An amateur's thoughts on Laurel and Hardy

For years, I have underestimate Laurel and Hardy, influenced, I believe, by too many encounters with their inferior work. January's tribute to Hal Roach on the Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind offered a chance to take another look at the classic comedy team and enjoy some of their best shorts and features, and I have to say, I have been missing out a bit. Though I stand by my belief that the affectionate title "The Boys" should go to Wheeler and Woolsey, I don't want to take anything away from the legendary Ollie and Stan.

I mainly focused on the shorts this time around, though I did enjoy the heck out of the classic feature-length "Sons of the Desert." After seeing a healthy chunk of L&H, I feel confident in offering the following observations, though I retain mere amateur status in discussing the guys (see what I did there?) and their films:

*I remain an Ollie man as opposed to a Stan man: OK, it's goofy to feel you have to be a devotee of one over the other because, after all, they are a team, but I'm just sayin'. While I appreciate and enjoy the fine work of Stan Laurel, I find Oliver Hardy more effective as a pure laugh-getter. I think I always had this opinion, dating back even to those terrible "Scooby-Doo" episodes which guest-starred "Laurel and Hardy." As a kid, I simply laughed more at Ollie, and I remain more captivated by him as an adult. It's not something I can easily break down, but I always did have an affection for the overdog for some reason. For example, I rooted for Tom against Jerry, Wile E. Coyote against the Road Runner, and I guess I just took more to Hardy's put-upon big-guy act than to Stan Laurel's innocent, doltish little guy act. But I can give you one specific reason I laugh more at Ollie, though...

*I love Ollie's breaking down of the fourth wall: I can remember even as a kid loving it each time the big guy followed some boneheaded action or insult by staring at the camera with a classic indignant expression on his kisser. After seeing so many shorts in a relatively short period of time, I can say that Hardy didn't just break down the fourth wall; he dynamited it, gathered all the pieces, tied them in a sack with bricks, and dropped them into the Potomac River. I mean, in some of the early sound shorts, he's looking at us practically every other time Stan does something. But you know what? I love it. I'm a sucker for it, and each time he does it, it kills me.

*I don't know if this is considered sacrilege or if this is going to be a "duh" kind of statement, but I believe Laurel and Hardy weren't necessarily well served by their directors: Perhaps I'm thrown by the primitive filmmaking techniques of the early sound area or the choppy editing that may sometimes be necessitated by deteriorating source material. I don't know if I should single out Laurel and Hardy here. I absolutely love the Marx Brothers, but when I watch their classic Paramount films, I often can't help but wonder, "Why doesn't the camera MOVE?" or "Why was there a cut there?" But when I watched the Stan and Ollie shorts, I kept thinking the timing was off, maybe in terms of a reaction shot held too long, or maybe a directorial choice was odd and we weren't getting the full impact of a gag.

I know, I know, who am I to question the men who created so many classic comedy shorts? Well, I am a humble amateur, but I can tell that Laurel and Hardy are comedians of immense talent, and it is my opinion that the filmmaking did not always utilize those talents to their full potential. One could say this about many of the greats of that era when looking at the work with a modern eye, but I just think that as good as those shorts are, they could be even better with some better editing or maybe directing.

I don't want to end this post on an even slightly negative note, so let me reiterate: While I never denigrated Laurel and Hardy, I think in recent years I grossly underestimated their work, and so the recent flood of L&H films on Turner Classic Movies opened my eyes far more than a guy who says he loves classic movies should have had to have done.