p. 142: ‘[Buster] performs
stunts that would kill an ordinary child.’
9 Unidentified clippings, c.1904, MKS, p. 38, and c.1907, MKS, p. 147.
10 Review in Worcester, Massachusetts, paper, 5 April 1909, MKS, p. 152.
11 Unidentified clipping, c.1906, MKS, p. 62.
12 Unidentified clipping, c.1909, MKS, p. 141.
13 Ad for the Keatons in NYDM, 14 January 1905, p. 19.
14 Unidentified clipping, c.1905, MKS, p. 87.
15 Unidentified clipping, c.1909, p. 129.
16 Unidentified clipping, c.1908, MKS, p. 125; NYDM, 22 October 1904,
unpaginated clipping, MKS, p. 50.
17 Unidentified clipping, c.1908, MKS, p. 132.
18 Unidentified clipping, c.1905, MKS, p. 75; cf. NYDM, 21 March 1908 and
4 January 1908, and Pittsburgh Sun, 25 September 1907, unpaginated
clippings, LCE, p. 15 (the sheets in the envelope are numbered).
19 Unidentified clipping, c.1905, MKS, p. 109.
20 Unidentified clipping, c.1903, MKS, p. 26.
21 Unidentified clipping, c.1909, MKS, p. 141. There are dozens of similar
statements on the preceding and subsequent pages of the MKS.
22 Daily Dispatch, 12 January 1909, unpaginated clipping on unpaginated
sheets in MKS.
23 Unidentified clipping, c.1909, MKS, p. 125.
24 Unidentified clipping, c.1905, MKS, p. 145.
25 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 8 January 1905, unpaginated clipping, MKS, p. 60; cf.
unidentified clipping, c.1903, MKS, p. 35: ‘He is a sober, serious child,
wonderfully bright and never happier than when he is ‘‘on’’.’
26 Unidentified clipping from New York paper, c.1906, MKS, p. 24; cf.
unidentified clipping on unpaginated sheets in MKS, c.1909: ‘He should make
an effort to put more enthusiasm into his work and not play so placidly.’
27 Variety, 9 January 1907, p. 3. Quoted in Dardis (1979, p. 12).
28 Unidentified clipping, c.1903, MKS, p. 41.
29 See numerous unidentified clippings, MKS, pp. 24, 25, 60, 85, 136, 143,
145; also the quotation from the Brooklyn Citizen used in an ad in NYDM, 21
January 1905, p. 19.
BATTERED CHIL D 265
30 Unidentified clipping, MKS, p. 155.
31 New York Morning Telegraph, 24 January 1909, unpaginated clipping, LCE,
p. 16; cf. unidentified clipping, c.1909, MKS, p. 131: ‘Buster is a
mischievous son of Sire and Matron Keaton.’
32 Unidentified clipping dated 5 September 1909, LCE, p. 16.
33 Unidentified clipping, c.1909, MKS, p. 129.
34 Unidentified clipping, c.1908, MKS, p. 131; cf. the following ad from
1905: ‘Maybe you think you were handled roughly when you were a kid.
Watch the way they handle Buster!’ (quoted in Slide 1981, p. 82).
35 Unidentified clipping, c.1908, MKS, p. 131.
36 Unidentified clipping, c.1901, MKS, p. 36.
37 Unidentified clippings, MKS, pp. 138, 144, 155.
38 This paragraph is based on Stearns and Stearns (1986, pp. 36–57), Taylor
(1987) and Brodhead (1988).
39 In addition to the texts listed in the previous footnote, this paragraph is
based on Raichle (1974), Hiner (1979), Pleck (1987, chaps 4–6) and
Gordon (1989, chap. 2).
40 For this paragraph, see in particular Hiner (1979), Pleck (1987, chap. 4)
and Gordon (1989, chaps 2–3).
41 The classic account of the mixed composition of the vaudeville audience and
the meanings of vaudeville entertainment for this audience is McLean (1965).
More recent studies include Kibler (1999) and Butsch (2000, chap. 8).
42 I have attempted to show how this may be done with respect to Keaton’s
stage and film work in the 1910s and early 1920s in Kra¨mer (1995, 1997).
References
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Brodhead, Richard H. (1988) ‘Sparing the rod: discipline and fiction in
antebellum America’, Representations, no. 21, winter, pp. 66–96.
Butsch, Richard (2000) The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television,
1750–1990, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Dardis, Tom (1979) Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn’t Lie Down, Scribner’s, New
York.
Gordon, Linda (1989) Heroes of their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family
Violence, Boston 1880–1960, Virage, London.
Hiner, Ray N. (1979) ‘Children’s rights, corporal punishment, and child abuse:
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266 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION ST UDIES
Kra¨mer, Peter (1997) ‘A slapstick comedian at the crossroads: Buster Keaton, the
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