Laurel Always Left ‘Em Laughing : On 30th Anniversary of Legendary Comedian’s Death, His Writing and Acting Genius Remain a Potent Legacy

Stan to Olly: “Remember the old adage . . . . You can lead a horse to water, but a pencil must be led.”

“Brats” (1930)

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The grave site of comedian Stan Laurel is among the most traipsed past by movie fans who wander through the Hollywood Hills Forest Lawn Cemetery to pay respects to talents gone by. A special plaque on the stone wall commemorates the fact that a comic genius, the apparently hapless half of the legendary film team Laurel and Hardy, exited this world, at age 74, exactly 30 years ago today.

With more than 100 films (27 features) to his credit and decades of honed performances, Stan Laurel certainly possessed the credentials to expound on his chosen craft of comedy. Wisely, however, he preferred to leave the simplest question alone.

“A friend once asked me what comedy was,” Laurel told a reporter. “That floored me. What is comedy? I don’t know. Does anybody? Can you define it? All I know is that I learned how to get laughs and that’s all I know about it. You have to learn what people will laugh at, then proceed accordingly.”

And proceed he did, with silent and talkie films such as “The Music Box,” “Sons of the Desert,” “Leave ‘Em Laughing,” “Babes in Toyland,” “Way Out West” and “Block-Heads.” Through all of his efforts with Oliver Hardy, Laurel, with his scrawny build and bewildered mannerisms, was often the funnier of the two, and is credited with writing much of the duo’s best material.

As Ephraim Katz points out in “The Film Encyclopedia,” Laurel and Hardy “made people laugh by representing a level of naivete and stupidity that almost anyone in the audience could feel superior to.” Laurel would often play the more outstandingly brainless half, being chastised by Hardy in several films with the immortal line, “Here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into.”

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“My God, has it been that long?” says Dick Van Dyke, who delivered the eulogy for Laurel in 1965, reflecting on the legacy of his hero.

Van Dyke first met Laurel in the early 1960s when Laurel, who retired from film work after the 1957 death of Oliver “Babe” Hardy, was actually listed in the Santa Monica phone book. Van Dyke would check in at the front desk of the Oceana Apartment Hotel and then proceed to the small ocean-front apartment that Laurel shared with his fourth wife, Ida. “I’d be coming down the hall,” he says, “and Stan would stick his head out and say, ‘Hello, Dickie.’ ”

Van Dyke recalls long afternoons talking comedy and film with his hero. “Stan was a real English gentleman,” Van Dyke says. “His (goofy) character was strictly an invention. But he really did have that high-pitched laugh.

“Mostly I would ask, ‘How’d you do this?’ or ‘What made you think of that?’ and he’d be talking and get so animated and really wound up. I loved to sit and just listen.”

By that time, Laurel was in his 70s and a bit frail from a stroke he had suffered a few years before that had left him with a slight limp and no driver’s license.

“He wouldn’t go out,” Van Dyke says. “The stroke affected his left side and he didn’t want people to see him that way.” Even so, Van Dyke asked him to come to the set of his popular CBS “Dick Van Dyke Show” and provide a few pointers as a technical adviser to an episode that included a Laurel and Hardy tribute segment. But Laurel declined, saying he preferred retirement.

“He gave me notes afterward,” Van Dyke says, laughing. “Never when I needed them.”

During the last years of his life, Laurel, who was awarded a special Oscar in 1961 for his work in film comedy, took pleasure in simple things like spiffing up for his jaunt downstairs to collect his mail at the front desk and, of course, entertaining folks hanging around the lobby. Later in the day, he would sit on his cushioned chair and prepare his meticulously organized desk; for hours he would inscribe pictures and type out eloquent personal replies to fan mail.

“He was still sitting down every day and writing sketches for him and Babe, that many years after Olly was dead,” Van Dyke says. “He liked to write.”

After Laurel’s death, his only daughter, Lois Brooks, contested his will, claiming Laurel had been mentally incompetent, but friends who knew the aging comedian firmly disagree. “He was sharp as a tack,” Van Dyke says.

Word got around that Laurel welcomed visitors, and other performers began to follow Van Dyke’s example, including Dick Martin, Orson Bean, Marcel Marceau and Alan Young. Jerry Lewis reportedly offered to hire Laurel to doctor scripts, but Laurel said he truly preferred spending time with his grandchildren and watching TV with Ida.

The visitors loved hearing Laurel’s remembrances of the old days. He told them how Hardy actually grew to dislike his trademark necktie fumble.

“Stan said Olly was a golfer who liked to leave the studio early,” Van Dyke says. “Stan was the guy who did all the writing and came up with the gags. When they’d have Olly do those slow burns, Stan would wait until it was time for Olly to go play golf and make him do it then--so he’d already be P.O.’d.

“Oddly enough, Stan hated the crying bit. The audiences loved it, but he said to me, ‘I always hated it. . . . I never thought it was funny. Never.’ And come to think of it, he never did it for me either.”

Actor Tom Poston, who performed an astute Stan Laurel impression on “The Steve Allen Show” on NBC in the 1950s, also remembers meeting Laurel. “Well, besides (reportedly) being a wonderful kisser, Stan had an elfin humor that was irresistible,” he says.

Martin Short never got to meet his idol, but says Laurel was a huge influence on his style of comedy.

“I do a Stan Laurel take now and then,” Short says, “that kind of dazed stare where you could almost see an X-ray of his brain working over the information . . . sort of a dull response, where the head moves a bit like a car getting unstuck in mud--and then it moves.”

Laurel’s physical comedy was also trailblazing, Short says. “Someone can do a fall and you just think he hurt himself. Somebody else can do the same kind of fall and you’ll laugh. It’s about a complete relaxation of the body, no tension. That’s what Stan used to do. He’d be deadpan in the middle of the fall, and after the fall he was fine.”

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Unlike some other comedy teams, Laurel and Hardy labored harmoniously, embracing each other’s talents. “There was a wonderful love affair between the two of them which has never been duplicated” in comedy, says Van Dyke. “It was a sweet world they created and you went right along with them.”

Not long before he died, Laurel sanctioned the Sons of the Desert, a fraternal order of fans of Laurel and Hardy who continue to meet today in chapters around the globe. To the world, Laurel’s death meant the curtain had closed on the movie duo that both Lou Costello and Groucho Marx called the greatest comedy team ever.

In his eulogy, Van Dyke called Laurel the “greatest of film comedians,” if you measured by sheer volume of laughter.