The Tramp

D.W. Griffith’s use of the Tramp was to be a threatening figure of a vagabond who doesn’t belong to society. In Chaplin’s hands, the Tramp was something that translated into a universality. As the international working class flocked to motion picture theaters for amusement in the early years of cinema, Chaplin’s Tramp touched on universal themes, such as

• Disdain for the rich
• Resistance to authority
• Resentment of modern forms of alienating labor

Chaplin’s Tramp could be of any country and any time. It was a tramp, so it was a vagabond and could be anywhere from 25 to 50 years old. The Tramp really had an everyman appeal.

The character was modeled on the kind of character one could see in everyday life, the kind of character Chaplin believed was usually unseen or a forgotten fixture of society. This is much like the way we think of homeless people in large cities today, by often ignoring them. Chaplin was using a revealing function of the cinema to show and focus our attention on this character that he thought represented the everyday everyman.

In early Tramp movies, he usually has a job, and is typically trying to join some kind of society or town at the beginning, but not usually accepted. He leaves on his own. The structure of these is cyclical. He moves in, tries to get a job, fails at that job (as he did as a barber), and then leaves that society at the end.

The movies can be seen as serial or episodic, in that the character returned and did the same type of thing in each movie. He usually ends up causing the disintegration of some part of the society through naive bumbling or carelessness. In each case Charlie is in search of only food and acceptance, and sometimes love along the way. His films lampoon the rich who step on people such as him.

Comedies are often concerned with social elements and things that people invent, such as rules for us to follow, rather than things people can’t control, such as natural parts of the world. Chaplin reveals many of these things to be absurd as he moves in and out of various social situations.