Buster Keaton Silent Shorts—RANKED

After his 14-film screen partnership with Roscoe Arbuckle, Buster Keaton took over the Comique comedy unit to direct 19 short comedies before jumping into features. Keaton’s two-reel comedies from 1920 to 1923 stand neck and neck with many of his features, displaying some of his most inventive and surreal gags in all his career.

For this year’s Silent Movie Day, I’ll be sharing my personal ranking of all 19 of his solo short comedies. Of course, these are my takes so just because a film is lower than you’d put it doesn’t make it any less worthy of love! And even the most flawed of Buster’s work is still quite entertaining and well worth a watch.

So without further ado, let the fun begin!

Flawed but Fun

19. The Play House (1921)
18. The Frozen North (1922)
17. The Blacksmith (1922)

Even at the bottom of my ranking, none of these are films I dislike; they just don’t grab me as much as other Keaton comedies.

For instance, The Play House starts with one of the most ambitious sequences in all of Keaton’s filmography, with Buster playing every person in a vaudeville theater. But after being treated to such an ambitious technical achievement in those opening minutes, the rest of the film is a bit of a letdown outside of a bit where Buster imitates a monkey almost perfectly onstage. The Frozen North is one of Keaton’s more unique experiments, playing around with parody and dark comedy, but it almost feels like he gets tired of the parody halfway through and switches to a different film.

The Blacksmith, even with the it’s added found footage, fails to really develop a story or characters that pull you in. Being more gag-centric, it still has some great material such as a magnet constantly pulling tools out of Buster’s hands, a balloon somehow holding up the side of a car, and great fourth-wall breaking ending. There are memorable moments throughout all three films; I just find myself enjoying the pieces more than the whole.

Inventive but Uneven

16. The Haunted House (1921)
15. Hard Luck (1921)
14. The Love Nest (1923)
13. The Balloonatic (1923)

My next grouping have iconic, stand-out moments and gags but don’t maintain that same level of ingenuity throughout. For instance, The Haunted House feels like two separate films stitched together. The bank scene is fantastic when Buster gets glue all over his hands while handling money. Once Buster finally reaches the haunted house, the collapsing staircase gives him some fantastic pratfalls, but the two halves never fit together quite as neatly as I would like with the second section feeling less unique. Hard Luck starts of strong as well with a fantastic opening string of failed suicide attempts that’s one of my favorite stretches in these shorts. Afterwards however the story gets increasingly haphazard as Buster bounces from a fox hunt to a swimming pool to a western parody that comes out of nowhere and ends just as fast as it starts.

The Love Nest‘s best section is when Buster is aboard the pirate ship battling with Roberts’ captain. As a big Joe Roberts fan, I love seeing the two battle it out, and the captain casually throwing crewmates overboard gives Buster plenty of room for his darker sense of humor with a great recurring gag with funerary wreaths. Once he leaves the ship however, it ends on a sour note as we find out it was all a dream, cheapening everything that happened at sea. The Balloonatic is more consistent, with Buster trying and usually failing to outsmart nature. Meanwhile, Phyllis Haver proves much more capable in the wilderness than he is. A weaker opening makes me wish Buster would have spent even more time outdoors as his gags with while fishing in his canoe and with a pair of bears are fantastic. These all have stretches that rank among my favorite moments in the shorts, even if the films surrounding them are a little uneven.

Underrated Gems

12. The Electric House (1922)
11. My Wife’s Relations (1922)
10. Day Dreams (1922)
9. The Paleface (1922)

Now we are getting into the territory of Buster’s shorts that near impeccable. While the characters aren’t that deep, The Electric House really comes alive when Buster is allowed to play with all the strange technology he has packed into the house, especially the moving staircase that seems determined to throw everyone out a window that injured the real-life Keaton while filming. My Wife’s Relations goes much smaller, but is nevertheless just as effective, trapping Buster with the rough family he has accidentally married into. I especially love the little touches in this one, like Buster changing the calendar so he can steal everyone’s meat at dinner or the entire family slowly sliding down to the floor as the cameraman’s tripod slowly sinks rather than interrupt their portrait.

Day Dreams is harder to judge because nearly a reel of the three-reeler is still missing, leaving us to guess what starts some of the film’s shenangians and missing out on the important jobs his girlfriend dreams Buster is in. Even as it stands, Day Dreams is a really underrated Keaton comedy with another fantastic chase from cops, morbid humor, and one of his best gags being caught like a hamster in a waterwheel. The Paleface, meanwhile, is one I like a lot more than other folks, with a great central misunderstanding, some genuinely dangerous-looking stunt work, and that wonderful final gag where “two years later” turns out to mean Buster and Virginia still finishing the same kiss. Plus a sympathetic look at Native Americans in a stand-off with a greedy government looking to take over their land is a fascinating snapshot in American history in without sacrificing any comedy.

Keaton in Full Swing

8. Neighbors (1920)
7. Cops (1922)
6. The High Sign (1921)

Now we are getting into the shorts that enter a second gear. The gags are more elaborate, the pacing is tighter, and Keaton’s knack for turning a simple premise into increasingly elaborate chaos is on full display. 

Neighbors gets an incredible amount of mileage out of two houses and a shared backyard. The sequence with Buster and The Flying Escalante acrobats stacked on top of each other remains one of my favorite physical gags in all of Keaton’s work, especially once they somehow start running while still balanced on one another. There is a bit of a lull in the middle when Buster and Virginia are trying to get married, but otherwise the film has a wonderfully frenetic pace that never lets up.

Then Cops takes that controlled chaos and blows it up to an enormous scale, with hundreds of policemen coming after Buster from every possible direction. Keaton is fantastic at framing these huge crowds without ever losing track of the joke, right up through one of the darkest endings of his career that is a huge gut punch. The High Sign is one of Keaton’s most unique comedies as it was his first solo short he shot after his partnership with Arbuckle. The Blinking Buzzards plotline of protecting the man he has been sent to kill is pure comedy gold. The film’s climatic chase scenes of trapdoors, intricate mechanisms, and physical comedy might not be as polished as Keaton’s later films but makes up for it in pure fun seeing him figuring out exactly what made his comedic voice unique.

Near-Perfect Keaton

5. Convict 13 (1920)
4. The Scarecrow (1920)
3. The Goat (1921)

These shorts have nearly everything that marks Keaton comedy as a comedy master: inventive premises, perfectly constructed gags, escalating chaos, and characters who feel like active participants in the comedy rather than simply pieces being moved from one joke to the next.

Convict 13 has a wonderfully cruel rhythm where every time Buster manages to improve his situation, the universe immediately changes the rules and leaves him even worse off. He escapes his prison uniform only for the prisoners to revolt; even his successful ideas somehow put a bigger target on his back. Sybil Seeley also gets more agency than the average Keaton love interest, while Joe Roberts makes a fantastic physical foil once the prison uprising gets underway.

The Scarecrow sees another classic Keaton-Roberts feud with a basic love-triangle story filtered through Keaton’s wonderfully mechanical brain. For example, the contraptions in Buster and Joe’s one-room house are not just jokes on their own but also set up for later gags with completely different uses once the chase begins. And speaking of iconic chases, The Goat is just an expertly crafted chase comedy. Its three chases all grow out of the story, each one builds on the last, and the slow burn before Buster and the police chief finally recognize each other at dinner makes the final chase even better. By the time Joe Roberts’ elevator shoots through the roof, Keaton has turned a very simple story into pure comedy gold.

Perfect Films

2. The Boat (1921)
1. One Week (1920)

And finally, we arrive at the two films that sit at the very top of my ranking. Both take the basic ingredients of a Keaton comedy and execute them with remarkable precision, with every gag, setback, and escalation building naturally into what comes next. These two short comedies aren’t just the best of Keaton’s two-reelers, there up there as some of if not the best short comedies ever made—silent or sound!

The Boat is about as perfect an encapsulation of Keaton as you could ask for. Buster is the same handyman with some of the worst luck imaginable, only now Sybil Seeley and two kids are stuck along for the ride as they lose their house, their car, and eventually their boat. The storm sequence is spectacular, with Buster basically being put through a washing machine while the entire set rotates around him. The disasters pile up as one bad decision leads straight into the next until the family finally wanders off into the darkness with essentially nothing left.

As much as I love The Boat, it is nearly impossible to outdo One Week. It’s astounding this was the first solo Keaton comedy released. There are no signs of this being the work of a new director. The increasingly mangled house is the perfect playground for him, the story is simple but compelling, and every new problem seems to give him another opportunity to top the gag that came before it. The final act keeps escalating right up to one of his best pieces of misdirection. Buster could not have started his solo comedy career on a higher note: One Week is not just one of his best films, but one of the best examples of silent comedy ever made.

Let me know which Buster short comedy is your favorite! And check out my video reviews of each of Buster Keaton’s short comedies including his 14 with Roscoe Arbuckble.

And if you want more great silent film content, check out the Silent Movie Day Blogathon co-hosted by me and Lea Stans of Silentology that this post is a part of!