Stan Laurel Quotes

I wish they’d re-release ... I guess maybe I’d like to see it again because it has one beautifully funny sequence that I’ve never seen in movies, either before or since. We had an army of knights in a chase sequence. There were over three hundred of them working with basket horses… the circus-clown type horses, with the men’s legs extending beneath the little papier-mâché horses built around them. It was hilarious, like some of those circus routines. There were a lot of routines we did in those days that have been forgotten today. Comics today rely too much on the line gag and not the visual gag. I think that Hollywood comics these days are talking too much and not doing enough.

So terribly funny. He can still make me laugh like crazy after all these years.

It has to be visual stuff. Too many radio writers are writing radio gags for television, which is a visual medium.

He and Jolson were wonderful entertainers the like of which you don't see anymore. They weren't comedians really, but funny singing entertainers of the kind I used to see and love in the English music hall. It's a shame that young performers these days aren't remotely like them.

If anyone at my funeral has a long face, I'll never speak to him again

I don't see many people anymore. It's a long way out here to . And I can't go any place. I have and still haven't completely recovered from the stroke I had in 1955, so all I can do is stay in the apartment here and watch the ocean and television. About the only visitor I have, except for my family, is Jerry Lewis. He's been after me to work as a comedy consultant on his movies. Once he came out here and stayed seven hours. We had a lot of laughs. But, as for working again, I can't. I'm all washed up in this business.

I suppose we had very little of what you'd call family life. We were very seldom all together. I was almost always either in boarding school or living with my grandparents in were I was born, but still, strange as it may seem, we were always a close family.

About those boys, I don't care how rough you treat them. I can't tell you how much it hurt me to do those pictures, and how ashamed I am of them. We wouldn't have done them if we didn't have to eat. I kept thinking that sooner or later they would let us do the pictures in our own way, but it just got worse and worse, and we couldn't take it any more. I didn't always see eye to eye with Roach, but for the most part he left us alone, and I'll always be grateful to Hal for that. But those Fox people! You can give it to them good.

If they ever do a film of my life—and I hope they won't—I'd like Dick to play me. He's one of the very, very few comedians around who knows how to use his body for real.comedy.

He could lift that eyebrow, and I'd break up.

Something rare these days—a wit.

Who are these people? What are they? I don't understand this business of their being billed as 'stars'. What are they stars of? Who made them stars? As far as I can see, they don't do anything but read some questions from cards or a machine. The terrible thing about some of them is that they think they can act or read funny lines, for God's sake. And even worse than that is the fact that the audience seems to accept them on these terms. These people aren't talents, or even bad talents. They are simply non-talents.

Another 'great,' and I use that word very carefully, not the way Milton Berle uses it. One of the reasons I love Buster so much is because he lives comedy as well as practices it. Some of his things are better than Chaplin's.

A real craftsman. He knows what consistent comedy characterization is. The only criticism I have is that once in a while he holds after his laughs too long. He milks those holds on occasion and he shouldn't.

I hope that the motto can be blue and grey, showing two derbies with these words superimposed: "Two Minds Without a Single Thought."