Laughing Gas (1914)
A dentist's assistant with no medical training takes over the practice for the day, dosing patients with nitrous oxide and turning the waiting room into a running brawl.
Laughing Gas was made in the same breakneck year Chaplin began directing his own pictures, and its dental-office setting let him mine slapstick from a real Victorian-era fad — nitrous oxide as both party trick and medical treatment.
Background
Directed by Charlie Chaplin for Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios and released July 9, 1914 — also known under alternate titles including The Dentist and Busy Little Dentist — Laughing Gas casts Chaplin as a dentist’s assistant with no real training who takes over the practice for the day. He dopes patients with nitrous oxide, mishandles the equipment, and picks fights at a neighboring pharmacy, turning the waiting room into a running brawl built around the real Victorian- and Edwardian-era fad for nitrous oxide as both a medical anesthetic and a recreational party trick.
What to watch for
The film’s place in Chaplin’s directing career stands out: after Laughing Gas, he would never again be directed by anyone else on a short film, having fully taken over his own comic timing and staging at Keystone within his first year there. The dental setting also lets him work a full inventory of body-based slapstick — bad posture, mishandled tools, patients knocked senseless — rather than relying on a single prop or gag, a structural approach he would refine further after leaving Keystone for Essanay the following year.
