COMMENT | Why does the PM make me think of Buster Keaton?

COMMENT | Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin’s address to the nation on the first anniversary of his administration’s power putsch triggered a thought about Buster Keaton, so I re-watched his classic film The General.

The film is widely regarded as his masterpiece. Orson Welles, whose Citizen Kane is widely regarded as the best film ever made, said it was the “greatest comedy ever made […] perhaps the greatest film ever made.” And Welles was not known for his modesty.

Why did the prime minister make me think of Keaton? Because Keaton was different from the other silent movie comedians. I sensed that even when I was a kid watching their movies and shorts in Lido Cinema decades ago.

Like Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and the Keystone Cops, Keaton would be involved in a breathless sequence of hair-raising, life or serious injury-threatening moments, but his genius was to survive it all with a deadpan expression, not a flicker of emotion, as if nothing that life threw at him surprised him, hence the public’s name for him “The Great Stone Face.”

That stoic face in contrast with the slapstick, pratfall humour of surviving falls and dodging a beating from big bullies – hilarious.

The lines that put me in a humourous mood: “When the election is held, we will leave it to the people to decide whether the Perikatan government should be re-elected or otherwise.

“You are free to choose. That is what democracy is all about.”

Firstly, to be “re-elected” one would have to be elected in the first place and I don’t remember Perikatan Nasional (PN) being on the ballots in the last election.

Great rubbing-in punch-line, no humour intended, but I found it bare-faced funny: “You are free to choose.” Yes, the voters choose, and then days, weeks or months later the politicians choose - to change...