Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy: The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy

by Simon Louvish

Book Overview

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy have remained, from 1927 to the present day, the screen's most famous and popular comedy double act, celebrated by legions of fans. But despite many books about their... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312266510
• ISBN13: 9780312266516
• Release Date: December 2002
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
• Length: 520 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.7" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Our boys, in a different light

When I first began to read Simon Louvish's book about "our boys," I found the style a little awkward and strange. But after a chapter or so, it started to go more smoothly. This was the comedy team I had read about before -- the greatest movie comedy duo, in my opinion. Louvish writes at a chatty gallop which I suspect sounds a little different to an American at first because he is English. But once you've tuned your -- well, inner ear -- to it, his prose becomes quite captivating. Here is the slim, soft-spoken north of England comic who lived, breathed, ate and slept in terms of gags and bits of business. There is the rotund, musical, amazingly graceful Georgian who was such a consummate actor, made his comedy look easy, and left it all at the office when he went home, so that he could be an amateur chef, Hollywood's finest golfer, and a ballroom dancer par excellence. Their personalities were as different as their physical appearance -- but they fit together without a seam when it came to making comedy. Why did Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy form a superb whole out of two disparate halves? Louvish tells us how they never had a serious quarrel -- although Laurel, the creative one, had plenty of them with their boss, studio head Hal Roach. He describes how Hardy took no offense when Laurel was paid considerably more than he -- after all, Stan Laurel spent untold hours on gag creation, being the "director behind the director," cutting the final product, and so forth, while Oliver Hardy did virtually all his work before the camera. They got along superbly at work -- but seldom socialized until their later years after their movie careers were over. Louvish also discusses an aspect of their movies that many fans are not aware of: How Laurel and director Leo McCarey deliberately put elements into a number of their stories that suggested a homoerotic relationship -- without anything ever being overt, either through word or deed. As funny as the team is, and none were funnier, including the Marx Brothers, when you become aware of this homoerotic suggestion, and learn to look for it, there are scenes that can make you uncomfortable. By the way, in real life no one ever suggested that either Stan Laurel or Oliver Hardy was anything but enthusiastically heterosexual. Laurel was married to four different women; Hardy to three. This is a superb double biography, written in a unique, very recognizable style by a man who has specialized in the lives of great comedy kings.

Our boys, in a different light

When I first began to read Simon Louvish's book about "our boys," I found the style a little awkward and strange. But after a chapter or so, it started to go more smoothly. This was the comedy team I had read about before -- the greatest movie comedy duo, in my opinion. Louvish writes at a chatty gallop which I suspect sounds a little different to an American at first because he is English. But once you've tuned your -- well, inner ear -- to it, his prose becomes quite captivating. Here is the slim, soft-spoken north of England comic who lived, breathed, ate and slept in terms of gags and bits of business. There is the rotund, musical, amazingly graceful Georgian who was such a consummate actor, made his comedy look easy, and left it all at the office when he went home, so that he could be an amateur chef, Hollywood's finest golfer, and a ballroom dancer par excellence. Their personalities were as different as their physical appearance -- but they fit together without a seam when it came to making comedy. Why did Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy form a superb whole out of two disparate halves? Louvish tells us how they never had a serious quarrel -- although Laurel, the creative one, had plenty of them with their boss, studio head Hal Roach. He describes how Hardy took no offense when Laurel was paid considerably more than he -- after all, Stan Laurel spent untold hours on gag creation, being the "director behind the director," cutting the final product, and so forth, while Oliver Hardy did virtually all his work before the camera. They got along swimmingly at work -- but seldom socialized until their later years after their movie careers were over. Louvish also discusses an aspect of their movies that many fans are not aware of: How Laurel and director Leo McCarey deliberately put elements into a number of their stories that suggested a homoerotic relationship -- without anything ever being overt, either through word or deed. As funny as the team is, and none were funnier, including the Marx Brothers, when you become aware of this homoerotic suggestion, and learn to look for it, there are scenes that can make you uncomfortable. By the way, in real life no one ever suggested that either Stan Laurel or Oliver Hardy was anything but enthusiastically heterosexual. Laurel was married to four different women; Hardy to three. This is a superior double biography, written in a unique, very recognizable style by a man who has specialized in the lives of great comedy kings.

"Hats Off"

How does one do justice to two of the greatest comedy legends to have ever have graced the screen? A daunting task, but one that Simon Louvish (biographer of W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers) accomplishes with great aplomb and thoroughness. "Stan and Ollie" covers all bases as it explores the individual lives of the duo and the eventual pairing of two great screen comedians. Louvish begins by examining the respective early life of Stanley Jefferson and Oliver Norvell Hardy. Born and raised in England, Stanley Jefferson was the son of a theatre owner and performer, whose children were destined for the stage. But his namesake would take his father's love of acting much farther than the stage and onto screen, a journey that took him half-way around the world to California at the dawn of the movie era. Meanwhile, in small town Georgia, Oliver Norvell Hardy was born, months after his father's death, raised by a mother who ran boarding houses, her perpetually chubby son a constant watcher of the guests. His love of movies hit its stride when he ran projections for the local movie house and decided to test his fortunes on the screen. Each comic tried to make it on his own - Louvish devotes the first half of his biography to their early lives and the movies they made before they became a popular duo. Stanley's rise was perhaps a bit more difficult due to his theatre training (and his being pegged to impersonate his former roommate, Charlie Chaplin). "Babe" Hardy took easily to the ways of the screen, despite his bulk that haunted him his entire life, which was counteracted by a grace and ease that seemd contradictory to his size. These two very separate beginnings were inevitably paired up in Hollywood at the Hal Roach studio, where these vaudevillan trained actors somewhat reluctantly became Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, a disparate image of perfectly paired clowns. Louvish traces the years and the films that Laurel and Hardy made together with Roach, intermingling the myriad marriage and divorce affairs that plagued each man, weaving in history of supporting players and screen moments as their story unfolds. He debunks some of the stories that have floated about these two, all the while recognizing that memory is not the strongest recorder of events years after the fact. The subtitle "The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy" refers not to any lurid details, but to the men behind the faces on the screen. Laurel and Hardy were screen personas, not the men who lived and breathed off-screen; while their real lives were sometimes mirrored by what they chose to enact, clowns cannot be funny all the time. Louvish does an admirable job of weaving the good with the bad, the tremendous success while at the pinnacle of their careers, and the sad, dwindling end that included forgettable movies and studio disputes. "Stan and Ollie", while long and a sometimes wandering read, is a wonderful portrait of two men who were friends until the very end.

Big Business & Big Fun

I enjoyed this book very much. I also enjoyed Louvish's books on W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers.What I liked about this book was that it placed Laurel and Hardy in a working context. The impression I got was that they were not totally responsible for their success. They needed a team of other performers (Edgar Kennedy, James Finlayson) and behind the camera people (Hal Roach, Leo McCary, the Parrott brothers) to create the comedy gems that we enjoy. (I found that Louvish's judgments on what the best L & H films pretty much tallied up with mine.) When the equation began to change, such as Roach getting mad at the duo after "Babes in Toyland" and gradually losing interest in their careers, the films ceased being as interesting.I found this a refreshing approach to the material, which too often is "Comedian X was a true genius and everyone else messed with his vision." Louvish's book presents a picture of the lives of the two comedians, but also shows how their films were a collaborative process.

The Comic Duo for All Time

Laurel and Hardy are not mean to each other, like Abbott was to the unfortunate Costello, and neither would conspire to seduce away a pretty girl from the other, like Hope and Crosby did. They didn't get mawkish or act as spokesmen for the downtrodden, as Chaplin did. On screen (and, let us be grateful, off screen, as well) they were friends. They may have dumped paint buckets over one another's heads or sat on one another's hats, and they caused an enormous amount of set destruction wherever they went, but there was kindness and caring between them. A fine, big dual biography now places the two within cinema and world and comedic history, _Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy: The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy_ (Thomas Dunn Books) by Simon Louvish. The author, who has done previous biographies of W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers, has an intellectual appreciation for Laurel and Hardy films, but his book is relatively free of theorizing about what made the pair such classics. He has not forgotten the main virtue of the team: they are funny.Laurel was born in Lancashire in 1890, of a theatrical family. His father was a minor stage star and author of some literally melodramatic plays (and though he turned out proud of Laurel's success and fame, never really took pride that it was done outside of the legitimate theater). He came to America with the same troupe that brought Chaplin. Hardy was a southerner from Georgia. He was fat all through his life, and like so many "different" kids, he learned to be entertaining as a way of diverting others from mocking him. He was a gifted singer, and would sing in the theater, his theater when he ran a small-town movie house. It was his entrance into show business. The two performed in a film together in 1921, but didn't become a team until 1927. Unlike many silent film performers, they had little difficulty making the transition to sound. They were lucky to have as a frequent director the great Leo McCarey, and Louvish pays compliments to the straight men who played with them, like James Finlayson and Edgar Kennedy. When the depression came, their roles as forgotten men who were ready to take on any work that came their way easily caught the mood of the time. The splendid _The Music Box_ of 1932 was a version of the Sisyphus myth, with "The Laurel and Hardy Transfer Company - Foundered 1931") trying to deliver a crated player piano up a ridiculously steep set of outdoor steps. The friendship of Laurel and Hardy is the theme of all their films, and Louvish takes us through all the major ones. They are childish men in many ways, and they damage each other's pride and step on each other's toes repeatedly, but the friendship always works and continues beyond every exasperation. "Here's another fine mess you've gotten me into" is known as their tag line, but the plaintive "Why don't you do something to _help_ me?" means much more, even though the help might have turned out to be much worse than