So did Mack Sennett

Yes, his new Broadway play is called “Hangmen.” Sure, he writes about violent people doing violent things. But at heart, he said, he likes a good laugh.
NYT.

So did Mack Sennett.
Like a good laugh, I mean.
He was also a very violent man.
Who came from what's called Upper Canada.
Although we'd call it Lower Canada.
Sennett became an American citizen
the same year as the Dempsey-Firpo fight.

As I was saying . . . 
Sennett got in Dutch with some bookies
way back before World War One.
The bookies had an interest in a movie
studio out in California.
Although it was really nothing but a dusty grove 
of lemon trees with a large tool shed where they stored the cameras and an Italian barber
who gave shaves under the shade of a large eucalyptus tree.
Anywho . . . so the bookies said they'd cut Sennett 
a deal and let him run the studio for them --
just to get out of the movie bizzness.
They didn't think there was any future in it.

Sennett had no idea what to do with a movie studio.
He was an itinerant opera singer.
Or so I read somewhere. Maybe. Possibly.
But there was this handyman at the studio with strabismus.
Sennett thought he looked funny, so he put him in front of
the camera and had things thrown at him.
Including pies. 
This made Mack Sennett famous and rich and psychotic.
He murdered Charlie Chaplin. But got off on a technicality.
A guy named Billy West took over the Chaplin character.
Sennett sliced two fingers off of Harold Lloyd's left hand in a bar fight.
It was covered up with a lot of hush money.
He had Buster Keaton thrown in front of a train.
Luckily, he jumped onto the cowcatcher just in time.
He insisted that Mabel Normand be his sparring partner
when he was learning muay thai boxing.
He put castor oil in Harry Langdon's chamomile tea during the Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918. 
Like I say. He was a violent and brutal man.
But he liked a good laugh.
And he lived long enough to lose his studio and all his
money in the Great Depression,
and then wound up with a bit part in the movie
"Abbott & Costello Meet the Keystone Kops"
in 1955.
And that was certainly a good laugh on him.