I just saw this in a rather crudely prepared sound version from the 1930's, with dubbed in effects and corny music and a second reel in far worse condition than the first at times the movie looked like a crude black-and-white animation rather than a live-action short. That's the bad news; the good news is that this is screamingly funny from the get-go to the end. "Snub" and his much larger dancing partner, "Fat" (Marvin Loback), struggle with each other in the room they share, try to crash the local vaudeville house and end up having to repossess a piano from their former landlord. "Snub" was a veteran of the Hal Roach studio (though this film was produced by his own company) and the by-play between him and Loback makes them look like the beta version of Laurel and Hardy (though the even funnier 1914 Sennett comedy "The Rounders," with Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle, is also an important Laurel and Hardy prototype). I think the reason these old comedies are still funny is that times, clothes, furniture and social mores may have changed, but human nature hasn't. Pollard isn't considered one of the "greats" of silent comedy, but he manages to sustain a brilliant series of gags throughout the 24-minute running time and offers more laughs in two reels than today's much-ballyhooed potty-humored "comedians' can give us in an entire feature.
