Paging Mr. Chaplin!

Tue, 11/10/2015 - 9:51am by amy

November 12 marks the 99th anniversary of a particularly strange moment in American popular culture. On this date, as the story goes, Charlie Chaplin - the biggest personality (by far) in show business at that time - was suddenly and simultaneously paged in over 800 hotels across the country. Such was the iconic ubiquity of Chaplin’s "Little Tramp" that mass suggestion presumably accounts for this strange psychopathological anomaly, or so the Boston Society for Psychical Research suggested while investigating the phenomenon of “Chaplini-itis” three months later.

This sort of cultural omnipresence may not seem so strange in an age where memes proliferate instantaneously, but in 1916? When the first transcontinental telephone call had occurred only a year earlier?

I read this in Charlie Chaplin: A Brief Life, a fairly quick read by novelist, biographer and critic Peter Ackroyd. It paints a compelling - if not always sympathetic - portrait of Chaplin that will send you to YouTube looking for bits and pieces of his genius. But to truly appreciate what all the fuss was about, pick up one of his best films on Blu-ray and soak up the bonus essays, documentaries, and numerous extras.