Tag: Laurel and Hardy
If you excitedly ripped open your physical comedy Christmas stocking, if you quickly devoured your physical comedy Valentine’s Day chocolates, if you got all giddy over this spring’s Premio de Primavera, then you’ll be hopping like crazy over the dozen goodies the Easter Bunny just brought you. One hundred percent recycled from my private collection and from links that came by way of such usual suspects as Drew Richardson, Lee Faulkner, Greg DeSanto, and no doubt other folks who I am forgetting. As usual, click on any image to enlarge.
Picasso once said, “good artists borrow, great artists steal.”
There are a ton of books about silent film comedy, many of them excellent, but they’re not written by performers. Paul Merton, author of Silent Comedy, is on the other hand a popular British comedian — mostly improv and stand-up, rarely silent —with a love for the heyday of slapstick. He has even done several lecture tours on the subject, bringing screenings with live music to theatre festivals and other venues throughout the U.K. In the past two years he has produced two documentaries on early film (not just comedy) for television: Paul Merton’s Weird and Wonderful World of Early Cinema (BBC Bristol, 2010) and The Birth of Hollywood (BBC2, 2011). He has also done an interactive presentation on early British film comedy for the British Film Institute, which you can view online here.
It hasn’t been hard to find something approaching the complete works of Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd, and Langdon on DVD in recent years, but when I wanted to purchase the Laurel & Hardy opus, I had to order a 21-disc box set available only in the UK and deal with all the region and formatting conflicts. All that has now changed with the release of a 10-disc box set suitable for the region 1, NTSC market, Laurel & Hardy: The Essential Collection.True, this has only 32+ hours of footage, as opposed to 68+ on the British set, but then who’s counting?
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Workshops & Other Events
My first book (1976)
My book Clowns has long been out of print, but you can borrow it for two weeks at a time from the Internet Archive. More information is available here.
My second book (2015)
Visual and verbal humor for the cognitively and artistically curious! Available here.
“A book to treasure!”
—Bill Irwin