From the early days of film came Laurel and Hardy, a comedy team that created slapstick hilarity from life's simplest situations. Some seventy years after their heyday, Arthur Stanley Jefferson and Oliver Norvell "Babe" Hardy are still remembered for the comic chaos they created in film shorts. They gave us something to laugh at by reminding us of our own foibles, in a way that was genuine and unpretentious. The lanky Stan Laurel (1890-1965) and portly Ollie Hardy (1892-1957) had but one objective: to create as many laughs as would fit in one short film. And that, they did. The book begins by...