My earliest Laurel and Hardy memory is that of watching PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES on a snowy Friday night on my grandparent's old Philco. There was probably more snow on the TV screen than was falling outside. I believe I was about six years old. Even though, at that age, my awareness of their comic technique probably didn't extend beyond "These guys act just like cartoons!", I could sense there was something special about Laurel and Hardy that separated their comedy from most of what I had witnessed during my brief existence. It was the beginning of a lifelong obsession, and one which, thirty-six years later, my mother is still waiting for me to outgrow.

     For a Laurel and Hardy fan, Chicago was a great place in which to grow up during the 60's and 70's. A local station ran two to three hours' worth of their films every Sunday afternoon. My friends and family had the sense to know that this was the only time during the week in which all other activities came to a standstill. When I was fourteen, I spent a bit of time in the hospital following an appendicitis attack. I'll always be grateful to my folks for sneaking my portable TV into my hospital room so I could get my weekly dose of Stan and Ollie (they showed OUR RELATIONS and The Chimp that week). My mother also bought me a copy of Leonard Maltin's book Movie Comedy Teams, which featured a lengthy chapter on The Boys. It helped in taking my mind off my lower abdominal pain, as I lay there checking off the titles to the L&H films I had seen.

     In the days before VCRs, I collected Laurel and Hardy in whatever form I could. Books, posters and super-8 films appeased me as I waited for Sunday to roll around. I also have Laurel and Hardy to thank for my interest in the great film comics. From Stan and Ollie, it was but a short step to the worlds of the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, the Stooges...even Wheeler and Woolsey and Olsen and Johnson. Though I've made my living as a schoolteacher over the years, I've dabbled more than a bit in acting, and I can honestly say that my study of classic film comedy taught me more about comic timing than all the acting classes I've had combined. I've never consciously aped any particular comic, but I have learned that sometimes the funniest reaction to an onstage calamity is no reaction at all. Just stare blank-faced, a la Stan Laurel. 

     I feel that no comics inspire genuine love and affection more so than Laurel and Hardy. I may laugh a bit more at Fields, quote Groucho more often, and be more impressed by the technique and inventiveness of Chaplin and Keaton. But it's the elusive magic of Stan and Ollie and the pure innocence of their characters that make them favorites with me. There's an everyman quality to their work which I find missing even from The Little Tramp's flights of fancy. They are the innocent in all of us, and posess the decency to which we all strive. 

     When I'm not busy with my current job at the Encyclopedia Britannica, I'm either watching an old comedy or listening to the music of The Beatles and Frank Sinatra. My greatest joy in life, however, comes from my wonderful wife Laurie, who makes me laugh almost as much as Stan and Ollie. She is also a big Laurel and Hardy fan, proof that I married the right woman. We had our first child in 1998, a cause for celebration even more so than the discovery of a print of Hats Off.

I can't recall the first time I ever saw Laurel and Hardy, but I can remember 30 years ago as a child looking forward to Thanksgiving and the annual showing of MARCH OF THE WOODEN SOLDIERS on New York's Channel 11, and THE DANCING MASTERS(!) was another early favorite. I also have very vivid memories of being in the hospital after an ear operation, and laughing as my father entertained me with a Stan Laurel hand puppet. I don't know whether we also owned an Ollie puppet, but I imagine they usually come in sets. And we even had had two pet hamsters named "Stanley" and "Ollie".

     In the mid-seventies, when he was in the 8th grade and I was in the 7th, my brother Joe bought some film books: one on Cagney, one on Bogart, and William K.Everson's THE FILMS OF LAUREL AND HARDY. He was the real fan of The Boys back then. Out of curiousity, I started reading the Everson book and found myself giggling at his descriptions, even before I had even seen the films in question. Soon after that, Channel 5 started showing an hour of their shorts at 7 a.m. Saturday mornings, and we both got up early to watch them, using Everson's book as our Bible ("Cool! It's Brats! That's a classic!") This was my first real introduction to their work, and I must say a thank you to Channel 5, (and thanks to the Porky Pig cartoons you showed before the Boys, and the BLONDIE movies afterwords.) By the way, we still have the original Cagney and Bogart books, but I am on my third copy of Everson and it's almost time for a new one.

     Much like my good friend Mr. Larrabee, I "hyperlinked" from Laurel and Hardy to W.C. Fields (funniest man who ever lived, by the way), Burns and Allen, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and "the rest of them" ("Nights I used to tend bar..." I can hear Fields murmuring.) But my love for The Marx Brothers soon won out over all. That's why you may find me mentioning Groucho or referencing A DAY AT THE RACES here and there throughout the film commentary. I can't help myself sometimes. But I'll always have room for Stan and Ollie, and my passion for their simple, graceful, elegant horseplay is still in full bloom. 

     Allow me to wax hyperbolically for a paragraph .To me, Stan Laurel was one of the most inspired comedy creators ever to have worked in movies. His gags and stories still bring laughter to the world, even 50 years after their last films, and the best routines he devised for he and his partner define the word "timeless". Babe Hardy, on the other hand, was no writer or director, but simply one of the screen's greatest actors. Oh, perhaps he never tackled anything tougher part than his own "Ollie" character, but he was certainly in league with all the De Niros, Barrymores and Oliviers you can name when it came to taking command of the camera lens. It's rare to find two performers, each possessing such enormous individual talent, who meshed so sublimely that they created something wholly new, something a thousand times greater than the mere sum of both. Fred and Ginger, John and Paul, Gleason and Carney... Stan and Ollie. The movies have given us some wonderful comedy teams, fleeting and permanent, through the years, from Chaplin and Arbuckle to Steve Martin and John Candy. But there is no doubt in my mind that Laurel and Hardy eclipse them all.

     When not fiddling about with this page, I follow politics and entertainment (shaking my head in disgust at both), listen to all sorts of music except anything that has been popular in the last decade, and write nasty letters to the New York Daily News.