For National Molasses Day: Great Moments in Molasses

February 8 is National Molasses Day! And you mightn’t think that this blog would have anything to say on this topic, but there you’d be wrong. For molasses happens to be the stuff of comedy — dark, sticky comedy.

Georges Méliès releases the film Amour et mélasse(Love and Molasses, 1908) on the theme of a clumsy nephew store clerk.

Fatty Arbuckle accidentally fills Buster Keaton’s hat with molasses, causing it to stick to his head, in their first comedy short together The Butcher Boy (1917).

In Larry Semon’sThe Grocery Clerk (1919) there is an all-too-typical scene where a white man is covered in molasses, creating a blackface effect. And I’ll be damned if I show you a picture of that, so here’s a still from the same short showing Semon and a long-suffering tabby. Not such a great molasses moment, but Semon’s got others, I’m sure, they just escape me for the moment.

An industrial vat collapses in Boston, causing the Great Molasses Flood of 1919, killing 21 people and injuring 150. Absolutely a true story. This one of course is great in magnitude, not so much in hilarity. Although it does tend to make people laugh when they first hear about it. It gets more horrible upon reflection, True story — look it up!

Baby Leroy opens the spigot of a molasses barrel in W.C. Fields It’s a Gift (1934), with baneful results for the Great Man’s livelihood.

Keaton re-created his Butcher Boy debut 40 years later on The Ed Wynn Show (1949)

Young Walter pours molasses all over his dinner, prompting wails of protest from Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

In his last album of new material (and, amazingly, his first comedy record per se), You Ain’t Gonna Believe This (2010), Mel Tillis revives his much cherished “Mole Asses” anecdote.

This has been GREAT MOMENTS IN MOLASSES.

For more on silent and slapstick comedy, don’t missChain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube