Laurel and Hardy

During research, I noticed that filmsite.org wrote "This is primitive and universal comedy with broad, aggressive, physical, and visual action, including harmless or painless cruelty and violence, horseplay, and often vulgar sight gags (e.g., a custard pie in the face, collapsing houses, a fall in the ocean, a loss of trousers or skirts, runaway crashing cars, people chases, etc)."

This is evident in Laurel and Hardy’s ‘From Soup to Nuts’ which is a silent short related to their feature film ‘A Chump at Oxford”. In From Soup to Nuts, during the scene where Laurel and Hardy are serving the food to the civilised family, a lot of physical and visual action to create comedy is used along with sight gags. For example, when we first see Laurel and Hardy in the dining room we see that Laurel is pouring food all over Hardy without noticing as he is holding the bowl unstable, this portrays the character of Laurel and tells the audience that he has a lack of awareness whilst making them laugh at the same time. A very obvious sight gag that we see is when Hardy slips on a banana skin and falls into the cake that he is holding twice, landing face first into the cake. The same also happens to Stan Laurel, however he spills soup when he falls on the banana skin, the soup then lands on a very arrogant member of the civilised family. Painless violence is shown when Laurel slightly knocks the family members chin with his fist, the family member makes an overreaction which causes the audience to laugh and therefore creates comedy.

My second research from a wiki page about comedy said that "Roy Stafford argues that each genre uses “familiar ‘narrative devices’” – and as opposed to other critics he even defines those devices for comedy sufficiently. Stafford (2) explains that in comedy the audience responds to two different comic elements: 

• “The Gag – visual, arual, verbal jokes, carefully timed and delivered for maximum impact;
• Comic situations – ‘narrative comedy’ in which it is the developing relationships between characters and the social environment that causes us to laugh

These two elements make a volatile combination since the performance of gags is often highly disruptive of the progression of the narrative.” " 


In the same scene, we can see evidence to support this quote from Stafford as verbal jokes are presented through text, for example when the family member uses Laurel's shirt to wipe the soap off, Laurel does it back before a shot appears with the words "-How do you like it?-" making the audience laugh. The scene also uses many visual jokes such as sight gags as explained in the previous paragraph. We also see how the situation develops in this scene and how the civilised family become more and more angry with Laurel and Hardy as they cause more havoc, also the family react every time something happens by standing up which makes Laurael become angry with the family.