By the end of the 1990s, almost nine decades since their first appearance on the early silent screen in Hoffmeyer's Legacy (1912), Mack Sennett's Keystone Kops had long entered the language as a byword for bungling, absurd, and hilarious incompetency. Icons of the early comedy "flickers" that made Sennett the most significant, famous, and successful pioneer of film comedy, the Kops, named for Sennett's Keystone company, featured regularly in the American silent era slapstick movies pioneered at Keystone Studios from 1912. With the release of The Bangville Police (1913), the Keystone Kops were established as a much-loved American institution and an integral element of Sennett's production output and comedy style. Sporting handlebar mustaches and ill fitting uniforms, the conscientious but utterly inept policemen (and sometimes the Keystone Firemen) fell out of cars, under cars, over cliffs, and more often than not over themselves, all at artificially high...