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Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy
The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy.
Faber & Faber, London 2001; paperback 2002
St Martins Press, New York, 2002
It is only fair that I declare a special interest here. Quarterly through my
letterbox plops the Laurel and Hardy Magazine. It is a non-profit-making publication
produced by the Helpmates UK Tent of the Sons of the Desert, 63 Wollaston Close,
Gillingham, Kent DA5 3PF. For I am a life member, a true and loyal Son of the
Desert, a geek, a Laurel and Hardy anorak So how can I possibly give an unprejudiced
opinion of a book devoted to my comic heroes, the divine duo, Stan and Ollie?
My 16mm collection includes every extant foot of film they ever made. To look
at the author's bibliography is to scan my bookshelves. My best friend, Tony
Hawes, was such a keen collector ofeverything associated with the timeless team
that he married Stan's daughter, Lois. You’ll understand that this leaves
me with few defences against anything affectionately written about the greatest
of the screen comedy partnerships. Yet moan I must.
Simon Louvish writes fluently and fully about his subjects, but he's not for
speed-reading. To race too fast over his 500-odd pages is to risk running slapbang
into the sort ofconvoluted sentence construction that can briefly dislocate your
brain. Try this: "Ifyour first memory is, or includes, Laurel and Hardy,
as my own experience, it tends to be indelible." The man's a punctuation
junkie. *
There is no denying the extent of the scholarship involved. The research carried
out by Louvish and his colleagues is exhaustive. It's also exhausting, for he
seems unwilling to omit any detail he's unearthed. Loving the subjects, as so
many of us do, even I balk at wading through yet another love letter from Babe
Hardy to his alcoholic wife, or the life and times of yet another forgotten performer
with only the most tenuous connection to our principal figures. The imitative
plays written by Stan's father and the many theatres he managed are worth an
essential reference but not an entire history, chapter and verse. In short -
which Louvish seldom is - his book deserved more selective editing. With a machete.
I've almost finished grumbling. So let's skip over the clumsily organised chronology,
which switches the reader's- attention backwards and forwards between the dates
of movie-making and personal problems in a disorienting whirl. And better not
to linger long over the author's aggrandisement of meanings behind the plots
and jokes. In quoting nonsensical dialogue from one of the pair's weaker features,
The Flying Deuces, he sees in Stan's refusal to join Ollie in an absurd suicide
attempt "a desperate symbiosis, with an almost mythological ethos - that
only death can finally prove friendship". Simon, trust me - it's just a
gag.
On the credit side, there's an enormous amount to enjoy. There's one passage
(pages 222 to 227) that contains some of the best and most incisive analysis
of their movie magic I've ever read. The writer's joyful descriptions of their
finest films are models of clarity, and his sorrow over their decline is movingly
expressed.
Historically accurate, biographically impeccable, Louvish does more to fill in
their real-life stories with little-known facts than any previous book Mostly
I enjoyed it, but then I'm a lifelong convert to the cause. As Spike Milligan
once
said: "From the moment I saw them on the screen I knew they were were my
friends."
Every successive generation' loves them. My only intelligent contribution to
a BBC TV programme called Cuckoo some years ago was that "kids know at once – they’re
not adults pretending to be children, they’re children pretending to
be adults.”
As for the foregoing attempt to find fault with anything favourable written
about them, I can only say to the literary editor of the Guardian, “Here's
another fine mess you've got me into."
( * Bob Monkhouse has chosen to take issue with a typo, since corrected
in later editions. S.L. )
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