I first became a fan of Laurel and Hardy watching their films on TV as a child. What made them unique was that didn't rehash old vaudeville routines as most comics of the day did, but they created pure film comedy. While other comedians in the 1920s were struggling with the new medium of taking films, Laurel and Hardy plunged right into sound films with ease. They could talk, they could act, and they were clever enough to not entirely abandon visual comedy but combine it with the verbal making them a world wide sensation. Despite being the dim witted one, Stan Laurel was the genius behind their films in the early days, before budgets and executives slowly squeezed out his control. Stan thought Oliver Hardy was the funniest actor he had ever met and their teaming became the greatest partnership in the history of film comedy. When Ollie died in 1957 Stan retired and had no desire to work any more without his famous partner. Such was the brilliant complexity of their screen characterizations that I had trouble trying to choose which of their many and varied facial expressions to render. Despite Stan's most famous looney smile with his elongated chin, I chose to do his simple "blank" look to show the depth of his comic genius.