Stan Laurel had an early start in show business. By the age of six, he was appearing
as a comedian in Glasgow; fourteen years later, he was on a second tour of America
with a Fred Karno troupe, understudying Chaplin. He decided to stay and try his luck
in vaudeville, and also appeared in two-reel shorts. One, 'Lucky Dog', had a bit player
named Oliver Hardy in it. For a few years, Laurel free-lanced as a writer, actor and
director with a number of film companies and appeared in more than 40 shorts between
1917 and 1926. In 1926, after signing with Hal Roach to write and direct, he was
persuaded to appear again on screen. Roach's director, Leo McCarey, wanted to team
him up as a skinny contrast to a fat actor in comedy sketches. The team of Laurel and
Hardy was born, and lasted almost twenty-five years.

Oliver Hardy also started out as a child performer. The son of a lawyer began singing
with a minstrel act when he was eight. Hardy also studied law at the University of
Georgia, but the pull was too strong, and by 1910 he had opened a small movie house.
In 1913, he joined the Lubin film company, where he generally played the comic villain.
Up to 1926, by which time he was with the Roach company, he had never been offered anything other than second-string character parts. That was until McCarey's flash of inspiration.

Stan Laurel was the ideas man, and did most of the writing. He was also primarily
responsible for creating the duo's characters. Their comedy, though slapstick, was
slower and more deliberate than the frenzy that generally characterized slapstick. In
all their films, Stan - 'the thin one' with a light-weight brain to match - was given to
scratching his head when in doubt, and bursting into tears when in trouble. Ollie - the
fat dignified one - was constantly exasperated by Stan's silliness, and impatient with
his partner's slowness. Ollie, for example, would impatiently go on ahead and
consequently get hit by falling objects as he walked through a door. He would react
to his temporary loss of dignity by twiddling his tie. He saw most of his troubles as
the result of Stanley having got them into 'another fine mess.' Through all their
misadventures, there was an obvious warmth and empathy between the two men,
which gave their comedy humanity.

The jump to talkies in 1929 proved no problem - both men had good voices and
were more than competent actors. Their characters remained as believable with
sound as they had been before. Together they appeared in more than 100 films,
three-quarters of which were silent or sound shorts produced by Hal Roach. The
films tended to be based on everyday situations to which the audience could relate,
although they also tended to expand into realms outside the norm.

An example was the 1932 Oscar winning short 'The Music Box', which centered
around a piano being taken up a flight of steps to the long suffering James Finlayson's
house. It was a very simple story line, with perfect business in it that looked totally spontaneous and natural. Finlayson was the comic foil in many of their pre-feature
length movies. In the silent short 'Big Business', Laurel and Hardy systematically
destroy Finlayson's house, while, in retaliation, Finlayson dismantles their car. The
sequence was done systematically and calmly by Laurel and Hardy, and increasingly frenetically by Finlayson. The acts of destruction were deliberate, each being
completed before another started. First a plant pot would be smashed, resulting in the retaliatory removal of a fender, a house window would get attacked with an axe in
return, and the cars seats then torn out ad finitum until both house and car were totally wrecked. The feature film 'Sons of the Desert' was probably one of their best, both technically and as a full-length comedy. But their most remembered moment is the
dance routine on the main street of Brushwood Gulch, where they sang 'In the Blue
Ridge Mountains of Virginia' in the 1937 movie 'Way Out West.' It was incomparable
to their last, disastrous movie, 'Atoll K', made in 1951. In 1950, Oliver had suffered a
severe stroke from which he never recovered. Stan carried on as a writer, working up
to his death.