Stan & Ollie Roots of Comedy [Hardcover]

Simon Louvish (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 22, 2001

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy both passed away almost 40 years ago, yet their films still have the power to reduce audiences old and new to helpless laughter. There has been no comprehensive account of their lives and work, until now. The roots of their comic greatness lay in nineteenth-century variety theatre. Lancashire-born Stan Laurel was steeped in the traditions of the music hall, and found himself touring the USA in the 1910s as Charlie Chaplin's understudy. American Oliver Hardy had established himself as a 'fat funny man' by the time he and Laurel were first paired in 1927. Laurel inspired Hardy to forge their famous double act, in which Laurel played the eternal comic fool, Hardy his temperamental master. Both men were devoted to their professional partnership, which outlasted multiple marriages. Stan and Ollie completes Louvish's trilogy of definitive biographies of the great clowns of screen comedy, following his books on W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Louvish has written a biography of Laurel and Hardy that brims with affection and still preserves an honest, unbiased view of their creativity and personal traumas. He presents a fully rounded, well-paced portrait of their contrasting backgrounds (Laurel was born in England; Hardy in Georgia), early separate careers and eventual union in a Hal Roach production, 45 Minutes from Hollywood, in 1926. Roach claimed to have discovered them before reluctantly conceding partial credit to Leo McCarey, who directed many of the duo's best movies. After appearances in five undistinguished pictures, their careers soared with such classics as Duck Soup (not to be confused with the Marx Brothers version) and The Second Hundred Years. The two saw themselves as working actors who happened to hit on an incredible streak of good luck. However, their off-camera lives were anything but lucky, and Louvish, in his chapter "Multiple Whoopee or Wives and Woes," poignantly chronicles each man's domestic catastrophes, with particularly painful emphasis on Hardy's marriage to his alcoholic second wife, Myrtle Lee. Laurel, after four disastrous unions, finally found happiness with Russian opera singer Ida Kitaeva Raphael. Thanks to Louvish's erudite yet accessible style, in-depth studies of Laurel and Hardy films are even more absorbing to read than their marital conflicts. A touching example of Louvish's deep feeling for his subjects occurs when he describes Hardy's huge 150-pound weight loss, in which he concludes, "it probably never occurred to Oliver Hardy that his fans actually considered him beautiful." It's clear the author does, and this tender admiration invites the reader to share his view.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Generally considered the finest film comedy duo, Laurel and Hardy made their mark in both the silent and the sound eras. While drawing on the efforts of past biographers, Louvish (London International Film Sch.; Monkey Business: The Lives and Legends of the Marx Brothers) delves deeper into the personal and professional lives of this beloved team. He explores the impact of the British music hall tradition on Stanley Jefferson (Laurel), whose father wrote plays and skits and ran theaters, and the early cinema's influence on Oliver Norvell Hardy, who at 18 was taking tickets and projecting films in Milledgeville, GA's Electric Theater. Though both came to work at Hal Roach Studios, it wasn't until 1927 that Laurel and Hardy engaged in their first team effort: Duck Soup (not to be confused with the Marx Brothers' vehicle). After such high points as Sons of the Desert (1934), an artistic decline began owing to the team's age, bad scripts, exiting Hal Roach, and new satirical comedy styles from Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges. Louvish has digested films, reviews, and interviews with those who knew the pair to reach entirely reasonable conclusions and create fully realized human beings. This definitive treatment is recommended for public and academic libraries, as well as special film collections.
Kim Holston, American Inst. for Chartered Property Casualty Underwriters, Malvern, PA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 533 pages
• Publisher: Faber & Faber; First Edition edition (October 22, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0571203523
• ISBN-13: 978-0571203529
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,323,731 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A nice mess, but still a bit of a mess, April 19, 2003

By 

Steven Bailey "Cinemaven" (Jacksonville Beach, FL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy: The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy (Hardcover)

Simon Louvish's epic-length biography Stan and Ollie plays like one of those Laurel & Hardy comedies that were padded to feature-length by the inclusion of romantic leads nobody cares about. Like those movies, one has to wade through a lot of guff to get to the really good stuff.

Louvish has done his research (as he all too eager to convince the reader), and it pays off most admirably when debunking previous tales of the Laurel & Hardy history. The most compelling example is the chapter detailing Oliver Hardy's first marriage. Hardy and film historians have long maintained that he moved to Jacksonville, Florida, to pursue a film career, and there was where he met and married first wife Madelyn. Louvish detailingly reveals that Madelyn was in fact Jewish, that Hardy met her in Georgia at the time of an infamous Jewish lynching, and that Hardy and his wife exited Georgia as a result, never to return.

Such dramatic payoffs are alone worth the price of the book. Louvish also often gleans much enlightened insight into Laurel & Hardy's film work (as well he should--Louvish in a part-time film teacher). To cite just one example, his analysis of the finale of L&H's penultimate Hal Roach film A Chump at Oxford is as insightful and moving as the finale itself.

Along the way, though, the reader must endure the obstacle courses that plagued Louvish's previous bios of W.C. Fields and The Marx Brothers (both of which tomes are shamelessly plugged throughout this book). For one thing, Louvish lards his writing with enough precious verbosity to make L&H biographer John McCabe look like an illiterate slacker by comparison. (Prime example: "Babe's inner life has always been a...mystery wrapped in an enigma, hidden behind those folds of flesh.")

My final complaint with the book is that when it gets into Laurel & Hardy at their prime, it quotes other, far superior sources (most notably Randy Skretvedt's) to the point of [being word for word]. And even then, accuracy is not Louvish's strong suit. Louvish quotes a Skretvedt interview with Hal Roach in which Roach, by way of contrasting L&H with other comedy teams, states that "Abbott and Costello worked at our studio, and they used to fight like hell. But with Laurel and Hardy, when I fired Hardy, Laurel cried." This quote has almost as many errors as it has words: A&C never worked for Roach, and Roach never fired Hardy (Roach had Stan and Babe on concurrent, separate contracts and often suspended Laurel or let his contract lapse during certain disputes).

For all of its faults, Louvish's genuine appreciation for Laurel and Hardy's comic artistry makes a considerable amount of Stan and Ollie worthwhile writing for the fervent L&H buff. Just make to sure to avoid Louvish's verbal land mines in order to reach the real meat of the book

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Comic Duo for All Time, November 28, 2002

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy: The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy (Hardcover)

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 no help at all. Louvish gives us plenty of details of the lives of these unforgettable clowns, and it has to be said that their off-screen lives were pretty ordinary. Perhaps Hardy was right, for instance, when he modestly said, "There's very little to write about me. I didn't do very much outside of doing a lot of gags before the camera and playing golf the rest of the day." But Louvish shows that those gags before the camera, and the friendship on screen and off, have made Laurel and Hardy far more than just geniuses of slapstick.

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Once again, bad writing defeats good research., July 22, 2003

By 

Gerald Kolpan (Phila, Pa.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy: The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy (Hardcover)

Just as he did with Monkey Business, his biography of the Marx Bros, Simon Louvish once again defeats his excellent research skills with his horribly corny and dated writing style.

Louvish's efforts to be as clever and funny as his subjects are embarrassing; good writing doesn't need to call attention to itself. Every page bristles with old medicine bottle sentences like, " To Stan, of course, art was not the issue so much as work and the remuneration therof," or, "This fact alone should provide a vital clue for the constant conundrum - the disentangling of the claims of authorship to Laurel and Hardy, the characters, the lines, the movies, the plots."

Editor!

Of course, any book with TWO subtitles is suspect. Louvish should stick to his terrific detective skills (and they are truly impressive) and get some talented grad student to do the writng.

To see what a good showbiz bio is like - well researched AND well written - check out "W.C. Fields: A Biography, " by James Curtis.