![]() ![]() Their relatability was a key part of what made them funny. They take failure and make it into something you can laugh about. They’re always trying to do the right thing, but get into a fine mess. “During the Great Depression, people are so desperate, and they need comedy,” says Louvish. They rose to fame at a period in history when Americans needed a good laugh. Their seamless transition from silent to sound pictures was notable, winning them recognition as “virtually the only silent comedy stars to repeat their phenomenal success in talkies, probably because their miming spoke louder than words.” And the hard work that Laurel & Hardy put into lugging a piano up a staircase in The Music Box clearly hit the right note with the Academy, as the film won a 1932 Oscar.Īnd their popularity went even deeper than their talent. Together, as TIME put it, they became Laurel - “slim, sad-eyed master mime” and “the brain behind the gags and the on-screen butt of them all” - and Hardy, “the master of mime and the bowler-bouncing doubletake” and “the withering glare.” They made dozens of silent film shorts in the late 1920s, such as Duck Soup, and began doing talkie shorts in 1929 and feature-length talkie films in the mid-’30s. Hardy was the son of an Atlanta politician, and studied law at the University of Georgia before he decided to pursue a career in singing. ![]() Laurel (born Arthur Stanley Jefferson in Ulverston, England) had been an understudy for Charlie Chaplin and a member of the London Comedians troupe run by Fred Karno, who is credited with having a role in launching Chaplin. The funnymen were introduced to the public in the mid-1920s by Hollywood film and TV producer Hal Roach, who thought putting together a skinny Englishman and a rotund American would be comedic gold, says Simon Louvish, author of Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy: The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy and a visiting lecturer at the London Film School. ![]()
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