A Laurel and Hardy Party #10: BELOW ZERO and TIEMBLA Y TITUBEA

(1930; director: James Parrott)

Depression-era comedies such as this one feel freshly relevant in today’s Age of the Pandemic, when many of us are teetering on the edge of ruin. Who knows? Maybe this winter, I’ll be on the street with an instrument that I have no idea how to play, busking for pennies, and having snowballs thrown at me.

The opening title card explicitly sets this mean and funny little short in the winter of 1929. Money is scarce, but snow is plenty. It falls in harsh blankets on the city where Laurel and Hardy have set up shop as street musicians. They play one song over and over again (“In the Good Old Summertime”, hilariously). One suspects that it’s the only song that they know. Or at least Stan Laurel knows it, sorta kinda. He plays a hint of the main melody repeatedly on a portable organ while Oliver Hardy plucks random strings on a stand-up bass like it’s the first time he’s ever touched one, or any other musical instrument, in his life.

Everyone hates them, of course–and those instruments don’t have long to live.

That’s the first half.

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A Laurel and Hardy Party #9: BRATS

(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.

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