Who didn’t grow up with the short films of probably the most famous comedy duo in the world? We’re talking about Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, who made people around the world laugh in the 1920s. Oliver Hardy, always mindful of his dignity, tried to control the chaos caused by Stan Laurel, only to make it even worse.

In my childhood, the black and white films usually presented by the great German comedian Theo Lingen were regularly shown in the early evening program. Unlike Charlie Chaplin, who was a superstar in the 1930s and 1940s, the comedy of Stan and Ollie has survived to this day.

Now the Italian comic artist Gianluca Buttolo has created a memorial to the two by having Laurel tell the story of the duo in a telephone conversation that actually took place between Stan Laurel and Seth Owens, a student from New York City who is doing a school project on the two, without embellishing and with many painful passages.

He talks about English-born Stan Laurel’s first attempts at vaudeville in the USA, where he shared a booth with Charlie Chaplin and had no success until he met Oliver Hardy and the successful duo slowly began to emerge. Laurel also talks about the years of bad contracts with Hal Roach, which he and Oliver Hardy had and then went to Fox Studio after a break with Roach, but where they had no creative influence and Fox simply wanted to make money with their name. The marital problems of the multi-married comedians also contributed to the difficulties with the film studios.

It’s also interesting that the two couldn’t really estimate how popular they actually were. – and therefore misjudged their negotiating position with the film studios. It was only when they made a long journey from Hollywood via New York to Europe in 1933 that they realized how famous and popular they were from the crowds at the port in New York and then later in England. Another trip to England after the end of the Second World War in 1948 was even more successful and confirmed them in their work.

This rather sentimental and sensitive album was published by Oxymore in 2023.