![]() ![]() ![]() After changing film studios in the early 1940s, their popularity fell (along with the perceived quality of their films), but television kept them in the public eye and ensured their work would never be forgotten.Īs is often the case with our funniest performers, however, the lives of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were hardly free from tragedy and sorrow. After winning an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Subject for 1931's The Music Box, the comedy team proceeded to make hit after hit during the 1930s, mostly working in short films of forty minutes or less. Those comedy fundamentals have allowed the duo to endure in popular culture long after their death. Few performing acts successfully transitioned from the Silent Era into the age of sound, but Oliver Hardy and Stan Laurel used a combination of visual contrast - the rotund and imposing Hardy standing next to the thin, angular Laurel - peerless physical comedy, and sharp comic timing to become one of the most popular comedy acts of the 1930s. Eighty years after their heyday, Laurel and Hardy remain icons of comedy.
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