Laurel and Hardy
Laurel and Hardy, were a comedy team that is widely regarded as the greatest in film history. Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy made more than 100 comedies together between 1921 and 1950, with Laurel playing the bumbling and innocent foil to the pompous Hardy.
Stan Jefferson, the son of a theatrical manager and performer, became a music hall comedian during his teenage years, and by 1910 he was understudying Charlie Chaplin in Fred Karno’s traveling comedy troupe. After the Karno company disbanded during an American tour in 1913, Jefferson worked in American films and vaudeville for several years, during which time he changed his surname to Laurel. Laurel found minor success as the star of his own series of comedy shorts in the early 1920s, but within a few years acting took second place to work as a director and gag writer. He signed with Hal Roach Studios in 1925 with the understanding that his primary duties would be behind the cameras.
Norvell Hardy’s father died in late 1892; in tribute, the younger Hardy later adopted his father’s first name, Oliver. While managing a movie theatre in 1913, Hardy decided that he could do better—or at least no worse—than the actors he saw on-screen, so he went to work at the Lubin studio in Jacksonville, Florida, the following year. During the next decade Hardy appeared in more than 200 mostly short films for various studios (beginning with Outwitting Dad [1914] and including an appearance as the Tin Man in the 1925 silent version of The Wizard of Oz) before being signed by Hal Roach in 1926.
(Read Lillian Gish’s 1929 Britannica essay on silent film.)
Laurel returned to acting when a last-minute replacement for Hardy (who had seriously injured himself in a cooking accident) was needed for a Mabel Normand comedy. The two soon became members of Roach’s “All-Stars,” an ensemble of comic performers featured in several short comedies. They were frequent costars in the All-Star Comedies but not yet a team. As producer Roach and director-supervisor Leo McCarey noticed the chemistry between “the thin one” (Laurel) and “the fat one” (Hardy), Laurel and Hardy started to work together more often. By the end of 1927 they had become an official team. The comedic formula that they developed was simple but enduring: two friends who possessed a combination of utter brainlessness and unhampered optimism, or, as Laurel himself described it, “two minds without a single thought.” Laurel was the guileless simpleton, the cause of most of their troubles, whereas Hardy played the self-important fastidious man of the world whose plans always went awry because of his misplaced faith in both his partner and his own abilities. They frequently managed to convert simple everyday situations into disastrous tangles by acts of incredible naïveté and incompetence. The team had attained enormous popularity by the end of the silent era through comic gems such as Putting Pants on Philip (1927), Two Tars (1928), Liberty (1929), and Big Business (1929).
The development of motion-picture sound brought about the full flowering of the team’s genius. Their voices—Laurel’s British accent and Hardy’s Southern tones—were perfectly suited to their characters, and Laurel devised several ingenious audio gags (such as the well-timed offscreen crash) to take full advantage of the sound track. As a performer, Laurel had such trademarks as frequent head-scratching, a whimpering cry (usually punctuated with a plaintive “Well, I couldn’t help it!”), and a blank stare completely bereft of thought or emotion. Hardy developed a vast array of eccentricities: flowery speech and mannerisms, explosive double takes, tie-twiddling, and frequent looks into the camera to elicit audience sympathy. It has been said that first-time viewers tend to find Laurel the more immediately funny of the pair, whereas longtime fans find Hardy the more enduringly funny. They appeared in more than 40 sound shorts for Roach, including the classics Hog Wild (1930), Helpmates (1931), Towed in a Hole (1932), and the Academy Award-winning The Music Box (1932). Although never credited as such on the films, Laurel was the de facto director and head writer for virtually all of the team’s Roach comedies. That may explain the consistent look and feel of the films, even though they were attributed to numerous directors.
Largely out of economic necessity, the Roach Studios began to star Laurel and Hardy in feature films. They made their feature debut in Pardon Us (1931) and went on to star in 13 more features through 1940. Their best full-length comedies included The Devil’s Brother (1933; U.K. title Fra Diavolo), Babes in Toyland (1934, rereleased as March of the Wooden Soldiers), Our Relations (1936), Block-Heads (1938), A Chump at Oxford (1940), and the two features generally regarded as their finest, Sons of the Desert (1933) and Way Out West (1937). Because of the dwindling market for short subjects, the team abandoned two-reelers reluctantly in 1935 but remained mostly contented while at Roach Studios, which, as one of the smaller studios, allowed them a greater degree of artistic freedom than they would have found elsewhere.
The importance of that artistic license became manifest in the 1940s, when Laurel and Hardy worked for Twentieth Century-Fox and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. As those studios denied the team the creative input to which they had become accustomed at Roach, their comedy suffered, and their films from the 1940s are regarded as their weakest body of work. They remained popular, however, with wartime audiences. Their final film was the European-produced Atoll K (1950; also released as Utopia and Robinson Crusoeland), after which they toured English music halls to great success. They remained an official team until Hardy’s death in 1957.
In 1960 Laurel was awarded an honorary Oscar for his contributions to film comedy. Lou Costello, of the comedy team of Abbott and Costello, once said of Laurel and Hardy, “They were the funniest comedy team of all time.” Most critics and film scholars throughout the years have agreed with that assessment.