Oliver Hardy: “Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”
Stan Laurel: “Here’s another nice mess I got you into.”
It’s such a simple metaphor. Yet, it has profound effects, because there never was comedy’s greatest awesome twosome, like them, before, or after, in movie history. Nor, there will be another ever. The benchmark tagline, or catchword, first surfaced in The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case (1930); it also scoots in several of their films, including one of their finest rip-roaring movies, Sons of the Desert (1933). The best part is the catchy phrase emerges in myriad forms. Hardy, in Thicker than Water (1935), for instance, tells his great pal, “Here’s another kettle of fish you pickled me in.” In Saps at Sea (1940), Hardy is at it again, “Here’s another nice bucket of suds you’ve gotten me into.”
What a mess they’d often get themselves into. This was, and is, eternal bliss—during their time, yesterday, today, and for tomorrow too. It holds a magical spell, never before, or after, incarnate.
Most of us know that laughter is the best medicine—a natural remedy for a host of ills and moody blues. Modern science testifies to such a credo, not just in terms of possibility constructs, but also actual precepts. So, what could be everyone’s best example of true laughter than the images of Laurel and Hardy—comedians par excellence—who laughed their way through the Great Depression? This is not all. Their fascinating impressions are still with us, as instant deliverers from our own sense of ennui, not just because they were the most remarkable two-man ensemble, the first great—and, perhaps, the last—Hollywood motion-picture comedy team, in a genre of their own, but also because they were to slapstick what the falling apple was to Sir Isaac Newton.
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