Chaplin and Keaton (among others, like Lloyd) are still hilarious and their films technically impressive and full of movie-magic spectacle. I’ve watched a fair amount (certainly a ton more than most people) of silent film and IMO the comics are by far the most-accessible of the bunch to a modern audience, requiring minimal “education” on how to understand, appreciate, enjoy, or “read” them. They’re the only ones I’d unreservedly recommend to just about anyone who likes movies.
Very few dramatic silents are even close to as accessible—I’d say the ones that age second-best are those that lean art-film, but those are hindered by that entire genre being obscure and difficult to enjoy for most people, so while they may not be much more challenging to enjoy than a talkie art film and might deliver just as much quality as most of those can, that’s a fairly different bar to clear than enjoying a comedy or ordinary drama.
The comedies do seem to be surviving better, too, even if not as well as they deserve. The dramas survive in the public consciousness as a very-small number of well-known scenes or images (the rocket-in-the-moon’s-eye, the android from Metropolis) but reference most anything else from even those films, let alone other very-well-regarded but barely-watched-today movies, and nobody but a few film nerds will notice.
Very few dramatic silents are even close to as accessible—I’d say the ones that age second-best are those that lean art-film, but those are hindered by that entire genre being obscure and difficult to enjoy for most people, so while they may not be much more challenging to enjoy than a talkie art film and might deliver just as much quality as most of those can, that’s a fairly different bar to clear than enjoying a comedy or ordinary drama.
The comedies do seem to be surviving better, too, even if not as well as they deserve. The dramas survive in the public consciousness as a very-small number of well-known scenes or images (the rocket-in-the-moon’s-eye, the android from Metropolis) but reference most anything else from even those films, let alone other very-well-regarded but barely-watched-today movies, and nobody but a few film nerds will notice.