Buster Keaton was one of the greatest comedians and filmmakers in the world until around 1929 or 1930. His work and his life took terrible nosedives then due to problems in his personal relationships, the consumption of alcohol, financial mismanagement, the coming of "talkies' and the decision to leave his own independent production company and make his movies thereafter for M.G.M. Film historians argue as to whether the problem was that the studio didn't know what to do with him or that he didn't know what to do with himself.
It was probably a combination of both but he worked for M.G.M. for four years making movies of varying quality and declining success. In 1934, he found himself out of that huge studio and laboring for smaller companies on smaller budgets. Still, he occasionally, now and then, once in a while managed to make films that almost lived up to his old standard. He made sixteen two-reel comedies for Educational Pictures, which was like Sandy Koufax pitching for a farm team. (I should be able to come up with a better analogy than that but you know what I mean. How about "Gordon Ramsay flipping burgers at a Wendy's?" Or "Laurence Olivier working with Ed Wood?")
When Educational went out of business, Keaton moved over to Columbia where a few other once-great comedians like Harry Langdon and Charley Chase made two-reelers when no other studio would have them. Mostly though, the big stars at the Columbia shorts department were The Three Stooges. It was for Buster yet another notch down and one of these days, I'll link you to a few of those films and you can judge for yourself how good they were.
(A "two-reeler," by the way, was a short film, usually around 16-24 minutes in length. They became less and less popular with moviegoers over the years but for a while, all the great movie comedians made them…somewhere.)
What I have here for you today was probably the best short Keaton did for Educational — Grand Slam Opera. Made in 1936, it spoofed the then-popular radio program, Major Bowes' Amateur Hour, and also some scenes in the 1935 Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers feature, Top Hat. Grand Slam Opera is a pretty good little film though every print of it I've ever seen obviously came from the same source material with the same frustrating splices. There are a couple of bad ones in its opening song, a parody of George M. Cohan's "So Long, Mary." (Educational refused to pay for the rights to use the tune so Buster paid the fee out of his own depleted pockets.)
This is not Buster at his best but it is him at his best when he was at his worst. That's still better than a lot of comics' best when they were at their best…