A Film Canon

 

 

Laurel and Hardy's most iconic shorts - Big Business (1929), Liberty (1929) and The Music Box (1932) - are effectively a continuation of 1910s slapstick, in which violence takes the place of more nuanced, ingenious physical comedy. That said, their particular brand of destruction is unique in its persistent attention to American jingoism, leaving patriotically precious speeches, songs and traditions in its wake, and benefiting from the transition to sound, which translates the duo's physical disparity into their American and English accents. Combined with Laurel's pervasive (if unintentional) subversion of Hardy, this conjures up a vision of the earnest American undermined by his bumbling, British heritage; that is, a conflation of the two into a single comic personality. This may explain their status as the most enduring comic duo, although it does limit the variety of their repertoire. If Chaplin and Keaton thrive on the pleasures of astonishment, then Laurel and Hardy thrive on the comforts of predictability, evident in their repetition of stock gags (such as the 'tit for tat' exchange), radical circumscription of action (particularly in The Music Box, confined to a staircase, portico and front room) and, above all, Hardy's exasperated glances at the camera - a visualisation of his iconic catch-phrase: "Another fine mess you've got me into!"