A husband spies his wife in the arms of another man, bursts into the house, and shoots them both dead. Suddenly he does a double take. “This isn’t my house,” he exclaims. “That’s not my wife!”

This is just one of the dark comedic images born from the mind of film’s most outrageous provocateur. Relentlessly physical, extremely cynical, and guided by bizarre dream logic, each of his films was a weapon turned against the conventions of cinema. His name was Buster Keaton.

This summer, Film Forum is presenting a series of features and shorts by Keaton on Mondays from August 7 to September 25, and to those raised in the era of color and sound, it might sound more like homework than entertainment. Keaton was canonized in the ’60s by cinema scholars, becoming part of the Holy Trinity of silent movie comedians: Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Keaton, forever and ever, amen. He delivered his classics in the 1920s, before bad business decisions, bad marriages, and booze drove a stake through his career. But those classics have stood the test of time, regularly appearing on all-time best-of lists.

Still, Keaton made silent movies, and anyone who tells you to see silent movies for fun is showing off, because the majority of them aren’t much fun at all. They should be studied, but enjoying them is another matter. So while Buster Keaton should be on every film school curriculum, should he be on movie screens? Is he actually worth your $11?

The short answer is “yes.” With their “life is stress” message, these flicks are ready-made for New Yorkers: cynical, fast, and unsentimental.

Keaton grew up in vaudeville, famous for an act he performed with his parents about a rambunctious child in which he was thrown all over the stage and even into the audience. The act was so violent and mean-spirited that when the Three Keatons (who had shared bills around the country with Harry Houdini and W.C. Fields, among others) came to New York, they were arrested on charges of child abuse and barred from performing in the city.

Following the dissolution of the act, a maturing Keaton saw moviemaking as a chance to project his “anything for a laugh” attitude onto a bigger playground; even today, no one else would play a hurricane destroying a Mississippi town for laughs, or cast a prison riot as a comedy.

Keaton’s movies are stunningly pessimistic, destructive, and surreal. In his world, the last stop on the “A” train is Alaska, the only good use for a building is to knock it down, and marriage is a trap. These attitudes blend in “One Week” (August 7), in which newlyweds receive a build-it-yourself house as a wedding present. They wrestle with the instructions, finally producing a monstrosity that spins like a pinwheel in the first high wind and ultimately explodes into kindling. Anyone who’s ever put together a bookshelf from IKEA can identify.

Perhaps the most gifted physical comedian in history, the stunts Keaton pulled off are worthy of Jackie Chan, only without the mugging. In “Cops” (September 18) he’s a hapless schlub who, while trying to impress a girl, accidentally throws a bomb into a police parade and gets chased through New York by an army of cops. Inspired by an anarchist bombing on Wall Street that had killed 30 people just two years before, “Cops” is a feverish display of physicality, with Keaton playing seesaw on a ladder and repeatedly jumping onto and off of speeding cars. Just when he’s finally escaped, he’s snubbed by the object of his desire and, without hesitation, he walks into a police station. Cut to: his headstone.

“Cops” was shot in 1922,the same year that James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” were published, so it’s no wonder that when Keaton starred in Samuel Beckett’s only movie, “Film” (1964), he seemed bored. He’d already covered the futility of existence 42 years earlier — and made it funny.

In 1924, he topped the manic pace of “Cops” with “Sherlock Jr.” (September 11), which is remembered mostly for its sequence of Keaton trapped inside a motion picture. What’s forgotten is the insanely inspired chase scene at the end of the film, which includes a baffling stunt that sees him elude his pursuers by jumping through the stomach of an elderly woman.In addition, 1924 saw the release of “The Navigator” (August 14), which delivers the kind of rhythmic physical genius that causes the intervening 80 years to melt away. It’s a flick that feels like it was made yesterday.

If Keaton’s features tend to end happily, his short movies usually end with him dead (“The Frozen North”), burning in hell (“The Haunted House”), or heading off to Reno for a quickie divorce (“My Wife’s Relations”). In fact, the shorts are little more than rock solid set-ups that unravel into an escalating series of stunts. “The High Sign” (August 7) starts with Keaton engulfed in a massive, murderous conspiracy and ends in a lightning-fast chase through a booby-trapped mansion that goes on for so long, and is so precise, it will leave you lightheaded. In “My Wife’s Relations” (August 28), Keaton takes revenge on his in-laws who were, by all accounts, hateful monsters.

The kings of silent comedy have become embalmed icons, with Harold Lloyd’s dangle from a clock face eternally reproduced but divorced from its context, and Charlie Chaplin’s little tramp used to market everything from computers to pizzerias. Both of these men made films that were so timely that as the 1920s receded into the past, their edge dulled. Chaplin also indulged in an awful lot of sentiment and some of the sugar in his movies has curdled into sappiness.

But Keaton’s stone-face is immune to the eroding influence of time. We can project whatever we’d like upon it. In Buster’s universe, where innocent men got to jail, fools rush off to war, dark conspiracies crush the unwary, monstrous in-laws destroy happy homes, houses fall apart, trains crash, boats sink, and plans go awry, our hero stares out with his long-suffering deadpan, as if to ask, “You expected the world to make sense?”

Now that’s comedy.