Charlie Chaplin's The Kid is by far the most famous character to emerge from the 1920's. He absolutely competes for the same audience space as Buster Keaton. In this part of the twenties we’re seeing the different genres emerge and the notion of celebrity being created and cultivated by audience familiarity. Artists are creating shticks for themselves to be recognized out of the mass of movies. It's an interesting phenomena in and of itself, the branding of a fake persona through the medium of film. This is a phenomena that advertisers would later employ to make the likes of Geico's Gecco, Kellog's Tony the Tiger and other fake personas household names.
While Buster Keaton primarily relies on physical gags to bring laughs to the audience Chaplin brings heart to his shtick. This film really cemented the possibility for what comedy can do by mixing in drama within the comedic slapstick moments and the ability to shift gears between the two categories. Chaplin becomes a master of creating comedy out of dramatic realities. Something that would culminate in his last work, The Great Dictator, but he clearly understood that people tend to laugh the hardest after tears or after suspense. That laughter is a great sigh of relief from the tensions and brutalities of everyday life.
His camerawork is also moving use out of the two dimensional set mentality, employing true locations, and compositional framing that takes into account the z plane rather than just x and y.