One half of the duo credited with virtually creating the slapstick comedy genre in motion pictures hailed from the CSRA.
While Charlie Chaplain may have created the famous Little Tramp on screen, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy took physical comedy to a whole new level.
Norville “Oliver” Hardy was born in Harlem, Ga., in 1892, and he credited his youth living in the South as being the inspiration for creating a character that would become iconic, according to tourism website Explore Georgia.
The son of a Columbia County tax-collector-turned-luxury-hotel-manager, baby Norville and the Hardy family moved from Harlem to Milledgeville where his father, Oliver, was hired at the Turnell-Butler Hotel. Sadly, Norville’s father died of a heart attack when the boy was just 10 months old.
MORE: Something you may not have known: The revolutionary rockstar Lafayette
Later, when Hardy struck out to become a comedian, he changed his first name to Oliver in homage to his late father.
Hardy actually started his career working as a janitor for the Palace Theatre in Milledgeville in 1910 where he was first exposed to the new “moving pictures” and then followed his dream to Jacksonville, Fla. where he appeared in his first motion picture, “Outwitting Dad,” in 1914, according to IMDB.
Hardy migrated to Jacksonville was because that city almost became the “movie town” known today as Hollywood. According to Phil Edwards, writing for Vox, Jacksonville had the perfect climate, and movie makers wanted to be closer to New York City as opposed to the other suggested location, Los Angeles, Calif.
However, Edwards writes that the “actors running loose around town” scandalized the locals, and Jacksonville residents voted against allowing the burgeoning industry to continue to produce movies there, so Hardy had no choice but to relocate to Los Angeles.
From there, Hardy had mild success in the movie industry and even tried his hand at directing, but it was when he met English comic Stan Laurel in 1921 that Hardy would be positioned to become internationally famous.
In “The Lucky Dog,” the first film featuring the pair, Hardy played a bit role as a criminal trying to rob Laurel’s character. The two men would become fast friends but would not create the groundbreaking duo Laurel and Hardy until 1927’s “Slipping Wives, Duck Soup,” according to IMDB.
MORE: Pickleball is arising in Augusta as a new favorite sport
The two men discovered a formula where Hardy would play the bully against the hapless Laurel, and in the Silent Film Era, the physical slapstick comedy worked on screen.
Once “talkies” came along, many Silent Era stars did not make the transition, but Laurel and Hardy retooled their act to include “one liners and quips,” according to The Guardian.
Laurel and Hardy also broke the taboo of breaking the fourth wall, or looking directly at the audience, and created loads of laughter with brief comical glances and shrugs. The pair also performed their own stunts, leaving audiences in tears.
According to The Guardian, Laurel and Hardy were particularly successful during the Great Depression where their outrageous onscreen antics provided an escape to moviegoers during those trying economic times.
The pair would continue making movies together until Hardy’s death in 1957.
…And that is something you may not have known.
Scott Hudson is the senior reporter for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
