In an era before synchronized sound, when title cards anchored a film’s narrative in a specific language, one genre effortlessly leaped over national borders, cultural barriers, and linguistic divides: slapstick comedy. The sight of a pompous man slipping on a banana peel, a desperate chase across a rapidly escalating series of obstacles, or a lover’s meticulously planned rendezvous descending into chaotic failure—these scenarios provoked roars of laughter from Tokyo to Berlin, from Moscow to Rio de Janeiro. Silent comedy was the closest cinema has ever come to a true universal language. Its grammar was not words, but physics; its vocabulary…

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