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An anarchic but well-intentioned soul, in the tradition of the music hall or circus clown, Fred Evans’ Pimple was initially garbed in blazer, cricket cap and clown make-up with a central parting that denoted the overgrown schoolboy. The early films tended to be of the 'chase' genre but in 1913 Joe Evans wrote the first of the Pimple parodies. Inspired by the lavish British and Colonial production of 'The Battle of Waterloo' (Charles Weston, 1913), Joe wrote a skit making their lack of production values part of the joke (they shot most of their early films in the back yard of their Eel Pie Island premises on the river Thames). The use of comic inter-titles, traditionally criticised for interrupting the kinetic physicality of later comic films (e.g. in Keaton or Chaplin), is more than compensated for in their humour which was greatly enhanced by the audience's familiarity with the subject being spoofed. An article on Pimple in The Bioscope praised Evans’ fertility of invention and referred to his brand of humour as ‘often as nearly akin to wit as is possible in a medium which receives no assistance from the spoken word. The parodies became the staple format of the Pimple films from this time on and Joe and Fred Evans gleefully ridiculed topical situations and every important film and play of the era (such as Trilby, Humanity, Ivanhoe, the Lieutenant Rose serials and even Shakespeare). By the mid-1910s they were producing a film a week and Fred claimed in 1915 that they had made over two hundred. |
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