There’s always something worth a laugh

Recently I watched on television the 1992 film Chaplin, starring Robert Downey Jr as the great English comic actor, best known in Thailand simply as Charlie. It brought back happy memories of the mid-1970s when a series of the Chaplin movies were re-released in Thailand and proved a huge hit. The Thai public loved Charlie.

I was fortunate enough to be writing film reviews at the time and remember sitting in the packed cinemas with audiences falling off their seats and collapsing in the aisles with laughter. It was a wonderful experience being amongst so many happy people. It was all the more remarkable considering the films were in black and white and made 40 years earlier, back in the 1930s.

Charlie simply walking into a door or tripping over a dog sparked howls of laughter. And the famous scene from Modern Times where he dives into a pond which is only about a…