User Reviews

Joe Rock was a fine producer of comedies in the late silent era. He knew how to let his performers work and the results showed. So when he came up with a bad idea, it was really a stinker.

The bad idea here is this: people laugh at fat guys. People laugh at comedy teams. So let's take three enormously fat bit players and make a team out of them. Then he surrounded them with good production values and came up with.... well, this. The Three Fatties (also known as "Tons o' Fun") play three enormously untalented performers in a cabaret. One of them puts on a grass skirt and dances the hula. Another pretends to lift a piano attached to a rope and pulley. They are so bad that the audience rebels and soon there are melons and cole slaw flying everywhere.

The result is about as awful as suggested. Clearly the High Concept picture is not a recent idea.

After a pretty slow start, this somewhat chaotic short comedy has a few good moments. Overall, it's only fair at best, but it does have a couple of funny parts. It starts off with an unnecessarily long sequence that makes little sense and that is not particularly entertaining, and which has the sole purpose of setting up the entrance of the 'Ton of Fun' trio. The three of them play a night club singing act that gets into a fracas with the patrons, and from there at least the pace picks up quite a bit.

While in general it's too silly and lowbrow to come off very well, there are a couple of creative gags, and a clever camera shot or two at the height of the action. Those occasional pluses keep it from being a complete washout. It might not look so bad when compared with some of today's tasteless 'comedies', but if you compare it with its 1920's contemporaries, it doesn't hold up very well.

This "comedy" is among the most unfunny silent comedy shorts I have seen (with the possible exception of a couple of Chaplin's earliest films where he just stood there and did practically nothing). A girl goes to a nightclub with her skinflint uncle. When the bill comes, he runs--leaving her to stay and work off her bill! The owner soon tells her that he's in trouble because his new act, a singer, stinks and he's afraid all the customers will leave. She tells him she knows of some great entertainers. She phones three guys who in films were referred to a "Ton of Fun", as the three guys were very obese--weighing 1000 pounds overall (yes, I know this is ONLY half a ton).

The three guys come and their only discernible talent is being fat. How this makes them in any way funny is beyond me. They are terrible singers and dancers and the audience starts throwing fruit and vegetables at them. Then, they throw them back. That is all there really is to the film. Not funny or memorable in any way.

I think this film could easily have been entitled: HEY LOOK--LET'S LAUGH AT THE FAT GUYS! It's really a pretty sad way to get some laughs--thank goodness this type of film didn't catch on and encourage similar ideas such as laughing at cripples or blind people.