Hal Roach's in-house master of the title cards, H. M. Walker, seemed to have quite a propensity towards naming shorts with questions that involve marriage. The one only has one film separating it in Charley Chase's filmography from "Should Husbands Be Watched?" "Is Marriage the Bunk?" does involve Charley Chase put in an uncomfortable situation because he is much poorer than the husband of his wife's sister, but beyond that marriage isn't such a narrow focus of this short. (As an aside, Charley always seems to work from a middle class perspective -- always trying to remain a gentleman despite circumstances. We might be told that he is poor --sometimes even as a reveal gag as in "Young Ironsides--", but it is always something that we need to be told in order to find it out).
One of the earliest gags here involves Chase, established here as an unsuccessful entertainer, promising "something new" in a Charlie Chaplin imitation. It's actually a pretty good one, but this use makes Chase -- who himself had directed blatant Chaplin imitator Billy West -- into something of an iconoclast. Instead of trying to reflect glory from the comedian everyone considers the greatest, he gets laughs by mocking everyone else's unoriginal fixation with imitating him.
Overall, though, while "Is Marriage the Bunk?" is probably structurally great compared with other one-reelers of its day, it is more formless than Chase had already prove he could be in this format. He gets into his trademarked embarrassing situations, but there's not a strong unifying idea linking them.
On the plus side, this does afford the opportunity for some excellent gags, with probably the piece de resistance revolving around Charley, distracted from an urgent courier's mission (which is time-sensitive for reasons too unimportant to explain), ends up holding a block of ice in the street blindfolded for a mountebank the police have chased away. He's threatened with firing if he makes a display of himself again -- then accidentally ends up the guinea pig in a podiatrist's demonstration.
This was one of the last ten-minute one-reel comedies Chase filmed before moving to a format twice as long. It proves both how funny he could be, and how the complicated structure of his is signature style could sit a little uneasily with the shorter format.
One of the earliest gags here involves Chase, established here as an unsuccessful entertainer, promising "something new" in a Charlie Chaplin imitation. It's actually a pretty good one, but this use makes Chase -- who himself had directed blatant Chaplin imitator Billy West -- into something of an iconoclast. Instead of trying to reflect glory from the comedian everyone considers the greatest, he gets laughs by mocking everyone else's unoriginal fixation with imitating him.
Overall, though, while "Is Marriage the Bunk?" is probably structurally great compared with other one-reelers of its day, it is more formless than Chase had already prove he could be in this format. He gets into his trademarked embarrassing situations, but there's not a strong unifying idea linking them.
On the plus side, this does afford the opportunity for some excellent gags, with probably the piece de resistance revolving around Charley, distracted from an urgent courier's mission (which is time-sensitive for reasons too unimportant to explain), ends up holding a block of ice in the street blindfolded for a mountebank the police have chased away. He's threatened with firing if he makes a display of himself again -- then accidentally ends up the guinea pig in a podiatrist's demonstration.
This was one of the last ten-minute one-reel comedies Chase filmed before moving to a format twice as long. It proves both how funny he could be, and how the complicated structure of his is signature style could sit a little uneasily with the shorter format.