Comedy gets old quickly. The catchphrases, the gags, the jokes are often linked to the spirit of their time, to contemporaneity. It is enough to look at some clips of Zelig from a few years ago on YouTube to realize that, except for a few rare cases, what used to literally drive us crazy, today seems barely worthy of a smile. Except for a few rare cases, we were saying, because there are comedians and types of comedy that resist the passage of time , they age well like a good brandy. Totò remains Totò even more than half a century after his death, just as Charlie Chaplin remains Charlot. In short, comic immortality is for a few, or rather for very few. Among these we include, without any shadow of a doubt, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, for us Italians simply Laurel and Hardy .
One way to celebrate them and in some way rediscover them is the publication in Italy of the biography that the film historian John McCabe dedicated to Oliver Hardy , “Babe” (Sagoma Editore, 2024, pp. 368).
With Babe, the nickname by which Ollio was known in Hollywood , John McCabe allows us to take a great journey into the life of one of the great comic artists of the twentieth century and into the great American cinema of the classical age . McCabe follows Hardy, who was voiced in many films by Alberto Sordi, from his first steps into the world of entertainment, recounting his troubled marriages, his cyclical financial tensions, his kind personality and his fragilities. And of course his meeting with Stan Laurel that changed everything. Perfectly complementary on stage and in front of the camera, the two men were however very different in their private lives. With different interests and opposing personalities, their bond remained limited to the professional sphere for a long time. Only in the final part of their lives did Hardy and Laurel really learn to know each other, reviving that unshakable friendship that they had always staged in their unforgettable comedy films.
Babe therefore turns out not to be a simple biography or, even worse, a hagiography, but the story of a fragile and talented man, a great actor and a great star . At the same time the volume - enriched by a series of period photographs, largely unpublished - is a tribute to the power of friendship and the beauty of the art of laughter, which has made Oliver and Stan immortal in the hearts of millions of spectators all over the world.
