As Robert Youngson noted at the end of the 1966 compilation film The Crazy World of Laurel and Hardy, Stan and Ollie were “two funny gentlemen and two funny, gentle men”. Fate had thrown these two great comics together, and they’d realised that their sole chance of surviving a screwy world lay in sticking together through thick and thin.
Ollie was often bemused by Stan’s cockeyed logic, and Laurel occasionally kicked against Hardy’s Dixie pomposity. Consequently, they frequently fell out and sent simple situations spiralling into chaos. But they needed each other and we still need them in troubled times to remind us to see the funny side.
Their career spanned the tail end of the silent era and the mid-1950s, and their best work is found across both shorts and features, so here’s six of one and half a dozen of the other…