Funny Men.(Brief Article)

"Put 'em both up, insect, before I comb your hair with lead" is not a promising start to a friendship. But with the first line ever exchanged on film between Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, in "The Lucky Dog" (1921), the two were already "in perfect physical synch," Simon Louvish writes in the forthcoming STAN AND OLLIE (St. Martin's). The pair's humor involved a lot of smashing--falling crockery, specially built collapsible Model Ts, and the inexplicable flying pie. ("You know, you never saw where it came from," Laurel commented.) The backgrounds of the two men were as distinct as their physiognomies; Arthur Stanley Jefferson, the thin one with the worried face, was from northwest England, and the rotund Oliver Norvell Hardy came from Harlem, Georgia. But over the course of hundreds of shorts and features, "the boys" (often thinly disguised as detectives, sailors, or jailbirds) and their antics ...