tavm This was another early Charlie Chaplin film that he also directed. Since it's for the Mack Sennett Keystone Studio, expect lots of punching, slapping, and throwing of bricks. In Laughing Gas, The Tramp is a dentist's assistant who sometimes acts like he's his boss. One of the ways he takes advantage of that is when he steals kisses from one of the lovely female patients by using one of those tweezers to pull her face toward his. And she seems to like it! That was one of the funniest scenes for me. There's also a funny fight/chase between him and Mack Swain that causes Swain to go guess where! So on that note, Laughing Gas is recommended and is available on a DVD collection called "American Slapstick".

CitizenCaine Chaplin plays a dental assistant in this one. There are several moments highlighting physical comedy and sight gags in this film. The hitting, slapping, and falling bits are better timed and funnier than in most early Chaplin efforts, though of course we've seen it all before. The tremendous size difference between Chaplin and the dentist he works for is used to particular good advantage. Chaplin's bit on the staircase, his trick rolling his hat on his arm, and his use of the pincers to steal a kiss are also very funny gags. As with most of Chaplin's early films, the film is uneven. However, Chaplin edited and directed this film, and the film moves at a frenetic pace and has much quicker edits between scenes than any previous Chaplin film. ** of 4 stars.

Michael DeZubiria It is no secret that Charlie Chaplin spent most of his first year in film-making churning out simple short comedies for Keystone Studios, in which he spent most of his time either kicking, punching, and throwing bricks at people or planting kisses on uncomfortable women. Laffing Gas is kind of a cross section of Chaplin's first year in film because it has all of those elements, as well as about the same ending as most of the other Keystone films, but it also shows a lot of Chaplin's most brilliant talents, the tricks that he does with his body and his cane and his hat.Also, I am not sure if it was just the copy that I watched, but part of the film plays in regular motion, rather than the slightly fast motion of most of the other short films, so you can see pretty clearly what it actually looked like when they were filming the fight scenes. Early in the film, Charlie walks into the dentist's office where he works and immediately has a fistfight with another guy, the receptionist, I guess, in the office. And this guy is tiny, by the way .Chaplin was a little guy himself, but this other guy makes Chaplin look like a giant. Anyway, they have a fight scene that is in normal speed, so it almost looks like slow-motion.The film is also one of the more violent of the Keystone films; at one point a guy gets hit in the face with a brick and then seems to spit out some teeth, soon landing himself in the dentist's office and being worked on by Charlie, who threw the brick in the first place, with a pair of what looks like bolt-cutters. There is a brief use of laughing gas in the film, but most of it is another ten minute slapstick fight scene interspersed with some genuinely brilliant moments.Also note that one scene in the film is filmed on the sidewalk in front of a place called the Sunset Pharmacy, which I imagine was a real place somewhere on Sunset Blvd. in Los Angeles. If anyone knows anything about that, please let me know!

MartinHafer I've seen quite a few Chaplin shorts from early in his career and I've noticed that his early stuff (done for Keystone Studios) is pretty dreadful stuff. Unlike his wonderful full-length films from the 20s and 30s, the films from 1914-1915 are incredibly poorly made--having no script but only vague instructions from the director. In most cases, the films had almost no plot and degenerated to people punching and kicking each other.This short is quite a bit better than the norm. While at times the plot degenerates to a lot of punching and kicking for absolutely no reason at all, the film also has a few decent laughs as Charlie pretends to be a dentist. Nothing outstandingly funny, but compared to the generally boring stuff he did for the studio, it's a big improvement.