Charcoal???

Would it have been easier to take had he referenced: "Yo' lips!"?

Nothing is more beautiful than nothing.

Well, more than that, throughout the skyscraper scene, the black character is portrayed as both stupid and lazy. Of course, in comedies there are many silly characters-- many buffoons and idiots, etc.-- but it was the manner of this character's combined laziness and stupidity that is unmistakably crafted to satisfy the worst kind of stereotypes of blacks held by whites at the time. In retrospect, this embarrassing inclusion certainly does mar the film's intended exciting climax.

That said, for me at least the final half hour of this film is exciting, whereas the first hour is deadly dull, with a number of routines so hackneyed that going through the motions of them just made me squirm with impatience rather than laugh. Clearly, this film bears the mark of Lloyd trying to learn how to make the transition from silent to talkies, and while coming to rely on dialog he loses all of the creativity that had made Lloyd's, Keaton's, and Chaplin's silents so jam-packed with enjoyment.

That said, don't give up on Lloyd's talkies! He does quickly learn to make that transition, and he comes out with enjoyable movies like The Milky Way and The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, a memorably bizarre film like The Cat's Paw, and absolutely excellent stuff like Movie Crazy, which is one of his very best (and in which Lloyd seems a dead ringer for Woody Allen, by the way)!

In the clip shown in "Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy", he calls Willie Best "Charley"

The character is supposed to be a jerk, but the portrayal the negro and the sailor as literally mentally disabled to contrast with the hero's half-clever antics is kind of nasty