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The Silent Comedy Watch Party

The Silent Comedy Watch Party is a live-streamed show presented every Sunday at 3:00 pm ET on YouTube. Co-hosts Ben Model, a silent film accompanist and presenter, and Steve Massa, a silent film historian, present slapstick comedy shorts from the 1910s and 1920s, with introduction and discussions, and live piano scores. The stream has been online without a break since March 22, 2020, and has brought much-needed laughter and relief to its viewers around the USA and internationally through the universal language of silent film comedy. Model and Massa present their portions of the show from their respective apartments, with Model playing for the films on his acoustic piano, bringing an informality to the show that feels like you’ve had some friends over to watch old movies. Each episode is archived on YouTube for viewing after the live-stream has ended.

Model and Massa program titles with well-known comedians like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, as well as lesser-known silent clowns like Alice Howell, Marcel Perez, Gale Henry, Hank Mann and Wanda Wiley. Once a month, Model and Massa welcome a guest, remotely and live, on The Silent Comedy Watch Party. Past guests have included Library of Congress curators Rob Stone and Rachel Del Gaudio, MoMA film curator Ron Magliozzi, Harold Lloyd’s grand-daughter Suzanne Lloyd, and Ina Archer, a filmmaker and artist who is also a media conservator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The running time of each episode of The Silent Comedy Watch Party is approximately 90 minutes, and has 400-500 screens tuning in live. The archived streams have anywhere from 1500-3000 views each logged on YouTube.

bios:

Ben Model – co-host, accompanist, producer

BEN MODEL is one of the nation’s leading silent film accompanists, and performs on both piano and theatre organ. Ben works full-time presenting and accompanying silent films in a wide variety of venues around the USA and internationally – doing so virtually, now – carrying on a tradition he learned from silent film organist Lee Erwin (1919-2000). 

Over the past 40+ years Model has created and performed live scores for several hundred silent films. He is a resident film accompanist at the Museum of Modern Art (NY) and at the Library of Congress’ Packard Campus Theatre, and performs at theatres, museums, schools and other venues around the US and internationally. His recorded scores have been heard on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and on numerous home-video releases from Kino Lorber, Milestone Films and Model’s own label Undercrank Productions.

Ben Model is also a Visiting Professor at Wesleyan University (Connecticut), where he teaches a course on silent film.

Steve Massa – co-host, film historian

STEVE MASSA is the author of Slapstick Divas: The Women of Silent Comedy and Lame Brains and Lunatics: The Good, The Bad, and The Forgotten of Silent Comedy – his most recent book is Rediscovering Roscoe: The Films of “Fatty” Arbuckle. He has organized and curated comedy film programs for the Museum of Modern Art, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, the Pordenone Silent Film Festival and Bristol Slapstick Festival, as well as provided essays for the National Film Registry, the National Film Preservation Foundation, and the Criterion Collection. Steve has provided notes and commentaries for many comedy DVD and Blu-ray releases, as well as co-curated Undercrank Productions’ The Mishaps of Musty Suffer, Volumes 1 & 2, the award-winning Marcel Perez Collection, Volumes 1 & 2, The Alice Howell Collection, and the forthcoming Edward Everett Horton Collection.

contact and social

photos

Ben Model accompanies the Hank Mann comedy AN EYE FOR FIGURES (1920) on the premiere episode of The Silent Comedy Watch Party last year, on March 22, 2020 (photo by Mana Allen)
Silent film accompanist-historian Ben Model, producer and co-host of The Silent Comedy Watch Party; from an episode live-streamed in 2020 (credit: Undercrank Productions)
Ben Model and Steve Massa, co-hosts of The Silent Comedy Watch Party seen here in a February 2021 episode (credit: Undercrank Productions)

Click photos of Ben Model below to download in hi-resolution.

Steve Massa, introducing a silent comedy film program at the Museum of Modern Art (NY) (photo by Susan Selig)

video

This past Sunday’s episode of The Silent Comedy Watch Party (no. 46) live-streamed on February 21, 2021: