I’ve read that Buster Keaton’s stated goal was to get the audience to laugh, which is no small undertaking.

You really must pay attention to laugh at a silent film. With no voices to guide the narrative and scant words on the screen, the modern audience member must slow down to speed up — humor in 1926 is no less fast or biting.

I was given the funds to produce an outdoor silent film series by the generous support of the Vashon Park District. Similar to being in a furniture store and being pretty sure that the avocado green love seat will work in my living room, I was hopeful this film series would not be a total disaster — because it seemed like an awesome idea. And it was.

With intermittent original music scored and performed by the Ensemble Anomaly, a soft yellow din from the popcorn machine (used by the kind offering from the Chamber of Commerce) and the genius filmmaking of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, both nights were a success.

Both films have entirely different plots: Keaton, a projectionist, determined to sleuth his own predicament, and Chaplin, a machinist, who in and out of work stridently tries to escape his predicament. Both films end with each character in the arms of the woman whom they sought, yet in two distinctive ways. In the last scene of “Sherlock Jr.,” Keaton stares at and takes direction from the man in the film he is projecting, clumsily and half-heartily stroking the hand of the woman he has been vindicated by.

For a filmmaker so involved with trying to make us laugh, he also asks a serious question relevant today: Do we get our cues from cinema, or is cinema a simulacrum of our own ideals of who we want to be? Yikes. It doesn’t sound funny, and yet to see him play it out is touchingly sweet and sad at the same time.

Our tramp, on the other hand, employs any means necessary to get in or out of jail, blindly leads a pro-workers’ Communist march, is an accomplice in the theft of a department store, steals food, lies about stealing food, returns to a job as eagerly as he tried to dismantle it — all to, at the end of the film, encourage his love to “cheer up and smile … Everything is going to be great.”

One has a decidedly erratic morality and works to make life sweeter for the one he loves. The other is a dreamer, saddened by his station, and in the end, not sure that life with this woman whose finger now dons his ring will make him or her happy.

For me, their actions should sum up the character of their characters. But in the end, it’s who they loved and how they loved that says more about these men than the compass they followed to get there.

— Islander Matt Lawrence curated this summer’s outdoor silent film series.