A SECRET WEAPON FOR THE SILENT COMEDY GENIUS AND LAVISH LIFE

Charlie Chaplin manufactured audiences snicker, but he also made us experience. His films usually balanced delicately, as poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti observes, on “a good line involving sentiment and sentimentality.”  Buster Keaton may well not have elicited just as much laughter or emotion as Chaplin, but his comedy was no less than as Inventi