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

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

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.