Acceptable Targets: Chaplin once wrote in an essay: "People as a whole get satisfaction from seeing the rich get the worst of things."
Award Snub: City Lights and Modern Times were not nominated for a single Academy Award, although this may have had to do with Chaplin's disdain for the Academy and Hollywood as a whole (to the extent that he helped found United Artists to work outside the studio system), along with stories that he used his 1929 "Special Award" Oscar as a doorstop. See also Knight Fever.
Non Sequitur Scene - Chaplin's films perhaps pioneered the Non Sequitur Scene. In films such as Sunnyside and The Kid there were randomly inserted dream sequences where Charlie danced with girls dressed as angels, it had nothing to do with the overall plot and was never brought up again afterwards.
Ho Yay: Often. Behind the Screen (1916) included a shockingly overt example for the time. Chaplin is a movie stagehand, while Edna Purviance dresses as a boy and gets a job as a stagehand after failing to get hired as an actress. Charlie figures out her secret and kisses her. Eric Campbell intrudes, sees Charlie apparently kissing a boy, and pantomimes a mincing homosexual stereotype.