"What makes the clock stunt even more impressive, Ms. Lloyd said, is that her grandfather was hanging on with only eight fingers."

"In 1919 he had lost part of his right index finger, his entire right thumb and part of his palm when he attempted to light a cigarette from the fuse of what he thought was a prop bomb for a publicity photo. But the bomb exploded, temporarily blinding him and putting him in the hospital for about two weeks. For years he wore a prosthetic glove to mask the injury in movies, but not in his personal life."

From "A Man Hanging From a Clock. Yes, It’s That Silent Film. 'Safety Last!' the 1923 Harold Lloyd movie best known for the dangerous scene, marks its centennial" (NYT).

You can watch the entire movie on YouTube. I'll start you in the middle of things (and keep going, because it's not just the clock, it's the rat, the gun, the anemometer, etc.):

"He was so afraid of girls that he made a secret study of them, and the more he studied them, the more he feared them."

So reads an intertitle 1 minute and 19 seconds into the 1924 Harold Lloyd movie "Girl Shy" (which I watched because my son John identified it as his favorite movie of that year). 

The character is what these days we might call an "incel." He's also, essentially, a pornographer, to the extent such a person could appear in a mainstream movie in 1924. He is writing "The Secret of Making Love" by thinking up a stereotypical female and dictating the right approach for the male to gain the quickest possible sexual access...

 

The access is indicated by his putting a check by her name in his little book. If you watch that clip, you'll see his visualization of the seduction of, first, the "vampire" (i.e., the vamp) and, second, the flapper. In case you'd like to know this pathetic little man's imagined mode of conquest, the vampire is seduced by ignoring her (negging?), and the flapper responds to his acting like a "caveman" (domestic violence?). 

Of course, this is played (successfully!) as comedy, and of course, our little man — Harold Meadows — finds a real woman to love. Here, he tries to tell her about his book, gets carried away in rhapsodizing about the new direction of his next chapter, and is thwarted by a turtle who slowly drags him into the muck where he becomes embarrassingly gooey and sticky. He's sitting on the turtle, which I have to say represents his genitalia: