Summary
As The Kid sits on the stoop with his stuffed dog, an older urchin suddenly comes over and steals the dog. The two boys get into a brawl in the middle of the street, hitting one another. When The Tramp comes out of his house, he sees the fight and grabs The Kid, trying to break it up, but he cannot. He eventually decides to sit on the sidelines with everyone else and cheer The Kid on. During a break in the fight, The Tramp coaches The Kid in how to fight.
When the older boy has been injured by The Kid, his brother, a much older, tough-looking guy, steps in to fight on his behalf. The brother tells the young thief to fight The Kid, and they start to fight again. The brother then turns to The Tramp and says, "If your kid beats my brother, then I'm going to beat you."
As the young boys fight, The Tramp becomes more and more anxious about having to go up against the brother, and so eventually holds The Kid down with his foot in an effort to make it look like he's lost. However, The Kid gets up and hits the older boy and The Tramp must face a fight with the brother. As the brother swipes at The Tramp, he manages to duck out of the way over and over.
Suddenly, The Woman appears and tries to break up the fight. She tries to convince them to stop fighting and they shake hands to appease her. The Woman says, "Remember—if he smites you on one cheek, offer him the other." The brother invites The Tramp to hit his cheek and The Tramp starts hitting him with a brick. The Tramp successfully escapes getting hit at all. The brother staggers away in a daze after getting hit in the head by the brick many times.
Suddenly, as The Tramp sticks his head out the door, The Woman enters carrying The Kid, claiming that he is ill. The Woman says she must go, but that she will return, and The Tramp calls in a country doctor. When the doctor enters, he immediately takes The Tramp's temperature and goes over to The Kid. He runs a series of tests on The Kid, but seems basically incompetent.
When The Tramp calls the doctor over to the table and invites him to sit down, the chair breaks. As he sits down, the doctor asks The Tramp if he is The Kid's father, to which The Tramp replies, "Well, practically." The doctor is taken aback, but The Tramp tries to explain, holding up the note that he found with the orphan boy. The doctor says that The Kid needs "proper care and attention," and leaves after promising to see that the child gets it.
We see the boy healing in bed and reading the newspaper as the Tramp attempts to cook. Suddenly, a representative from the County Orphan Asylum arrives at the house, and lets himself up to The Tramp's apartment, looking for The Kid.
Analysis
So much of the humor in the film is physical, as represented by the fight that breaks out between The Kid and the boy who stole his stuffed animal. At first, The Tramp tries to stop the fight, but seeing that it is entertaining, he cannot help but cheer from the sidelines. Then, after The Kid has hurt the thief, the thief's brother enters, a towering sight gag of a bully. We know it is only a matter of time before The Tramp must go up against this big brute, and it is this physical threat that makes the scene so humorous.
Another element at play in the humor is the irony of the scene. In this fight scene, The Kid is much smaller than his adversary, yet he proves to be much tougher than him, intimidating the older boy with his scrappiness. The Kid's unexpected toughness works out in an ironically disadvantageous way when the thief's older brother tells The Tramp that he will beat him up if The Kid wins. As they go head to head, the viewer witnesses the irony of The Tramp hoping that The Kid does not win the fight, as it will mean a worse outcome for him. The humor of the moment is heightened by this irony, as The Tramp does all that he can but fails to prevent his ward from doing well in the fight.
When the physical fight does break out, the irony of the unmatched fighters continues to get pushed to absurd limits. Even though The Tramp is small and clearly a weak fighter, he manages to evade the punches of the comically large brother again and again, and even gets in a few blows of his own. The violence becomes outrageous and over-the-top, with a brick being treated as though it were made out of rubber and a weakling somehow wriggling free from every danger he faces.
Nearly every character in the film, apart from The Man and The Woman, is painted as comical and absurd. When The Tramp calls in a country doctor to examine The Kid after the fight, the doctor wields no authority, seeming more like a liability than an expert. A great deal of humor comes from his being incompetent in his job, in a way that even the feckless Tramp finds alarming. In the moral universe of The Kid, no individual, even those in authority, is immune from the absurdity of human error.
Despite being mismatched, The Kid and The Tramp have a strong connection. Over the years, The Tramp has become attached to taking care of The Kid, and when the country doctor threatens to find an authority who will give the boy the proper care and attention, The Tramp is upset to realize that what he is doing for the boy may not be looked on kindly by the state. Likewise, the audience is attached to their unlikely connection, charmed by their mutual dependence, so the threat of state intervention seems undoubtedly negative.
