(1930; director: James Parrott)
Laurel and Hardy are the bumbling babysitters of two annoying toddlers and this is a great short because it doesn’t make the mistake that a lot of lesser comedies would make.
They didn’t hire cute kids to play the troublemakers. Cute kids don’t exist in Laurel & Hardy’s world of idiots and jerks.
They also didn’t hire kids who sorta look like jerks.
Nope, the Hal Roach crew did the right thing and had Stan and Ollie also play the toddlers, via gloriously primitive 1930 camera tricks. Roach and stalwart director James Parrott went to the trouble to make some oversized furniture for them, but they didn’t even try to make the boys look proportionate as 3-year-olds. They look like they got hit with the shrinking ray from Dr. Cyclops.
The good news is that comedy doesn’t need good special effects. Comedy can look like shit and get away with it if it’s funny.
And this film IS funny. Our heroes fall down stars, smack each other silly, get hit in the head with blocks, get knocked into a bathtub full of water and get poked in the eye like real artists. We also get some serious insight as to why it’s a bad idea to keep a glass cabinet full of fancy dishes near a pool table.
While they were going wild with special effects, they also threw in a sequence with an animated mouse that looks like someone merely took a Sharpie to the original film strip. I love it.
The really inspired joke here though–this film’s humming comedic engine–is that the adult Laurel & Hardy are every bit as clumsy and clueless as the toddler Laurel & Hardy. They both bicker constantly and sabotage each other and both are equal in their capacity to destroy everything around them. The only difference between the kids and the adults here is that the adults are in charge. Or they think so, at least.
It’s a message that resonates. When I was a kid, I thought everything would be different when I got older. As I’ve gotten older, it’s slowly dawned on me that sometimes, in some situations, adults are just children who owe money.