Andrew McConnell Stott muses over the dual personas of many comedians:
Is it a condition of comic genius to be perpetually wrestling with demons? From Canio, the iconic, stiletto-wielding clown of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s 1892 opera, Pagliacci, to modern greats like Richard Pryor, Andy Kaufman, and John Belushi, it would seem so. Even in Chaplin’s day, the depressed and often violent clown was a well-established trope, both offstage and on.
Around the time of his divorce, Chaplin had fallen into such “full-blown despair” that he told the journalist Benjamin De Casseres:
There are days when contact with any human being makes me physically ill … I am oppressed at such times and in such periods by what was known among the Romantics as world-weariness. I feel then a total stranger to life.
Back to Stott:
That comedy is a mansion built on tragic foundations was a theory given credence by Sigmund Freud.
“A jest betrays something serious,” he wrote in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, which argued that humor was a means of circumnavigating taboo and repackaging unpalatable thoughts into digestible form. At the heart of Freud’s argument is a reluctance to accept comedy on its own terms as comedy, viewing it rather as a proxy for something kept hidden. For Freud, Chaplin was “a particularly simple and transparent case” of someone who used humor to explore the darker states of mind. Writing to his friend Max Schiller, Freud commented how Chaplin always seemed to play the same part:
The weak, poor, helpless, clumsy young man for whom things turn out right in the end. Do you think he has to forget his own ego for this role? On the contrary, he only acts himself as he was in his bleak youth. He cannot escape from those impressions, and even today he is compensating himself for the deprivations and discouragement of that period.
On that note, Harmony Korine depicts a deeply conflicted Chaplin in a NSFW scene from his 2007 film Mister Lonely:
The Dish 