There's the fellow who will make you laugh!
Whenever Lon Chaney played a clown on film, it pretty much guaranteed that it would be the kind that cries on the inside. Take 1928's Laugh, Clown, Laugh, directed by Herbert Brenon, in which he is Tito Beppi, who makes a good living clowning around with his partner Simon (Bernard Siegel) as Flik and Flok. When their traveling circus rolls into a small village, though, Tito finds an abandoned child he names Simonetta so Simon will agree to help him raise her. (Talk about blatant emotional manipulation.) The years go by, Tito and Simon's fortunes rise, and Simonetta grows up to be a young woman played by Loretta Young, who's poised to join the act as a tightrope walker, but Tito has to suppress his romantic feelings for her, believing she could never think of him that way.
Meanwhile, the innocent Simonetta also catches the eye of the indolent Count Luigi Ravelli (Nils Asther), who becomes Tito's unwitting rival when they both go to the same neurologist -- the Count for his fits of uncontrollable laughter and Tito for his crying spells -- whose diagnoses are all love-related. (After telling Tito to "lose no time in winning the lady," his second suggestion is for him to see Flik while he's in Rome, which may very well make this film the source of Rorschach's Pagliacci joke in Watchmen.) Simonetta, too, is distraught when the Count sends her pearls, a gesture she misinterprets, and Tito cheers her up by pretending to cry and having her powder his long nose and a stuffed cock he happens to have in his dressing room. (Paging Dr. Freud.) The Count's the one she winds up betrothed to, though, and Chaney makes sure Tito's heartbreak is palpable. Even under Flik's clown makeup, there's no mistaking how he feels.