Timeless Twosome

Laurel and Hardy's Laughing 20's pays gleeful tribute to the most durable tandem sight gag ever sprung from Hollywood's Golden Age of comedy. Cinema Anthologist Robert Youngson (Days of Thrills and Laughter, When Comedy Was King) distills the best of this hilarious film from one-and two-reelers made before 1930. His narrative is merely connective tissue, and for no clear reason he rabbets in glimpses of Charley Chase and Max Davidson, two nearly forgotten second bananas from the Hal Roach studio. But blinking, head-scratching Stan Laurel and slow-burning, tie-twiddling Oliver Hardy are impossible to forget, as a new generation of viewers has learned after catching the act in some of TV's most inaccessible time slots.

Laughing 20's melts resistance with the team's first co-starring effort, Putting Pants on Philip, made in 1926 under Supervising Director Leo Mc-Carey, with George Stevens as cameraman. Stan plays a kilted skirt-chaser, accompanied by shamefaced Ollie through shrewdly orchestrated slapstick etudes. From Soup to Nuts is a tiny masterpiece of physical comedy, as rigorously controlled as ballet in its step-by-step demolition of an elegant dinner party by two nincompoop waiters for whom a dog, a banana peel, three whipped-cream cakes, and a lady in a sliding tiara add up to disaster. The theme of tit-for-tat destruction, a comedy cliche raised to classic stature by Laurel and Hardy, is the starting point for an excerpt from their pie-in-the-face epic Battle of the Century. Whether dangling from the girders of an unfinished skyscraper, flattening a bungalow as they build it, or luring a horse onto a grand piano, they are pluperfect clowns.

Laurel and Hardy were virtually the only silent comedy stars to repeat their phenomenal success in talkies, probably because their miming spoke louder than words. Stan remained a model of amiable imbecility, impervious to thought. Ollie, a blob just a shade brighter, bumbled his way through every difficulty with ineffable grace, slowly building up vast reserves of despair, self-pity and frustration that only a long pained look into the camera could dispel.

The subtle genius of Chaplin's tramp or of Keaton's mote in the eye of an incomprehensible universe lay beyond the range of Laurel and Hardy. But they were lovable caricatures of the dolt in Everyman, a bow and fiddle striking delightfully dissonant chords in a mad world. Witless innocence was their hallmark. It purifies even a 20's sequence in which they are pursued, clad in underdrawers, by a pair of gorgon wives toting a shotgun to avenge some fancied infidelity--as they round the corner of an apartment house, a shotgun blast brings dozens of men tumbling out of all the doors and windows, each dragging his trousers behind him. The art of Laurel and Hardy has already enchanted millions, from Marshal Tito (who owns a library of their films) to Master Mimic Marcel Marceau. Laughing 20's should bring new converts into the folderol.

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