Screencap 1 (Unborn Elephant)

(Stealing an idea from Nathaniel, among others.) (I'll identify the movie in a few days.)

Charley Chase's 1925 film Isn't Life Terrible? isn't up to Chase's usual standards, at least judging by what I've seen of his work. The Leo McCarey-directed short unfortunately depends for much of its running time on racial humor, as Chase and his wife inadvertently swap their daughter for a little black girl while embarking on a cruise. I'm assuming that the repeated closeups on the child (who, incidentally, is cute as a button) are supposed to be hilarious, but I didn't find them so funny. Overall, the film is sloppy. The scene from which I extracted this intertitle is typically confusing: Charley and a camping-gear salesman are lying together on a foldable camp bed, and one of them says the line about the unborn elephants, which is a lead-in to a punchline: "I can feel their tusks in my back." It appears that they're both talking before the intertitle comes up, and while it's obviously Charley's punchline, it's unclear who sets it up. Plus, it's not very funny anyway.

Travis deserves special mention: he guessed Big Red Riding Hood, a Charley Chase short from the same year (released a mere 90 days earlier) and also directed by McCarey.