Charlie Chaplin and Mack Swain in “His Musical Career”

Today marks the anniversary of the release of the Charlie Chaplin comedy His Musical Career, co-starring Mack Swain. Chaplin and Swain play a pair of piano movers who mix up their orders (note that this is 18 years before Laurel and Hardy made the very similar The Music Box, and with roughly the same relationship between the two men. Interestingly both films also feature a comedian named Billy Gilbert, though they’re both different ones: Billy Gilbert I is in His Musical Career;  Billy Gilbert II is in The Music Box).

The pair delivers a piano to a crazy long haired professor whose piano they are supposed to be repossessing. And then they go a rich guy’s house and repossess his piano, where they are supposed to be delivering a new one. There follow all the requisite piano moving gags. A piano drops on top of Swain, and Charlie steps on him. Business with trying to move pianos in a two wheel donkey cart (the piano, weighing more than the donkey, lifts the poor creature into the air). Business with carrying a piano upstairs. In the end the rich man comes home and demands: “Where are you going with my piano?” and the two roll down a steep hill riding the piano all the way and wind up — as always — in a body of water.

Also in the cast: Charlie Chase, Cecile Arnold, Frank Hayes, and Fritz Schade. 

To learn more about comedy film history including Charlie Chaplin comedies like “His Musical Career” please check out my book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube