"Who needs
a biography of a comic, studiously researched, detaching fact from
legend? Surely all that is enough is a happy picture book of the old
vintage heroes,
with jaunty captions and nostalgic tributes! Better to preserve the
sledgehammer of research for our more sombre, `serious' artists, our
literary giants,
painters, poets…
"But what greater poets, singers of the eternal mischief of the human spirit,
can we conjure but the clowns whose antics soothed us in this century past of
social turmoil and bewildering challenges…? They sing an older song, when
we examine it, with a deeper, more profound rhythm than first look might suggest.
In our more skeptical age, when knowledge of the past, and how we got here, tempers
the moronic market's mass trumpeting of anything that can be traded as `New'
- it is worth taking a closer look at the all-too-human narrative of the folk
who kept us sane in the melee…"
- from the prologue to STAN AND OLLIE: The Roots of Comedy.
