World of Comedy aka Harold Lloyd’s World of Comedy (1962)

(On Cable TV, November 2022) The one weird thing about Harold Lloyd’s World of Comedy is not its place as an anthology showcase for Harold Lloyd’s virtuoso mastery of early comedy—that’s well known. It’s that, for all of its status as a retrospective of early cinema, it was released in the early 1960s, qualifying it as a classic film of its own! There’s a fair case to be made for World of Comedy being one of the reasons why Lloyd’s work is still well known today—it was an interim introduction to his work for “younger” audiences before home video and later online streaming made his work available to all. One thing we don’t appreciate from our twenty-first century perspective is just how precarious movie history was in the decades between then and now—entire careers were forgotten or lost during these years, only to be revived by dedicated historians. Lloyd, on the other hand, was not one to let posterity dictate its terms—as a canny businessman, he himself put together this retrospective, selected the excerpts and wrote the film’s narration. He clearly knew what to highlight—if the attribution of a few clips is less-than-clear, Lloyd often lets excerpts run long to showcase the sustained genius of his comic pacing, always topping the current situation with a more outrageous one. I had seen maybe half of the film’s content, but gladly watched it again just for the sheer joy of it. World of Comedy is a terrific introduction to Lloyd’s work, and an incredible comedy showcase no matter how familiar you are with him.