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of BEING FUNNY
in Four LANGUAGES
By HOMER CROY
frijoles, and thus equipped they started in Thursday morning being funny in four languages.
LTOW do they do it? That is the question? If you *• *■ were suddenly called upon to speak three strange languages, how would you do it? And suppose you had to speak them so that people in those countries would think you were born just butside Paris, or in Unter den Linden, or that your father was a bullfighter, what, I repeat, would you do?
I have watched Laurel and Hardy being funny in four languages, and it is something I will never forget, although I saw the shelling of Paris when Big Bertha was dropping them regularly, but, as I recall
it, the people wore gay and carefree expressions
on their faces in comparison to the expressions I
saw and heard in and around Culver City
California. This is the way Messieurs Laurel and
Hardy do it. They have their "tutors," as
they are called, three of them: Spanish,
French and German. Senors Laurel and
Hardy make the scene first in English.
and then they turn' on the heat and
make it all over again in German
How do they gargle deeply enough
to satisfy the elite of Potsdam? Well, Hardy has lost
sixty pounds in the last
thirty days. When he
was a lad, Herr Hardy
used to tour the country as one of a singing
quartette which was
billed as "A Ton of
Melody." Well, he couldn't
do it today. If he went
out today they would have to
bill him as "The Flyweight
Tenor." Foreign talkies, that is
the answer.
THE first day I saw them work was in "Brats." When I arrived the two lads were in a bed that would have made Brigham Young weep with joy; the biggest bed I ever saw in my life, although I have never been in a harem. It was especially made for the occasion and was twice the size of an ordinary two-dollars-aday bed. In fact it was made extra large as Petits Laurel and Hardy were playing the parts of children and were dressed like same. They had made the English version and now they tore into the German version.
The German "tutor" made them repeat again and again the words in German, and then he stood just outside the camera lines and listened and drilled themagain
showing them how to place their lips to get the right accent. The two tots lay on their great pillows snoring softly, when there was the sound off stage of an automobile horn, and then they sat up in bed and listened. Laurel had to say, "I want a glass of water." And then poor Hardy had to say, "Ich auch." Doesn't sound like much, does it? But have you ever tried to pronounce it so that forty million Germans will say, "Ach, dot boy knows his ich's?"
If you haven't, don't try, for those two words are stumpers. Men have talked German for years and died with steins in their hands and couldn't pronounce them correctly — and yet Hardy had to get it exactly right.
VER it and over it they
went, while they
stared into the
high-powered
lights and
struggled like
donner and
blitzen.
Oliver Hardy started out to be a lawyer. He was graduated from the law department of the University of Georgia — but legal clients failed to present themselves quickly enough.
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