Divine Comedy - Laurel & Hardy
Back in the Mofussil ages, when Doordarshan reigned supreme over the Indian eyeballs with its programming of kitschy Ramanand Sagar's epics, Sunday evening Hindi movies peppered with too many advertisements for Lux Beauty soap, Cinkara tonics, Lalitaji's Rin Detergent etc (I leave it to the more talented mimics I know to write a cultural history of those early TV years in India), the powers to be managed to slip in some subversive programming such as Tom & Jerry cartoons, German detective soaps (I forget the name now), which I distinctly remember had a 'shocking' episode on busting of an amateur porn ring (now you know why!), and also the comedy of the Great Chaplin.
However it was "Laurel & Hardy" that held my attention and allegiance then, as they do so now. I was thinking about them late last night in bed as I was reading this in Kurt Vonnegut's latest acerbic and funny book A Man Without A Country (for the interested, this book is basically an eighty two year old socialist-humanist's chataqua on comedy, creative writing, fossil fuel powered thermodynamic whoopee, the Chosen One's, i.e., Small B's Administration of Guessers etc, and because of its slenderness can be comfortably read in an afternoon) :
"Humor is an almost psychological response to fear. Freud said that humor is a response to frustration - one of several. A dog, he said, when he can't get out a gate, will scratch and start digging and making meaningless gestures, perhaps growling or whatever, to deal with frustration or surprise or fear.
And a great deal of laughter is induced by fear. I was working on a funny television series year ago. We were trying to put a show together that, as a basic principle, mentioned death in every episode and this ingredient would make any laughter deeper without the audience's realizing how we were inducing belly laughs.
There is a superficial sort of laughter. Bob Hope, for example, was not really a humorist. He was a comedian with very thin stuff, never mentioning anything troubling. I used to laugh my head off at Laurel and Hardy. There is terrible tragedy there somehow. These men are too sweet to survive in this world and are in terrible danger all the time. They could be so easily killed."
While one can find separate biographies of thin Laurel (most interesting fact: he was British, and was an understudy to Chaplin as he was starting out in comedy) and plump Hardy (he was born in Harlem, Georgia, not far from where I currently live), their lives might be more insightfully treated as a set of Siamese twins, in which the two confused heads are at constant war with each other. Or as Vonnegut again put it in the prologue of his novel "Slapstick",
"The fundamental joke with Laurel and Hardy, it seems to me, was that they did their best with every test. They never failed to bargain in good faith with their destinies, and were screamingly adorable and funny on that account".
Anyway, here you can watch a short documentary on these fellas. Finally, we come to the comedy itself. YouTube has plenty of choice morsels for belly aching laughs. Here are some of the longer ones:
<a href=”www.youtube.com>Big Business: Selling Christmas Trees
<a href=”www.youtube.com>You Gave It To Me
<a href=”www.youtube.com>Laurel Visits Hardy at the Hospital
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