This was good. This was excellent. At the end of the workday, when the light had gone, Chaplin was not yet ready to finish. He wanted to keep rehearsing under the arc lights, but there was a build-up of ash, and then, when Henry and Albert and Zasu and everyone else was tired, and they could no longer play their parts, he told them he was very proud of them. They were going to torment the censors, drive crazy the blue-haired ladies of Indiana, for who could say where art ended and the obscene began?

The day players were dismissed, and most of them changed and ambled out the studio gates, happy to have done something, finally. Rebecca, however, went to the invoice desk in Accounting and said she was Zasu’s sister and was here for her paperwork.

Overstuffed chairs were dragged from the prop room. Edna, who hadn’t been in a shot today, took off her shoes and rubbed her feet and finally leaned against Albert, who was trying like grim death to hold back a fatal yawn. Zasu, who was in not just the clothes she’d come in but several layers of sweaters and jackets, and was sipping hot tea, stared straight ahead, her wounded eyes looking as if she’d been through a stampede. Chaplin admitted he was asking her to do outstandingly difficult work, and he apologized, and she was wonderful, and there was a great conservation of effort on his part.

“What do I mean? It’s like this. The theory of humor that no one else seems to understand—have you seen an Arbuckle film? He’s quite good, but he doesn’t understand—you don’t just throw a pie. No, you have me attempt to throw a pie at an enemy”—he made the necessary motions as he narrated— “and instead, on the wind-up, it drops behind me, and I shade my eyes, take a step backward to see where it went, and I slip on it, and it shoots like a watermelon seed to hit a passerby, who knocks his glass of water over on my enemy, which causes them to engage in a fistfight. That gets four separate laughs from one piece of business. Harold Lloyd doesn’t understand any of that. Lonesome Luke! Wherever did he get the idea to have baggy trousers and a toothbrush mustache?”

So it went until Alf gently put his hand on Chaplin’s shoulder and told him they could continue tomorrow.

When he arrived the next day, bright and early, the whole company was there—except for Zasu.