Mack Sennett was born an anarchist, a disturber of the peace who captured working-class resentments and turned them into comic mayhem at the expense of authority of all kinds. "Nearly every one of us lives in the secret hope that someday before he dies, he will be able to swat a policeman's hat down around his ears," he once remarked. Had Attorney General John Ashcroft's minions been at work a century ago, they would surely have noticed that the cop-twitting Sennett was a foreigner, a farm-born Canadian who, having endured the terrors of an evangelical boarding school, had good reason to rebel.

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