‘Scot‐free flip‐top’ or Ish 2b

The phrase 'Scot-free flip-top' comes from J. H. Prynne's late modernist long poem Snooty Tipoffs (2021), 1 where it already has a slapstick ring, and in the vicinity of a special issue on Chaplin it may easily acquire a Chaplinish quality.Cut to the Chaplin of The Circus (1928) in the role of impromptu funambulist, edging across the highwire with the help of a propman's pulley, then suddenly, without his knowing it, cut free from the cable and risking with every flip-flop a fatal topple and emasculating 'flip-top'.Surviving freedoms like these 'scot-free' is Chaplin's forte-one he has bequeathed to numberless cartoon characters since-while the almost-fall is how we are used to seeing him fall.Peter Ackroyd counts that in the 20-min film One A. M. (1916) Chaplin falls 46 times, 2 as though he were refining his way of falling into flight.This brings to my mind two more Chaplinish moments.First: 2025 Wimbledon champion Jannik Sinner's perfected art of the skid or ankle-dragging slide.Second: the ending of Beckett's Mercier and Camier (1946), when Beckett's double act confront the bitter alternatives of 'Ruin and collapse' and must choose how to act. 3 Either way, they are for it.Yet in approaching their fall as a mutual and ongoing game, they put off whatever it is the end has in store for them, and float.Beckett writes: 'Soon falls begin to enter into play, now Camier accompanying Mercier (in his fall), now the reverse, and now the two collapsing simultaneously, as one man, without preconcentration and in perfect interdependency'. 4 Like the Chaplin of Beckett's The Kid (1921) and his 5-year-old co-star Jackie Coogan-of whom Chaplin wrote 'he is the most amazing person I ever met in my life' 5 -Mercier and Camier's motion is fused into a single act by a 'perfect interdependency'.More Prynne: 'anchovy synergy'. 6 You can hardly tell the two men apart; they are holding hands throughout and 'even at the worst moments their hands kept faith, although no knowing now which gave and which received the clasp'. 7 The subject of this special issue is 'the Chaplinish', one of whose advantages is that it may be applied almost anywhere so long as you show your working.Unlike 'the Chaplinesque', the OED has never heard of it. 8 We may learn from the dictionary that 'Chaplinesque' came into existence in 1921 and immediately gained traction, overcoming the

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