The Film of the Year blog has announced a Slapstick Blog-a-Thon for 7-10 September. A blog-a-thon, as I understand it, is where one blogger starts off a topic and as many bloggers who want to chime in on the same theme. And here the theme is slapstick – but let Film of the Year‘s Thom Ryan explain what’s going on:

Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton! Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and Mabel Normand! Hal Roach and Mack Sennett! Laurel and Hardy and The Three Stooges! Daffy and Donald! Slip-and-fall and the ol’ pie-in-the-face! The Cook (1918), The General (1927), The Gold Rush (1925), Safety Last (1923)… Possibly no other genre gives us more reasons to bust a gut or split our sides with laughter than slipping, tripping, and gripping slapstick. Recent discussions convinced me that there’s a huge pile of slap-films that I need to see. Then I thought, why keep ’em all to myself? So, I’m inviting the entire blogosphere to join together September 7-10 and let the world know why slapstick is so flippin’ funny!

Here’s how it works:

1) Leave a comment or e-mail me if you’d like to join the blog-a-thon.

2) On September 7-10 post something slapstick related on your blog. Then leave a comment here or e-mail me that you’ve posted and I’ll link to all of the posts from here.

3) Read each other’s posts, share comments, and have fun!

Film of the Year is well worth checking out for itself. It’s a week-by-week chronological survey through the history of cinema 1895-2009, with one film chosen to represent each year. The assessments are engaging, discursive and knowledgeable, and it’s just a really good idea for a blog (it’ll take him two years to complete, hence the 2009 end date).

Anyway, find out more about the Slapstick Blog-a-Thon from Film of the Year, which supplies these suggestions for possible themes:

Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Charley Chase, Dangerous Stunts, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, Harold Lloyd, How/Why does it make us laugh?, Max Davidson, The Three Stooges, Slapstick awards, Joe E. Brown, Fay Tincher, W.C. Fields, History and slapstick, Leo McCarey, The art of pie throwing, Jerry Lewis, John Bunny, Our Gang, Origin of the word, Monty Banks, Seltzer bottles, Mel Brooks, Max Linder, Slapstick and violence, Snub Pollard, Slapstick style, Harry Langdon, Ben Turpin, Avant-garde slapstick, André Deed, Things fall apart, Hal Roach, Mack Sennett, The Keystone Company, Make your own slapstick short, The Keystone Kops, Slapstick Animation, Stan Laurel, slapstick and dance, Oliver Hardy, Abbott and Costello, The Marx Brothers…

The Bioscope will be contributing something.