It is surprising that Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy’s real debut as a comic duo, in 1927, remained virtually unseen until 1974. Even more so when you consider that Leo McCarey borrowed its title for the Marx Brothers’ most celebrated feature. Duck Soup – which was remade in 1930 as Another Fine Mess – features Fred Guiol as director, McCarey as supervisor and H.M. ‘Beanie’ Walker writing the intertitles. The fact that the story is based on Home from the Honeymoon by Stan’s father, Arthur J. Jefferson, demonstrates the extent to which this film truly belongs to Laurel. Although he retained the essential themes of his father’s work, Stan brilliantly rewrote it, incorporating disguises, desecrating symbols of privilege, and featuring awkward (or better yet, terrified) acts of voyeurism towards the opposite sex. It marks the beginnings of an extraordinary deconstruction of machismo; it is also the first film in which ‘Babe’ Hardy acts as the spark, igniting his partner’s gags and paving the way for all the quarrels and predicaments to come.

Alessandro Criscitiello

A short film that contains two significant developments as far as the comedies the duo made for producer Hal Roach are concerned. Not only does Hardy cast his first, unmistakeable glance into the camera, reinforcing the relationship between the comedian and his public as much as Larry Semon, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd had done, but he also shares the same amount of screen time as Laurel for the first time. The premise is absurd, wacky and delightful: Stan is a taxi driver who embarks (with his taxi) on a ship full of millionaires, while Oliver is the ship steward whose attempts to flirt with the rich ladies are routinely sabotaged by Stan’s unwanted presence. None of these devices would be remotely plausible without the two imposters played by Gustav Schaffrath and the magnificent Anita Garvin, while the rest of the female cast is comprised of the cream of silent film stars (Dorothy Coburn, Viola Richard, Lupe Vélez). It is a film of concentrated slapstick, which also marks a significant refinement of our antiheroes’ personae and act.

Alessandro Criscitiello

One truism of film restoration is that the best-loved titles are almost always in the worst shape. Negatives wear out from overuse, old prints are duped to create new ones, and image (and sound) quality are lost with every new analog generation. That’s long been the case with Charlie Chaplin’s Mutual shorts, a series of 12 two-reel comedies that he made in 1916 and 1917. Considered by many to be Chaplin’s funniest, most formally accomplished work, the Mutual shorts have nearly been loved to death after over a century in constant circulation.
MoMA’s new restoration of The Adventurer, the final and, for many, finest of the Mutuals, comes as a revelation. Assembled from seven different sources, almost all from the domestic A negative, often combining elements within a given shot, it has a clarity and grain structure missing from the film for generations, and has been fitted with remade intertitles that match samples from original prints of other Mutual films. The film now looks – almost eerily – very much as it did when it first appeared on American screens.

Dave Kehr

In comedy, I think it’s always better to get two, big, separate laughs with one incident than with two individual incidents. Let’s take the ice-cream gag in The Adventurer: the first laugh comes at my embarrassment over my own predicament. The second, and the much greater one, comes when the ice cream landed on the woman’s neck and she shrieked and started to dance around. Only one incident had been used, but it had got two people into trouble, and had also got two big laughs. Simple as this trick seems, there were two real points of human nature involved in it. One was the delight the average person takes in seeing wealth and luxury in trouble. The other was the tendency of the human being to experience within himself the emotions he sees on the stage or screen. One of the things most quickly learned in theatrical work is that people as a whole get satisfaction from seeing the rich get the worst of things. The reason for this, of course, lies in the fact that nine tenths of the people in the world are poor, and secretly resent the wealth of the other tenth.

Charlie Chaplin, What People Laugh At, in “American Magazine”, November 1918