‘Collecting Laurel and Hardy’
By Danny Bacher and Bernie Hogya
Schiffer Publishing

The music that we call jazz has always been welcoming to artists with senses of humor to match their senses of rhythm; small wonder that Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller were among the music’s first international superstars, joined by Louis Jordan, Nat King Cole, Dizzy Gillespie, Jon Hendricks, and Louis Prima in subsequent generations.  

Today, the tradition thrives with such talents as John Pizzarelli, Ken Peplowski, Jon Faddis, Anne Hampton Callaway, and Kurt Elling, all of whom were and are very funny folk: brilliant clowns as well as superlative musicians.

Apparently, fate too has a sense of humor — and a rather cruel one at that — in that it robbed us of the youngest of these top-shelf contemporary musical comics, Danny Bacher, an excellent and exuberant singer, saxophonist, and entertainer.  Bacher, who died last week at 47, was this generation’s heir apparent to the legendary musical clowns of the last hundred years.

Any performance by Bacher was like eating at Carmine’s on Broadway: Just like you never leave Carmine’s hungry, you never left one of his shows feeling less than eminently satisfied and thoroughly entertained. It felt impossible to do anything but smile the entire time he was on stage, whether singing, playing his soprano or tenor saxophone, or even just talking.

More than any of the funnymen who preceded him, Bacher was a serious — if that’s the right word — scholar of comedy. He had made a genuine study of the master movie comics of the 1920s and ’30s, landing on the team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy as his specialty. He spent much of his relatively short time on earth amassing and curating what must be the world’s premiere privately held collection of Laurel & Hardy merchandise, memorabilia, paraphernalia, souvenirs, bric-a-brac, and tchotchkes. 

A few years ago, Bacher joined forces with an award-winning art director and advertising guru, Bernie Hogya, the force behind the iconic “Got Milk?” campaign. The two pooled their archives and their labor into a remarkable new book, the full title of which is: “Collecting Laurel and Hardy: Autographs, Posters, Toys, Dolls, Games, Trading Cards, Comic Books, Costumes, Props, and More!”  

The elongated title is perfectly appropriate, as this is an exhaustive study of two- and three-dimensional artifacts from the universe of Stan and Ollie, and shows how the many fine messes they created spilled off the screen and into the forms of toys, puppets, comic books, and whatnot.

In the best tradition of L&H — as well as that of Danny Bacher — “Collecting Laurel and Hardy” is thoroughly entertaining, written with a sense of humor that serves both its author and its subject. As Leonard Maltin points out in his introduction, Laurel & Hardy “were a gift to cartoonists, caricaturists, and animators around the globe, which made it easy to market and manufacture toys, games, figurines, and such. Even badly drawn renderings of Stan and Ollie (and there are many) are instantly recognizable. One is fat and sports a mustache, while the other is thin and clean-shaven with a mop of hair he can run his fingers through.”

Another factor that added considerably to their appeal was their musicality. They were the only major stars of the silent comedy era that made a completely seamless transition into talking pictures; unlike with Chaplin, Keaton, or Harold Lloyd, sound only made them funnier. As with the Marx Brothers and the Ritz Brothers, music, singing, and dance figure in many of their pictures.

Clearly, it was significant that in “The Music Box,” which might be their single most iconic film, Stan and Ollie are attempting what might be described as a musical endeavor — a grandly Sisyphean effort in which they have to somehow push an upright piano up an enormous flight of stairs in the high hills of Los Angeles.

Yet more than the Marxes or the Ritzes, L&H were endlessly appealing to very young viewers; you can’t imagine anyone developing a Saturday morning cartoon series around Groucho Marx or Harry Ritz. In fact, there’s a particularly fascinating section depicting animated versions of L&H, ranging from the earliest sound cartoons and a 1936 meeting with Mickey Mouse all the way to a full-scale Hanna-Barbera animated TV series in 1966-’67, as well as adventures with the “Scooby Doo” gang in 1972. There’s even a still from an L&H cameo on “The Simpsons” from 2021.

“Collecting Laurel and Hardy” is a bargain at $50; this is the kind of book one could spend many hours poring through the 300 pages containing nearly a thousand mostly full-color pictures. There’s just about everything you could think of and definitely quite a lot of stuff you could never even imagine, such as a pair of Christmas ornaments with the heads of Stan and Ollie growing out of the bodies of chickens, which is at least borderline creepy in a Dr. Moreau kind of way. The authors liken them to the 1932 horror film “Freaks,” wondering, “Were these created by Tod Browning?”

Apart from merchandise, the true delights of the book are actual effects from L&H themselves, used in their films or their personal lives; there are autographs and plenty of letters from Laurel — like Louis Armstrong, he was a prolific correspondent.  Even more impressive is the actual oil painting of the dean from “A Chump at Oxford” (1940), complete with an anecdote about how difficult it was to protect the wooden frame from an infestation of hungry termites. There’s also a pair of Hardy’s oversized blue jeans from “Way Out West” (1937), and the famous fezzes from my favorite of their feature films, “Sons of the Desert” (1934).

In fact, my final conversation with Danny Bacher revolved around those last items. The last time most of us saw him was at the launch for the book at Fort Lee’s Barrymore Film Center on December 6. At the wake last Sunday, I informed his widow, Erin Beirnard, that it was the only time I ever saw him without a smile on his face.