W. C. Fields

I wish someone would explain to me why, at this late date, comedy is still considered a lesser art?  When asked to name a great work of art, most people would name a tragic play or serious novel, or point at the work of Renaissance masters – but it is rare indeed for one to name a great comedy. 

This astonishes your correspondent.  Comedy is infinitely more difficult than tragedy; one remembers the dying words of the great tragedian Edmund Kean who said on his deathbed, “dying is easy; comedy is hard.”  Why great comic inventions are not received with the same veneration as our great tragedies says something about our inherent misconception that “high minded” also means “serious.”

One of the most fascinating comic artists of the early sound era was William Claude Dukenfield (1880-1946), better known as W. C. Fields.  Fields was born in Darby, Pennsylvania, and was bitten by the stage bug early in life.  He started his career in vaudeville, as a comedic juggler.  His prowess at juggling is in evidence in several of his films, most notably 1934’s The Old Fashioned Way.  (You can see it here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytgPGr6JhLo).  Though we think of Fields as heavy and ungainly, his training as a juggler left him with a remarkable physical grace -- a trait shared by many great comics.  Fields made several films during the silent era, but for all of his grace, sound was an essential part of what became the Fields persona.  

Or perhaps we should say personas, plural.  In the 1930, his most important film decade, Fields really only played two characters: a henpecked husband or a shifty conman.  The henpecked husband was a masterful creation: this Everyman was the perpetual victim of shrewish wives, vile children, pesky salesmen, and the very world around him.  Fields was besieged by stepped-in fly papers, sticky gloves, vanishing hats, stepped-upon rakes and falling objects.  The embattled Fields shares our common humanity and frustrations, helping us laugh at the constant assaults on our dignity and our persons. 

Fields the conman is, perhaps, a wish-fulfillment ideal of ourselves.  Fields the sharpster, unlike his henpecked persona, is the eternal talker and trickster, a man on the make.  (In My Little Chickadee Fields, holding a deck of cards, is asked: “is this a game of chance?”  He replies, “Not the way I play it.”)  Fields the crook is equal to nearly every occasion; his only real enemy is himself.

Though Fields the trickster has become part of our national folklore, I think Fields the Everyman is the more honest and accessible creation.  Watch Fields trying to get some sleep one morning on his front porch in It’s a Gift: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_xwqxz1Wio.  Or, better yet, a brilliant sequence from the same film where Fields, as a shopkeeper, deals with a blind and deaf man and a table of light bulbs:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y189-69cQPs&feature=related.  It’s a tribute to Fields’ genius that we can watch a blind and deaf man flailing around a store and still think it’s funny. 

Fields only really broke out of his established routines in 1935, when he played Mr. Micawber in MGM’s David Copperfield, directed by George Cukor.  It’s impossible to watch this film and not think of other possibilities for Fields inhabiting film versions of great novels, including everything from The Pickwick Papers to the title role in The Wizard of Oz (a part, incidentally, that he was offered).

The 40s were an unhappy decade for Fields.  Many of the great comedians of the 1930s found their more freewheeling style and easy surrealism inconsistent with a world embroiled in a global war, and Fields shared his decline with the Marx Brothers, Mae West and Laurel and Hardy.  Some of his later films, however such as The Bank Dick (1940) and 1941’s Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (certainly one of the strangest movies ever committed to celluloid) have great sequences and considerable charm.

Fields, a chronic alcoholic, died on Christmas day in 1946.  He had been hospitalized for various ailments for 22 months before winking at his nurse and passing from this life.  He is greatly missed by legions of people who believe that any man who hates dogs and small children can’t be all bad.

Tomorrow:  Mae West

Laurel and Hardy

It’s perhaps reasonable to say that American cinema’s Golden Age of Comedy occurred in the 1920s and 30s.  Silent clowns, such a Buster Keaton (1895-1966), Harold Lloyd (1893-1971) and Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977), changed the very language of comedy during the silent era, and such diverse talents as W.C. Fields (1880-1946), Mae West (1893-1980) and the Marx Brothers gave voice to that language.

But few comedic talents have a more devoted following than Stan Laurel (1890 – 1965) and Oliver Hardy (1892 –1957).  To this day there are organizations nationwide operating under the umbrella group The Sons of the Desert (named after one of the team’s most famous films), with ‘tents’ in most major cities.  For sheer mania, Laurel and Hardy buffs give devotees of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Who and Star Wars/Trek a run for their money.

This fanaticism is understandable.  There is a certain alchemy to Laurel and Hardy; at their best, the team could bond with viewers in a deep and emotional manner impossible to their equally famous colleagues.

I was thinking a great deal about Laurel and Hardy while reading Stan and Ollie; The Roots of Comedy; The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy -- an excellent book on the duo saddled with two unpunctuated subtitles.  Once I was finished, I could honestly say that I wish I knew them.

The author, Simon Louvish (born 1947), does a fine job of detailing the story of their lives.  He promises upfront not to gloss over the very human failings of the two, and present a warts-and-all biography.  That he does, but the warts are not very disfiguring and both Laurel and Hardy emerge as fallible human beings who remain lovable.  And while Louvish may not be the most limpid stylist, he gets the job done.

Stan was a jobbing vaudevillian born in the UK to a theatrical family.  Ollie was born in Harlem, Georgia, to a near-do-well father and working mother.  As a boy, Ollie became fascinated by the possibilities of moving pictures, starting as a projectionist.  Stan traveled to the US as part of a comedy troupe (which included Chaplin!), and made several solo comedies that did not register much with audiences.

The pairing came about almost by accident, but after the first handful of their 107 co-starring films, the bare essentials were cemented and their screen personas set.

At this point, it’s essential for you to have had a taste of Laurel and Hardy (if you haven’t!) before proceeding.  Jump to YouTube and look for any of the following: Laughing Gravy, Beau Hunks (both 1931), Helpmates, The Music Box (both 1932) or watch the boys dance in Way Out West (1937).  If it were possible to crystalize joy, it’s this graceful and lovely dance!

Now, with that behind your belt, let’s see if we can analyze this magical combination.  I have a few ideas of my own:

Laurel and Hardy are not just a team or a duo, they are a couple.  It’s amazing how often they end up sharing the same bed, consoling one-another, protecting each-other, jointly raising surrogate children or caring for pets.  It is almost silly how all close male relationship are now read for how they are ‘coded’ either hetero-or-homosexual, but I read the onscreen Stan and Ollie as homosexual in the purest, nonsexual sense.  They loved one-another.

At heart, both Stan and Ollie are children.  Yes, Ollie is often more intelligent and given to greater attempts to master the situation; he is the senior child of the two, but that does not make him less of a child.  It is this engaging innocence (even when they’re being brats!) that so many people respond to.

This eternal childhood often makes them more (or less) than human.  As such, they don’t change and seem subject to different physical, social and intellectual laws than we.  It would seem as if the two great clowns were denizens of some alternate reality rather than our own prosaic surroundings.  They are, first and last, their own unique selves.   They are impervious within the protective cocoons of their own strangeness. 

Yet, for all of the strangeness of Laurel and Hardy, the recurring note is one of sweetness.  The couple had a core of sweetness – the kind of sweetness that comes from an innocent, inner benevolence.  Even at their worst behavior (which often results in massive destruction of property), there is that core of kindliness.

As film historian Randy Skretvedt has written: The world is not their oyster; they are the pearl trapped in the oyster.  Their jobs hang by a rapidly unraveling thread.  Their possessions crumble to dust.  Their dreams die just at the point of fruition.  Their dignity is assaulted constantly.  At times they can’t live with each other, but they’ll never be able to live without each other.  Each other is all they will ever have.  That, and the hope of a better day.

Though I enjoyed Stan and Ollie a great deal, I can’t help but feel that reading about great comedians is never as satisfying as watching them.  Fortunately, Laurel and Hardy are readily available online and in a new DVD collection gathering their best films.  Many of their later films, such as Air Raid Wardens (1943) and Nothing but Trouble (1944) are despised by purists, but I find them watchable still for the inescapable benevolence of the duo.  Make yourself happy – watch Laurel and Hardy.

Tomorrow:  W. C. Fields