A Century-Old Comedy Comes to Life at the Brook Arts Center

Harold Lloyd's Girl Shy screens at the Brook Arts Center with live Wurlitzer accompaniment — and holds up completely.

Bill Mild · April 18, 2026

There's something special about watching a 102-year-old silent comedy in a room full of people laughing at the same jokes audiences laughed at in 1924. That was the scene this afternoon at the Brook Arts Center on Hamilton Street, where roughly fifty people gathered for a screening of Harold Lloyd's Girl Shy — accompanied, as all great silent films should be, by a live organist playing a genuine 1926 Wurlitzer.

The organist was Ian Fraser, who performs silent film, and the instrument beneath his hands has its own story. The Brook's Wurlitzer Opus #1519 — a three-keyboard, ten-rank pipe organ with more than 750 pipes hidden in chambers on either side of the proscenium arch. It's maintained by the Garden State Theatre Organ Society, whose members clearly love it. Hearing it fill the house, you understand why.

Girl Shy (1924) is Harold Lloyd at his best. Lloyd — alongside Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, one of the great silent comedians — plays Harold Meadows, a tailor's apprentice so painfully shy around women that he can barely speak. The irony is that he's secretly writing a how-to manual on how to romance them. What follows is a romantic comedy that builds to one of the great chase sequences ever put on film: Harold commandeering every available means of transportation — a car, a horse, a trolley, a motorcycle — to reach a wedding before it's too late.

It holds up completely. The physical comedy is precise and relentless, Lloyd's timing is impeccable, and the final chase is genuinely thrilling a century later. The audience today seemed to agree.

The Brook Arts Center has built a quiet reputation for events like this: programming that takes the building's history seriously and uses it. A 1924 romantic comedy, with a live organist, in a 1926 theater — that's not a novelty act. That's the real thing.

Coming Up Soon

On Sunday, May 3rd at 3:00 PM, the Brook Arts Center presents Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush — this time with the acclaimed Paragon Ragtime Orchestra providing full live accompaniment. Tickets start at $20 and are available at brookarts.org.