'They Journeyed, They Undertook Quests'

Growing up in Cleveland, I saw palm trees only in the movies. In color films they looked like décor stuck in place by set designers, glossy L.A. props. Only in silent pictures or early talkies did they appear truly alien. One of the ancillary pleasures of watching Buster Keaton or Laurel and Hardy, whose films were often shot on the workaday, pre-CGI streets of Los Angeles, was spying those starkly exotic-looking palms in black and white (along with billboards and interesting examples of SoCal architecture).

My oldest son sent me a link to a video meme making the rounds that plays on the idea of people having difficulty saying goodbye at the conclusion of Zoom meetings. The clip is drawn from one of Laurel and Hardy’s best films, Perfect Day (1929). That same son several years ago gave me as a Christmas gift Laurel & Hardy: The Essential Collection, a ten-disc set, so that evening I watched the entire film. It passed the Kurp Klassic Komedy test by triggering three out-loud laughs during a running time of nineteen minutes, forty-two seconds, with no one else in the room (smiles and tastefully noncommittal snorts don’t count). That’s nearly one audible laugh every six minutes, a rate exceeded only by W.C. Fields in It’s a Gift (1934).

Back to palm trees: few sightings in Perfect Day. Wait for the scene in which Stan runs up the street and you’ll see several silhouetted along the horizon. (Wait also for the gouty father-in-law played by Edgar Kennedy to emit a sotto-voce “Oh, shit!” when his foot is slammed in the car door by Stan.) I found a marvelous archaeological dig dedicated to the film at Silent Locations. The proprietor, John Bengtson, tracks down the places in Los Angeles where Perfect Day was shot.  

Two things about Perfect Day impress me: 1.) the elegant simplicity of its premise and, related to that, 2.) the way it presages Samuel Beckett and his perennial themes. Beckett loved Laurel and Hardy and makes several references to them in his work (see Watt, Mercier and Camier). In Stan and Ollie we see Didi and Gogo in Waiting for Godot, who also dress in bowlers and baggy pants. In Hugh Kenner’s words: “[O]ne of them marvelously incompetent, the other an ineffective man of the world devoted (some of the time) to his friend’s care” (A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett, 1973). They spend all of Perfect Day going nowhere. Kenner continues:

“They journeyed, they undertook quests, they had adventures; their friendship, tested by bouts of exasperation, was never really vulnerable; they seemed not to become older, nor wiser; and in perpetual nervous agitation. Laurel’s nerves occasionally protesting like a baby’s, Hardy soliciting a philosophic calm he could never find leisure to settle into, they coped. Neither was especially competent, but Hardy made a big man’s show of competence. Laurel was defeated by the most trifling requirement.”

Hardy always proceeds as though he knows what to do and how to do it. (I love the way he rakishly cocks his bowler like a cartoon Irishman looking for a fight.) It’s the way most of us would proceed if we had any idea what we were doing and how we were supposed to do it.