Bedtime Reading
In bed today, snuffling my way through a cold. Just finished reading two books. Simon Louvish's The Roots of Comedy, about Laurel and Hardy. And feeding my private vice, Dr Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen. Leaving the good Doctor aside for the moment, I felt that the Laurel and Hardy book was a strain to read, perhaps because it was a strain to write. In the end, Laurel was the more interesting of the two, doing most of the scripting and gagwork. By all accounts he wasn't great at the kind of long form plots needed to keep a feature film ticking over. But they were happily working at a time when you could make 12 three reeler shorts in the time it now takes to put together one feature film deal, shoot not included. It is odd to think that without the peculiarities of the newsreel, short, cartoon, feature set up common then, the world would never have enjoyed the perfection of the Music Box, as the pair of them contrive to explore every variation on dropping a piano down a flight of stairs.
6:12:34 PM 
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