Laurel and Hardy Live on at B’nai Torah

In a back room, just off the chapel at Congregation B’nai Torah in Sandy Springs, Howard Newman is fiddling with the connections between a video screen and a small boombox with a DVD player. Newman is the Grand Sheik of the Atlanta chapter of the Sons of the Desert. The organization, which is said to have as many as 300 chapters around the world, is devoted to preserving the work of two of the greatest film comedians, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.

Newman first discovered the films of the funnymen after his father brought home several that he had checked out from the public library in Ohio, where he grew up. Mixed in with the silent classics by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton were short films by “the boys” as the two are affectionately known. He soon became hooked on the misadventures of the rotund Ollie as Hardy was called and his skinny dim-witted side kick, Stan Laurel.

“I started watching the films when I was growing up. And I came to realize that of all the different comedians that I was viewing, that I was enjoying Laurel and Hardy the most, and so my first meeting with the Sons of the Desert was one month after the very first convention.”

Although he missed the first convention 60 years ago, he’s been a regular at the gatherings that have been held ever since. Mingling with fans from all over the world, meeting some of the actors and actresses who appeared in the films, watching rare classics was, in Newman’s words, the best.

“The conventions were wonderful. I looked forward to each convention like it was an exotic vacation. And I loved it, yes, absolutely loved it.”

Between the conventions that are held every two years, the fans of Stan and Ollie stay in touch with the occasion publication of the “Intra-Tent Journal” as the group’s news magazine is called.

One issue features the work of Laurel behind the camera. Although his comedy character was not very bright and slow moving, Laurel was the brains behind the pair’s astonishing success, sometimes serving as a film’s producer as well as working out the gags they did on film. But none of that intense work ethic ever appeared to rub off on the comic character he created.

Tonight’s film at the Sons of The Desert is the 1937 feature “Way Out West,” set in a comic version of the Wild West. When they first appear on screen, they’re not riding a pair of magnificent stallions. Instead, Laurel is walking and leading a mule through the sagebrush, while Hardy reclines on a wooden sled-like contraption, fully at ease as the mule and Laurel trudge on. They are making their way to Brushwood Gulch where they are hoping to find the daughter of a friend who has died and left the deed to a goldmine the daughter is to inherit.

There’s lots of opportunity for comic mayhem and even a few musical numbers, with the two doing a nifty and surprisingly graceful dance before entering the town saloon. Once inside, Laurel mouths the lyrics of “The Trail of The Lonesome Pine” first in a bass voice, then when Hardy hits him on the heat with a mallet, chirping in what seems like a young woman voice. Many years later, after both comedians had passed on, the song showed up in Britain as one of the biggest pop hits.

This month marks the 135th anniversary of Stan Laurel’s birth, who formed a lifelong partnership with Oliver Hardy, who was born in Harlem, Ga., just outside Augusta. They were first brought together almost 100 years ago, in a short two-reel film, made at the Hal Roach Studios in Burbank, Calif. The film was called, “Putting Pants On Philip.”

The simple plot has Hardy making fun of a young man who is dressed in traditional Scots clothing of a short, pleated skirt and knee stockings. Then, he suddenly realizes that this young man, who seems oblivious to anything that’s wrong, is his nephew, who’s come from Scotland for a visit.

As simple as the story is, there was a chemistry that the audience detected between the haughty and embarrassed fat man and this slight, boyishly innocent, yet gently comedic young man. It was the first of 102 films the pair made over the next 25 years. Hardy died in 1957 and Laurel followed eight years later, but their memory lives on in the flickering images that Howard Newman has revived inside the Sandy Springs synagogue.

“The appeal of these two men is so deep and abiding,” he says. “It’s their essential innocence. They are two innocents in a world of sophistication and complexity.”