Laurel and Hardy

Start with: The Music Box (1932) The screen's great slow-burn partnership. Stan Laurel played the clumsy, childlike one and Oliver Hardy the pompous gentleman who suffers for it, and the comedy lives in the pauses: Ollie's long look into the camera, Stan's crumpling face. Off screen the division was different, because Laurel did much of the creative work and often rewrote whole sequences. They became a team at the Hal Roach studio in 1927. The Music Box, in which they haul a piano up an enormous flight of steps, won the Academy Award for best live-action short and shows the whole method in under half an hour.