"Andrew B." wrote me to ask…
Who would you say is the greatest comic actor of all time, living or dead?
Oliver Hardy…with Stan Laurel a close second. I can watch Oliver Hardy in anything — even the worst Laurel & Hardy movie (and they made some awful ones late in their careers), even that dreary John Wayne movie Hardy appeared in without Laurel.
The best way I can explain what I love about "Babe" Hardy (his friends called him that) is like this: Harold Lloyd made a lot of great comedy films in roughly the same era but in Lloyd's films, the situations were risible and the gags were clever but he himself was not all that amusing. Reportedly — and this is easy to believe if you've seen his movies — if a scene called for him to walk across the room and open a door, he'd turn to the director and writers and ask, "What do I do to be funny?"
That was a question Oliver N. Hardy never had to ask. He was actually funny just walking across a room and opening a door. He also had a great sense of scale. Early comedy films drew a lot of their performers from the stage — shows we might now think of under the general heading of vaudeville. A lot of these folks were used to playing to the second balcony, making their reactions and movements too extreme for the camera. Other performers were literally learning to be comic actors before the cameras, never having done it before. They tended to underplay. But Hardy was always just right.
Once sound movies came along, a lot of comic actors were more interested in talking funny than in being funny with their gestures and actions. Among those who came around long after Stan and Ollie and who moved funny were Dick Van Dyke, Art Carney and most of the leads in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. That's one of the things I love about that movie.
The best episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show are ones which give Dick many opportunities to react to situations not just with his face but with every part of him from the neck down. And I love watching Carney on the classic episodes of The Honeymooners where he steals just about every scene he's in — no easy thing to do when you're sharing the screen with Jackie Gleason. The difference between them is that Gleason was a good physical comedian and Carney was a great one.
And I really love Phil Silvers. A few months ago, I watched the 1955 movie of Guys and Dolls for the umpteenth time. I always think what a classic that would have been if they'd cast Sinatra as Sky Masterson instead of Nathan Detroit, and hired Silvers to play Nathan. To me, Sgt. Bilko was the most wonderful comic character ever created for television.
These days, I don't see many comic actors who act with their entire bodies, perhaps because the shows and the scripts do not demand that of them. I'm not talking about a need for more slapstick and pratfalls. I'm talking about "takes" and reactions and adopting postures that reflect the situations…and being funny walking across a room and opening a door. Nowadays, actors do that exactly the way you or I would and if they're supposed to be funny, they say something funny as they walk across the room and open the door. If you don't get what I mean, watch Oliver Hardy, especially in a silent film or a talkie scene where he has nothing to say. He could say so much with nothing to say.
