Before talking about the great and glorious silent age, I first have to pass on to you all my latest obsession in the realm of historical sketch comedy, as you and I are probably of one heart in believing that it is, in general, A Fine Thing. Netflix recently told me that I had to watch That Mitchell and Webb Look, and it was entirely right. They don't JUST do historical sketches, but when they do, they are generally awesome - great core ideas executed and paced brilliantly. Here are six favorites to get you started - make sure the kids are out of the room though:

Queen Victoria and the Linden Trees
The SS and Tailoring
Jehovah and Abraham
Numberwang
Mr. Darcy and the Dance
The Clergy Returns

They also have some devastatingly wonderful comedy albums available off the iTunes once you've burned through the episodes which I am equally ecstatic about. So, duck in!

One of the interesting book genres you see from time to time are silent actor guidebooks from the teens and twenties, illustrated How-To Books for the proper way to convey surprise, anger, love, and so forth, with a single glance and gesture pairing. They could get rather specific : #145: Disconsolate After a Rejected Proposal, and so forth, for those actors faced with particularly unique situations.

Theda Bara has often been accused of being one of these paint-by-numbers emoters, but that's not entirely fair. Even in situations that seem to scream for a Standard Emote, she manages to always recast it, skew it a little Sinister or Unhinged, in ways it's still interesting to watch.

That said, she's not my favorite silent film actress. I'm not sure if the topic is ever going to come up again, so I have to get my plug in now for Miriam Cooper. She is BRILLIANT. She is almost forgotten now (her imdb profile doesn't even have a PICTURE, for crying out loud), mainly because the movies that were her big opportunities were also those that featured Lillian Gish, who was one of the towering superstars of the age. Her portrayal of The Friendless One in D.W. Griffith's Intolerance is absolutely entrancing - there's no other word for it. She stopped making films altogether in 1926, and lived on another fifty years, dying in 1976 after a bit of a well-deserved rediscovery.

- Count Dolby von Luckner