Oliver Hardy is an optimist and a leader, even if the only person who ever follows him is Stan Laurel. If there is something to be done, Ollie will roll up his sleeves, tip his derby askew, and get down to business. Ollie spends his life trying to attain peace, tranquility and happiness, and, once achieved, arranging the elements in order to maintain that happiness.

     The leading force in Oliver Hardy's life is forward momentum. His life must move ahead in a direct and orderly fashion toward clearly defined goals.

     There is nothing clearly defined in Stan Laurel's life. No matter how many times it might be explained to him, he can never comprehend that life is a series of goals to be achieved. He is content to sit, stare blankly or read the newspaper until he either gets hungry or falls asleep. However, if put in motion, he will usually stay in motion, repeating the same actions over and over without thought or reason. His short-term memory is nearly non-existent and he quickly forgets any mission at hand unless reminded by his friend Ollie. For Stan, life is pure existentialism: a series of moments, one after the other, unconnected in any way.

     The overriding force in Stan Laurel's life is inertia. A Stan at rest will tend to remain at rest until Ollie calls for him, and a Stan in motion will remain in motion until Ollie tells him to stop.

     Thus, Laurel and Hardy films often attempt to answer the age-old physics question: what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immoveable object? It does not in what direction Ollie’s forward momentum is going: toward a wedding (Me and My Pal), a day at work (Busy Bodies) or simply convalescing in a hospital (County Hospital.) Stan, by the simple act of being there, automatically sends Ollie’s momentum flying in some other direction, inevitably toward calamity and ruin.

     Stan Laurel received top billing in all their films, but Laurel and Hardy were as equal a screen partnership as ever there was. More often than not, however, the films were about Oliver Hardy. That is, the films constantly asked the question "What would happen if Oliver Hardy attempted (X) and Stan Laurel helped?" It could be something as simple as cleaning the house (Helpmates), or a more complex mission like installing an antenna on the roof (Hog Wild). He will either call Stan for help, or Stan will show up on his own (boredom seems to one of the forces that can set a resting Stan Laurel into motion.). As the project of the day evolves, Ollie delegates mini-tasks to Stan, and Stan willingly does them, but always in a way that brings injury to Ollie and sometimes sets the task back a level or two. At which point, Ollie dusts himself off and attacks the project anew. Again, he will give Stan something to do, and again, Stan fails, setting things back yet again. In the end, there is usually nothing left of the mission except the pungent aroma of complete failure, some damaged property, and Ollie in some dreadful situation he could not have imagined at the beginning of the day. At the end of Helpmates, for just one example, Ollie has lost his wife, his house and most of his clothes, simply because he called Stan over to help tidy up the house.

     A typical day in the life of Oliver Hardy can usually be book-ended by these two samples of dialogue, variations of which frequently occur in many of their films:

OLLIE: Why don't you do something to help me?
STAN: What can I do?

OLLIE: Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into!
STAN: (crying) Well, I couldn't help it!

     In Oliver Hardy's world, insult is routinely added to injury, with additional injury thrown in for good measure, usually thanks to Stan. In the short film Dirty Work, Stan and Ollie are chimney sweeps. The task - clean the chimney of one Professor Noodle, who, unbeknownst to Stan and Ollie, has invented a Fountain of Youth potion. Within twenty minutes, the following things happen to Ollie, thanks to Stan:

• A heavy ornamental clock is dropped on his head
• His right shirt sleeve is ripped from his shirt
• He is hit in the face with a dirty broom
• He is knocked from the roof of a house through the skylight
• He is nearly shot in the face with a rifle
• He is nearly hit by a falling duck
• He is hit by a falling broom
• He is knocked off the roof into a greenhouse
• He is hit in the eye by a broom handle
• He is again nearly shot in the face with a rifle
• He is pulled from the roof through the chimney
• He is hit in the head with four successive bricks
• And then another
• And yet another
• And then a bunch more
• His pants are accidentally filled with dirt
• Finally, he falls into a vat of the Professor’s youth serum and reverts to a lower state - a derby-wearing chimpanzee

     When Ollie starts out each day, he has no suspicion that he might end up covered in sauerkraut and then shot (The Midnight Patrol) or have his legs tied around his neck (Going Bye-Bye!). To him, every day is a fresh start, filled with promise and guaranteed success. It is no coincidence that one of Ollie's pet phrases is "Now we're getting someplace!". Goals exist to be achieved. But the further Ollie gets into each day's agenda, the further that agenda gets set back. The setbacks bother him only momentarily. He then gets back at it with renewed determination, eager to complete the task at hand successfully to achieve that day's allotment of happiness. Rarely does Ollie give up. If a task is to fail, it is to fail all the way, not be abandoned in midstream. Things need to be whole and complete one way or the other. The world needs equilibrium.

     In Dirty Work, Ollie started out the day with the goal of cleaning a chimney. By the end of the day, the chimney has been destroyed and all the dirt and soot has been redistributed to the floor of the Professor's living room. And Ollie gets to appreciate all of this from his new perspective as a lower primate. Utter failure. But not because of anything Ollie did, at least not intentionally.

     Where Ollie is always actively working to manipulate the world in his favor, Stan's natural state is to be at rest, and he will use the quickest methods at hand to return to that state. If Stan and Ollie need to break into a house, Ollie will seek out the best possible plan, one that will produce the maximum success with the minimal effort. He strives to find the perfectly balanced plan. Stan, eager to get back to his state of rest, will simply walk up and ring the doorbell. Having accomplished that, he will stand there waiting for the owner of the house to open the door, and it is up to Ollie to pull him away and hide him in the bushes. Stan cannot understand long-term goals. He just barely retains the fact that, for some reason, Ollie wants to get into a house. And so, the most efficient method to Stan is the most obvious.

     Ollie's belief in order transcends anything else in his life, including his understanding of Stan. He may have never said it in a film, but one of his prime philosophies is "A place for everything and everything in its place." Ollie expects things to always be where they are supposed to be, because that is how the world works best. He has seen Stan time and again leave obstacles in his path, owing to Stan's tendency to disregard things as soon as he has no more use for them. When Ollie walks through a room, he should expect that Stan has left several booby-traps in his path, but Ollie's overarching belief in order gets in the way. "Not this time," Ollie thinks, just before he slips on a rolling pin or block of ice and goes flying through a closed door.

     Thicker Than Water, their final short before the team moved exclusively into features, is often passed off as a pleasant time-waster (even by the webmasters of this page), but it does contains one beautiful sequence that perfectly illustrates the dynamics of the Laurel and Hardy relationship. Having been ordered by his wife to wash the dishes, Ollie recruits Stan to help. Ollie will wash the dishes in a basin full of soap and water, and Stan will dry them. Ollie wants to move the dish basin from the sink to a wooden board that pulls out of the counter. He tells Stan to pull out the board. Stan, living in the moment and unable to follow chains of events, pulls the board completely out of the counter instead of pulling out just enough for the basin to rest on. Ollie, not seeing what Stan has done, and again expecting everything thing to be in its prescribed place, drops the basin into the empty space where the board is supposed to be, and it crashes to the floor.

     Pushing on toward his goal of a complete set of clean dishes, Ollie grabs the board from Stan and places it back in the counter. Now it is time to do the dishes. Ollie's plan is to wash them in the basin, hand each newly washed dish to Stan for drying. His plan also calls for Stan to put the dishes someplace else after drying, but his mistake (the same mistake he makes in many films) is not revealing the entire plan to Stan. He expects Stan to think as logically as he does. But Stan, unable to extrapolate any action beyond what Ollie has told him to do, sees his job as complete done as soon as he dries a dish. Therefore, having no other immediate place to put each dry dish, Stan gives them back to Ollie, who begins to wash them again.

     There is a built-in stop valve in situations like this when Ollie is around. Stan, taking each event as it comes, would go on for eternity handing the dry dishes back to his pal. But Ollie's need for order eventually causes him to realize that forward momentum has come to a complete stop. No matter how many dishes he washes, there always seems to be more to be done. So he must look around for the monkey wrench in the engine, and remove it. In this case, a curt "Don’t keep handing them back to me! Put them over there!" breaks Stan’s loop and sets off another series of events (described later).

     In Helpmates, there is a great shot that reveals how short Stan Laurel’s attention span really is. While attempting to clean up the Hardy house, Ollie is inevitably soaked with water, and he asks Stan to wring out his pants. Stan puts them through a ringer next to the sink, but the sink is full of water, and the pants exit the ringer straight into the sink to become even wetter than before. Stan sees what he has done and looks around guiltily, hoping that Ollie didn’t catch his error. Cut to Ollie fiddling with the stove, which plays a part in his master plan of drying his coat. Cut back to Stan, and he is once again pulling Ollie’s pants out of the sink. It could not have been more than five seconds before this that Stan realized what he did wrong the first time around, and yet, when the camera cuts back to him, we discover he has just done it again. He cannot help himself. His mind is in a state of perpetual transcendental meditation - his thoughts are like little bubbles that exist for a moment and then float away, forgotten.

     And once again, Stan’s inertia interferes with Ollie’s forward momentum in a way that proves harmful. Distracted by Stan, who is stuck in one of his endless activity loops, Ollie steps away from the stove to berate his friend for a few moments, an action which usually gets the ball rolling again in these situations. Unfortunately, in stepping away from his coat-drying duties, Ollie has neglected to turn off the gas, so that when he returns to light the stove, it is the same old story as whenever Laurel and Hardy experiment with elements such as fire and gas - the kitchen blows up, sending Ollie sailing through the closed door, a wall of flames licking at his heels.

     It is Ollie's need for order that leads him to immediately accept Stan's occasional coherent ideas. Ollie will come upon an obstacle, and will be stuck for a plan of attack. So eager is he for any plan, he will accept the most garbled Laurel advice immediately with an impressed "That's a very good idea!" or a condescending "At last you're using my brain!".

     Again, from Thicker Than Water: Ollie complains of money trouble, with "creditors hounding me at my very fireside!". He is buying his furniture on the installment plan, and it is eating into the monthly budget. Stan suggests to Ollie that he withdraw his life savings of three hundred dollars and buy the furniture outright (so he will no longer have "hounds in his fireplace"). Ollie thinks this is an excellent idea and to the bank they go. However, upon leaving the bank, they spot a sign outside an auction house that says "We are actually giving things away today". Ollie likes this concept. He may believe in the balance of the world, but he also knows that the world owes him. So they drop into the auction house and wind up accidentally bidding $290 on a grandfather clock. Now Ollie has ten dollars, a grandfather clock he has no use for, and more money problems than when the day started. On their way home, at Stan's suggestion, they put the clock down to rest for a moment. Of course, they are crossing a street at the time and the moment they put the clock down, it is reduced to kindling under the wheels of a speeding truck.

     The sequence started with Ollie having money problems but three-hundred dollars in the bank. The sequence ends with Ollie having money problems, no money in the bank, a shattered grandfather clock, and ten useless dollars in his pocket. And notice how it all begins and ends with a suggestion from Stan.

     There are times when we see that Ollie has achieved his goal of a happy life. Several shorts, such as Should Married Men Go Home? and Come Clean start with everything being right in Ollie's world. He is married and actually sharing a blissful breakfast with his wife. This domestic bliss usually lasts up until the moment Stan shows up. Then everything turns disastrous.

     In the silent Should Married Men Go Home?, Ollie is spending a happy Sunday morning with his spouse of the moment, when Stan approaches the house, dressed in golf duds. After a failed attempt to convince Stan he is not home, Ollie reluctantly allows Stan in the house but tells him that golf is out - he wants to stay home and relax with the wife. Not one to take a hint, Stan decides that staying home and relaxing with the Hardys is as good a way to spend the day as any, and settles down on the sofa. It is not long before he has ruined a shade and a chair and has caused Ollie to break the family record player. At this point, the rather patient Mrs. Hardy chases them both out of the house and off to the gold course. After a series of misadventures on the local course, Ollie ends his day completely covered in mud.

     Had Stan not visited, Ollie’s day might have been been pleasant, if ummemorable. But once again we find that Ollie’s grand scheme - in this case, spend a quiet day at home - has been subverted by the addition of Stan to the equation, resulting in an unforeseen end result: Ollie sitting in a muddy puddle, wondering where his Sunday went.

     The sound short Come Clean features a remake of the opening scene of Should Married Men Go Home? where Stan, this time with his wife, interrupts Ollie’s peaceful domesticity. Things are fine until Stan decides he is pining for a delicacy not currently in the Hardy ice box: ice cream. Rather than argue, Mrs. Hardy sends the boys out to the ice cream parlor. On the way, they save a woman from commiting suicide, but the woman, who is violently loud and quite insane, latches onto the Boys as her new keepers. The rest of the plot consists of Ollie’s efforts to keep his wife from discovering the new bizarre housemate who refuses to leave.

     In this film, there is a neat twist to the usual formula. Like Stan beating up on Ollie in One Good Turn, Come Clean features one of the pair finally getting the best of the other. By the end of Come Clean, Stan is sitting in a bathtub filled with water (still wearing his clothes, naturally), with Ollie seated next to him as they discuss matters. All in all, things have ended well for Ollie this time. Despite an unpleasant afternoon, Ollie is still married, still has his house and his suit, and has not been hit in the head by flying crockery. The insane harpie has been dragged away by the police, and everything is back to normal. In relation to his usual days, this is one to be jotted down in his diary. Through it all, Stan has been his usual self; that is, all hindrance, no help. But Ollie has shown supreme patience with his friend today. Several times during the film we have seen him about to explode, but sucking it up and swallowing his anger instead. But here, at the end of the day, he has had enough of Stan, and he removes the stopper from the bathtub, sending Stan down the drain and out of his life, at least for the rest of the evening.

     Their First Mistake opens in a similar manner to Should Married Men Go Home? and Come Clean, but this time, all is not well in Hardy’s world. He comes to the breakfast table and greets his wife, and she immediately puts an end to pleasantries with a curt dismissal of his greeting and a haranguing inquiry as to his whereabouts the previous night. "Stan took me to see a Punch and Judy show," Ollie confesses. Mrs. Hardy (played by the invaluable Mae Busch, the most important member of the L&H stock company besides James Finlayson) then goes on to inform Ollie of something he probably already knows in his heart:

"It’s Stan here, Stan there, Stan wants me to go here, Stan wants me to go there... Why, you ought to be ashamed just to be seen on the street with him!"

     In the middle of the breakfast scene, Stan calls up on the phone. Ollie answers, and in order not to let on that it is Stan calling, he pretends it’s his boss. "Hello, Mr. Jones! Thank you, Mr. Jones!" and so on. After hanging up, he explains to his wife that Mr. Jones has chosen him to go on an all-important out-of-town business trip ("It will have a tendency to promote me to higher endeavors," he explains.) The ruse has a threefold purpose: to make his wife happy (she is ecstatic that he is finally getting someplace), to keep her from knowing that it is Stan who is calling, and, probably most importantly for him, to be able to get out of the house today so that he and Stan can go to the Cement Worker’s Bazaar where, Stan has informed him, they are going to give away a free steam shovel, which, we can surmise, is the one missing element from Laurel and Hardy’s lives.

     Stan calls again, and Ollie repeats the whole Mr. Jones bit for the benefit of his wife. She is pleased, he has gotten her off his back, they continue with their breakfast, and all is fine in Ollie’s world.

     Then Stan walks in and says "I just wanted to tell Ollie that was me on the phone!". The rest, you can imagine yourself.

     But although Stan may be the number one cause for upsetting the order Ollie desires, not every problem in Ollie's life is Stan's fault.

     Even if Stan were not in his life, Ollie might still have a miserable life because, for unknown reasons, the cosmos itself does not like Ollie and spends much energy lining people and events up against him. Going Bye-Bye! opens in a courthouse with tough mug Walter Long being found guilty of some unstated offense thanks to the testimony of Stan and Ollie. When the Judge sentences Long to jail, Stan asks "Aren't you gonna hang him?". This remark ticks Long off enough to threaten the Boys with bodily harm, specifically, tying their legs around their necks should he ever meet up with them again. But it is Ollie's apologetic twiddle of his tie that upsets Long so much he breaks out of his straight-jacket and lunges at the Boys.

     Ollie decides the only course of action is to get out of town, but they are, as always, low on cash. Stan comes up with one of his better ideas - why not put an ad in the paper for a traveling companion to help share expenses? An excellent idea, agrees Ollie and so, by the next day, the ad is in place. The ad itself is a thing of illogical beauty, ending with the oft-quoted Laurelism -"Those not interested, do not answer."

     A woman answers the ad, and Ollie and Stan make their way over to meet her. However, the woman has another visitor - Walter Long, who has escaped from jail and is determined to track down the Boys and perform the anatomical reconstruction he has vowed upon them. The odds of the woman answering the ad being the girlfriend of the very person the Boys are trying to avoid are astronomical and can only be a deliberate act of the forces of nature.

     If at the beginning of the day Ollie make enemies with a person, circumstances will dictate that they will meet up again by the end of the day, through a series of events so unlikely that the cannot be coincidence - they are calculated acts by a world that does not like Ollie.

     What other explanation is there for the way Ollie is treated by inanimate objects? When a doorbell rings anywhere near Ollie, the bell itself inevitably flies off the wall and finds Ollie's head. Not just doorbells, but almost anything that is fastened to a wall will have a tendency to leap off the wall at the slightest provocation and make a beeline for Ollie's head. If Ollie falls down a chimney, he will pummeled with bricks. That might happen to anybody under the same circumstances. But with Ollie, the world always holds one brick in reserve. Ollie will be clunked by four or five bricks, sit until the cement and mortar shower is over, and then look up to make sure the coast is clear. And that is the moment the world drops one final brick on his head, just to make sure he gets the message - we don’t like you.

     What other explanation is there for a peculiar moment in Thicker Than Water that occurs just after the dishwashing sequence described above? Stan takes a dish pile and places it on the stove. At that moment, the stove burner lights underneath the dishes. Why? Stan did not accidentally turn the stove on. There is no shot of his shirt cuff getting stuck on any knob. The stove just lights by itself, for a reason that will become clear momentarily. When Ollie is finished washing the rest of the dishes, Stan is about to grab the pile from the stove to put them in the cupboard. But Ollie decides that Stan and a pile of dishes is a combination he does not wish to see, so he gives Stan another task and grabs the dishes himself. Of course, they are now red hot and Ollie, yelping in pain, drops the entire pile on the floor, where they immediately transform into useless debris. Again, the world tells Ollie - don't bother trying to please us with your fancy mannerisms and your flowery words; we don't like you. *

     The final moments of Helpmates is the quintessential Oliver Hardy ending. After reducing Ollie’s life to ashes (literally, in the case of Ollie’s house), Stan says, without a trace of irony, "Well, I guess there’s nothing else that I can do." Ollie agrees and bids him goodbye, and implicit in his farewell are the unspoken words "I’ll see you tomorrow." For Ollie, the quality of today’s encounter with Stan means nothing - tomorrow they just might find a hundred dollars on the sidewalk, or have some fun at another Punch and Judy show. Stan exits the burnt-out shell of the Hardy home, as Ollie sits in what is left of a chair and contemplates the day’s events. There is a clap of thunder and an ominous stroke of lightning. Ollie knows what’s coming - the world getting in its last licks before day’s end. The skies instantly open, unleashing a downpour such as hasn’t been seen since Biblical times. But Ollie does not scramble to seek shelter. He just continues to sit quietly, getting soaked to the bone, knowing that although this may be the way today ends, tomorrow things have to be better.

     No other classic screen comedian is held in such contempt by the forces of the universe or is saddled with such an albatross as Stan. Ollie, who, above all other comedians, longs to conform to this world, to be liked and accepted and admired, is repeatedly knocked in the head, kicked in the shins, and dropped in a puddle of water for his troubles. The world rains on Ollie's private parade, and once he is completely drenched, Stan will accidentally knock him into a bathtub. But, eternal optimist that he is, Ollie will resume his leadership role the next day as he charges ahead, Don Quixote-like, towards the goals that Stan, society and the forces of nature have turned into elusive windmills.

Copyright © John V. Brennan, 2002. All Rights Reserved.

     * That the world itself hates Ollie is undeniable, and calls into question just how peaceful those days in Should Married Men Go Home? and Come Clean would have been even without Stan. By definition, no Laurel and Hardy short can be about Ollie without Stan, so we only have the first reel of BLOCK-HEADS as an example of what Ollie's life would be like after an extended absence of Stan. Once Stan Laurel and Babe Hardy teamed and became a huge success, a Hardy or Laurel solo excursion became unthinkable. Almost.

      The idea of a Hardy solo series was bandied about in 1935, when Stan Laurel left the studios during one of his increasingly frequent business disputes with Hal Roach. While Laurel cooled his heels at home, Roach announced a new series of films under the umbrella title of The Hardy Family, starring Oliver Hardy, Patsy Kelly and Spanky McFarland. The move may have been a scare tactic designed to bring Laurel back, but in retrospect, The Hardy Family was a reasonable fallback position for Roach. Roach had Laurel and Hardy under separate contracts, so losing Laurel did not mean losing Hardy. By 1935, Hardy was too well known to go back to supporting roles, and, excellent and adaptable comedian that he was, he could have certainly carried a short by himself. So a Hardy solo series would have been Roach's best option at the time. Of course, Laurel and Roach did iron things out and Laurel and Hardy resumed their partnership (the happiest of all possible outcomes), so all talk of The Hardy Family vanished immediately. Would the public have accepted the fat one without his beloved thin partner? Impossible to say sixty-five years after the fact, but in retrospect, it would be quite a treat to examine entries into the series in the light of what they might reveal about Babe Hardy’s screen character, even if only one or two shorts had been produced before Laurel’s return.

     Of course, had The Hardy Family come to fruition, it would have not benefited from Laurel's input as a writer and director, and without that, the series may not have answered any relevent questions at all.