Believe me, I understand that Charley Chase did a lot better shorts than this one -- his next was the classic THE PIP FROM PITTSBURGH. Despite the title, Charley doesn't sing, the leading lady is Dorothy Granger and not Thelma Todd, the gags seem a lot more random and unprefigured, and instead of musical cues, we get Marvin Hatley doing sound effects. The thing is, random and chaotic and un-Chase-like as they are, they're all funny and I enjoyed the movie vastly.
Still, it's not top-drawer Chase, and when things go wrong, you look for a scapegoat. I'm going to point the finger at studio head Hal Roach. This was Jame Horne's last credit as Chase's director. He would be turned over to direct Laurel & Hardy, and although his replacement would be Charley's brother James Parrott, the set must have been chaotic by Chase's standards. Roach did this a lot to Charley, moving his director to another unit, on the grounds that he was a fine comedy director himself. Yeah, but when you're appearing in a movie, you need a director, and the movie suffers.
Still, there are plenty of funny gags -- I love the sequence in which chiropractor Lena Malena tries to remove a fishbone from Charley's throat, I think the sound effects are very funny and Dorothy Granger is cute as a bug in her first big role, even though she didn't last.