On Ted Edwards and How To Survive the Coming Apocalypse

It’s been a while since I have plugged Brent Walker’s indispensable reference book Mack Sennett’s Fun Factory here but I absolutely must do so today for it made possible this post on Keystone supporting player Ted Edwards (Maurice Edward Burrell, 1884-1945).

Primary sources are the bedrock of history, so let this post serve secondarily as an alarm bell. The internet, which has always been a dicey source of information, is about to get much, much worse, thanks to AI. If you’re smart, you can spot an AI generated article a mile away, with its vague information and strange wording. But not everyone is (smart, that is) and people who have grown up in the internet age were born into this dystopia, so I imagine them being completely devoid of defenses and vulnerable to the pitfalls. I predict mass madness on a Lovecraftian scale before terribly long. The only way to navigate this is going to be skepticism, figuring out who and what you can trust, and cross-checking amongst sources. My professional orientation as a non-fiction writer is as a journalist and critic, which means that, contrary to occasional attribution, I am NOT a historian. Perhaps one time in a hundred do I personally go to primary sources for my posts. Instead, I RELY on historians who have already done that work for us. But I take great care to draw from trusted sources and cross-check them. Even then, I’m sometimes wrong. Good heavens, I am appalled at the number of people who swallow without question some of the whoppers served up by a character who calls himself “Trav S.D.” How do you people live your lives? How have you not walked in front of a moving bus because someone told you it was a spa treatment? This is precisely how we got where we are, and it’s about to get worse.

End of sermon, but I hope you agree it’s an important one.

All this in the service of a minor supporting player whose movie career scarcely lasted more than four years. I mentioned Ted Edwards in my post on the 1914 Mack Sennett-Charlie Chaplin collaboration A Busy Day, so I thought I’d look into him. The son of a Sheffield draper, Edwards got interested in physical culture and athletics in his youth, lived in Canada briefly, and moved to the U.S. in 1905. Here he acted with stock companies, and also performed in vaudeville with the likes of Joe E. Howard and Joe Oliver.

Edwards was 30 when he started at Keystone, appearing in nearly 50 of their comedies between 1914 and 1917. Wikipedia erroneously claims that he’s only in two Chaplin comedies; the truth is closer to a dozen. I’m not going to list his films by name, because nearly every one of them is one I’ve seen and consider a classic of its kind, so there is nothing in particular to spotlight. But they star the likes of Fatty Arbuckle, Mack Swain, Chester Conklin, Sydney Chaplin, Mabel Normand, and Charles Murray. Usually his characters are unnamed; however, when he did play a named character, he was usually cast as a Reverend, as in the 1915 films Hash House Mashers, Hearts and Planets (pictured above), and When Love Took Wings. His last for Sennett seems to have been Are Waitresses Safe? (1917) with Louise Fazenda and Ben Turpin. In 1918, Chaplin gave him a role in A Dog’s Life, and then that seems to have been it for his movie career.

Thanks to Walker, we know that he is NOT the same Ted Edwards who is in the 1924 Fires of Youth with Billie Rhodes, or the exploitation classics Maniac (1934) and Polygamy (1936). (IMDB claims that he is). Edwards retired from acting after A Dog’s Life and returned to his working class roots (and his given name) as a carpenter and building contractor.

For more on the history of vaudeville,consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, for more on classic comedy and silent film please check out my book Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.