Free Laurel and Hardy Movies and Shorts to Watch Online
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Some comedy dates. Laurel and Hardy mostly don’t. Stan, the thin one who cries when things go wrong, and Ollie, the round one with the tie-twiddle and the long-suffering look into the camera, made people laugh for more than twenty years, and their best shorts still play beautifully to a room full of kids or a tired adult at the end of a long day. Starlite TV airs a run of their films from 1929 and 1930, right when the pair were moving from silent pictures into sound, plus one of their later features.
Most of these are two-reelers of about twenty minutes, made at the Hal Roach studio, so they’re easy to fit in. Here’s where I’d start.
The one everybody should see
Big Business is a silent short from 1929, and it’s the purest Laurel and Hardy there is. The boys are selling Christmas trees door to door in sunny California. A grumpy homeowner, played by their regular foil James Finlayson, doesn’t want one. What follows is a slow, polite, completely ruthless exchange of damage: he cuts up their tree, they take it out on his house, he takes it out on their car, and so on, each side waiting patiently while the other takes its turn. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 1992. Directed by James W. Horne, with Leo McCarey supervising, it runs just under twenty minutes and never lets up.
Early talkies
Laurel and Hardy were one of the few silent comedy teams who got better with sound. Their voices fit the characters exactly, and the studio kept the gags visual. Berth Marks was only their second sound film. Stan and Ollie are musicians heading to a show in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and they have to share one cramped upper berth on a sleeper train. Watching two grown men try to change into pajamas in a space the size of a coffin is about as simple as comedy gets, and it works.
Perfect Day is another small premise stretched to perfection. Two families, plus a grumpy Uncle Edgar with a bandaged, gouty foot (Edgar Kennedy), try to leave the house for a Sunday picnic in a Model T. They keep saying goodbye to the neighbors, and they keep not leaving. You can guess roughly how it ends, and it’s still funny.
The Hoose-Gow puts the boys in a prison work camp after they were caught near a raid they swear they had nothing to do with. When Stan puts a pickaxe through the radiator of the visiting governor’s car, a fellow prisoner suggests filling it with rice, and you can imagine the rest. Night Owls has Edgar Kennedy again, this time as a beat cop who needs to look good in front of his chief, so he talks two tramps into burgling the chief’s own house so he can catch them. Neither burglar is any good at it.
The 1930 classics
By 1930 the pair were at the top of their game, and several of my favorites come from that year. Blotto is a Prohibition-era comedy: Stan sneaks out with Ollie to the Rainbow Club, bringing along the bottle of liquor kept hidden at home. What he doesn’t know is that his wife overheard the plan and swapped the liquor for tea spiked with spices. The scene where the two of them get “drunk” on it is one of the great bits of acting in their films.
Brats is the clever one. Stan and Ollie play themselves and also their own little sons, Stanley Jr. and Oliver Jr., using giant furniture to make them look small. The dads try to play checkers and pool while the kids fight, splash and refuse to go to sleep, and the bathtub scene at the end is a treat. Kids tend to love this one.
Hog Wild starts with Ollie searching the house for the hat that’s on his head, and goes downhill from there. Mrs. Hardy wants a radio aerial put up on the roof, Stan offers to help, and Ollie falls off that roof more times than seems fair. It ends with a ladder balanced on a moving car in city traffic. Another Fine Mess is a farce: chased by a policeman, the boys hide in an empty mansion, and when a wealthy couple shows up to rent the place, Ollie poses as the absent owner while Stan has to play both the butler and the maid. It’s based on a 1908 play by Stan Laurel’s father, Arthur J. Jefferson.
A feature to finish on
The Flying Deuces is a 1939 feature, released by RKO and directed by A. Edward Sutherland. The boys are on vacation in Paris when Ollie falls for an innkeeper’s daughter, who turns out to be married to a Foreign Legion officer. Heartbroken, Ollie joins the French Foreign Legion, and Stan goes with him. It has a laundry scene, a jail break, an airplane chase, and a charming little song-and-dance to “Shine On, Harvest Moon” that critic Leonard Maltin singled out in his review. At 68 minutes, it’s a good choice for a family movie night.
How to watch
Starlite TV works like broadcast television, so the shorts air on a schedule rather than on demand. Most of them play on Laugh Track, our comedy channel, and The Flying Deuces also turns up on Family Room. Each film’s page lists its next showtimes in your own time zone, and many pages let you press play right away. If you like these, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd are the natural next step: see our guide to free Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin movies.