Laurel & Hardy Meet the Terrorists
by Richard Oxman
“Hardy Full-bodied Laughs & Resting On Our Investigative Laurels” was my initial title.
In the early seventies, I studied with Professor John McCabe in an Ed.D. program at New York University’s School of Education. For two courses, one in Shakespeare and the other in Comedy and Tragedy, getting ready to do my dissertation in Educational Theatre. However, it’s the insights he provided respecting Laurel and Hardy’s work that are ringing in my political ears today. Specifically, a test run for *The Perfect Day*.
At the Newsreel Cinema in Birmingham, England, a sample audience was subjected to a showing of the early fifties sound short, their responses carefully monitored. Special attention was paid to one particular sequence which elicited seven full-bodied ten-second laughs.
A gouty foot was hit seven times within a few minutes. Normally, one couldn’t hope to get solid laughs at each assay, but that’s exactly what happened. Chalk it up to the artistry of Stan Laurel…and his colleagues.
I wonder if one could have found seven full-bodied ten-second laughs among the thirty thousand people evacuated recently in Birmingham, following the so-called first suicide bombings in England. And I wonder who’ll be laughing during the upcoming repeat performances.
Someone’s laughing (through their heartbreak and tears) out there. That’s for sure.
And I don’t need an Ed.D. or any test tracking system to tell me some kind of sick something is being played out. Look at the words of Matt Moore (AP) with which I led off my recent article titled “[Seconds Apart, Worlds Apart](http://oxtogrind.org/archive/63)”:
> -The bombs on the subway went off within a span of 50 seconds Thursday, *suggesting detonation by synchronized timers rather than suicide bombers*, police said, revising earlier accounts that the blasts occurred within a 26-minute span. An explosion tore through a double-decker bus nearly an hour later.- Italics are mine.
How does one reconcile the *new official notion* of at-the-same-minute suicide bombers being responsible with the above? First, we’re expected to not raise questions respecting the sudden change in the official timeline. Next, we’re given a new element to plug into the official equation which contradicts the basis for the new timeline. Again, it’s served up in a setting which discourages interrogatives.
And all the while those on the left and right are shaking their heads with grim countenance, bemoaning what it’s all come to…. As if they knew what it’s come to….
Our first order of business is to start sending up full-bodied laughs (dis)respecting the obvious contradictions in the official lines being spewed out rapid-fire in the dailies. By faces full of… compassion and confidence.
And to ask additional questions not being asked. [1]
Where is that underground footage being talked about? I mean, the clear versions, not the general shots of someone with a backpack on a subway. How was some of that footage taken? Are there other possible explanations for the four suspects’ tracked movements? What’s the official line regarding why one detonation was not synchronized effectively? Why was it *tardy*? [2]
There are others.
For now, I’m going to give off a hardy full-bodied laugh…on this officially perfect day.
Fatal Footnotes:
[1] Above and beyond what’s asked in the first half here…and what’s asked in [Seconds Apart, Worlds Apart](http://oxtogrind.org/archive/63).
[2] I play with the word “tardy” here for a few reasons. One is the Hamlet line: “Now, this overdone or come tardy off…cannot but make the judicious grieve.” Another is John McCabe’s analysis of the effectiveness of the sequence I mention above: “These are the exact pitfalls avoided by Stan Laurel in this action. The hitting of the gouty foot is never overdone, it is made on each occasion to seem a natural accident. They are spaced by means of good editing so that one is not expecting them and when they come, they are a result of purely natural movement. Nor are they ‘come tardy off’. They come when they should come and this is determined in the cutting room.” The words (from Mr. Laurel & Mr. Hardy) reinforce what McCabe told me in person about thirty years ago, and they also make me think about the possible machinations of The Powers. I do not believe it is necessary for readers to get the convoluted connections which rest so clearly in my mind in order to appreciate the more fundamental questions raised here.
