The hardest I ever laughed in my life was in a movie where W. C. Field (Never Give A Sucker An Even Break)  kicked the obnoxious Baby Leroy in his diapers while nobody was looking.

I can’t tell you why the scene struck me as so funny – I nearly choked on my popcorn. It was great to see a brat get his due.

I do know that it would be unimaginable for any filmmaker to put a scene like that in a contemporary Hollywood movie, it would bring out a SWAT team and angry mobs on social media.

The great comedians – Chaplin, Fields, The Marx Brothers, Abbott & Costello – made the country laugh, through the Depression, World War II and people’s own individual troubles and struggles. They lifted the country up when it was down, movie after movie, year after year.

The movie “Stan & Ollie,” now out in theaters, is about two of the greatest: Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. And this post is a review of the film.

There was nothing dark or complicated about these movies, they seem to be just what people wanted and needed. Simple but crafted humor in a complicated world.

Comedians now host late-night TV shows like SNL and Colbert and talk about politics or do barbed stand-ups on HBO or Netflix.  I can’t really name a great comedian working today or a great slapstick artist like Fields or Chaplin working now. That’s a shame. We could use them.

As a nation, it seems to me we don’t really know how to laugh anymore, unless it’s at someone else’s expense. We take ourselves way too seriously too laugh most of the time. We are full of our grim and angry selves.

The movie, directed with gentle and disciplined compassion by Jon Baird, takes place at the end of this remarkable partnership, the greatest and longest double act in the history of movies.

The two comedians we meet in “Stan & Ollie” are no longer in their prime, struggling with their careers but also to make sense of their relationship, which is what the movie is really about.

We all know by now that Hollywood is an especially cruel place for famous actors who get must old, and the movie takes us to England in 1953 where Laurel and Hardy are on an exhausting road tour to try to lure disinterested producers into funding one more film. This effort seems doomed from the first, and both of them seem to know it, while insisting to each other that it can happen.

In this sweet, funny and very touching movie, the two legendary comedians are by now like a married couple, their relationship marked by unspoken resentments, grudges and irritations but also, and  more than anything, by a deep and enduring love for one another.

I love reading about Hollywood and comedy, I am not aware of any other pair that cared for one another as much as these two did. The Mark Brothers, Martin and Lewis, Abbott and Costello, feuded bitterly with each other broke apart.  Fields worked alone, but he  was a grumpy and lonely drunk.

This is the heart of the movie, really, the love these two very different entertainers and very human men had for each other, even after they had been through so much together and in such a cruel and cutthroat environment.

When they arrive in England, we get a taste of what’s to come. The theaters are small, the crowds sparse.  Slime bag producer Bernard Delfont (played beautifully by Rufus Jones) talks them into an intensive publicity tour to drum up more crowds. The tour is successful, but grueling, and with a high and temporary  cost to Hardy’s health and the comedians relationship with one another.

Onstage, for all of their struggles, the two are completely at ease with one another, respectful and compassionate. John Reilly as Hardy and  Steve Coogan as Laurel are perfect in their gentle dance routines  and still funny slapstick bits. Offstage, their relation is more complicated, but ultimate loving in the most heartstring-pulling way.

Hardy is laid back, averse to conflict and wedded to women, gambling and whiskey. Laurel is intense, serious, wondering why he didn’t get to be the next Charlie Chaplin. Yet they come together in their creativity and unerring feelings for what is funny.

Slapstick still works for me, and for Maria. I still laugh at Fields, the Marx Brothers, Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy.

No one in our time comes close to them when it comes to making people laugh at the absurdity and silliness of human beings and modern life. The only targets in their humor are themselves.

Sight gags are still much funnier to me than the pointed barbs and neurotic brooding of modern comedians.  Comedians like Fields and Laurel and Hardy and Chaplin were artists, as the movie shows,  they could make  people laugh by a flick of their heads, or a look in their eyes or the way they walked or fell.

They used every part of their bodies in their jokes, not just their minds.

The Slapstick Comedians like Laurel and Hardy offered a relief from the hard reality of life, not a nightly or weekly reprise of it.

That seems like a lost art to me now.

I spotted a few familiar and knowing jokes in the movie (Baird did his homework.)

At one point, Laurel and Hardy drag a heavy trunk up a long and steep concrete stairway, but when they get to the top, it slips out of their hands. The scene echoes their famous skit in “The Music Box” when they try to move a piano, and much the same thing happens.

They both stare at the trunk as it bangs it way down the stairs, and Hardy deadpans and says to Laurel: “Do We Really Need That  Trunk?” Would that we could all learn to laugh at life in that way.

Most comedians are portrayed as tormented neurotics, but here, Coogan and Reilly – even at the height of their conflicts – are gentle, flawed and poignant figures. This movie has much more heart than bite.

No one has ever been able to fully explain why the comedy of Laurel and Hardy in the Great Age Of Slapstick  has stood up so well, or why it ended so abruptly.

The cultural pundits blame TV, but I think its more complex than that. Our society has grown so much more complicated and divided, and so splintered and anxious it seems to have rushed past this simple but effective kind of humor.

I think it’s fair to say that Laurel and Hardy were the sweetest and most gentle (Chaplin also) of the great comedians.

Maybe they had the biggest hearts, or perhaps it was their genuine connection to one another that made people love them so much.

Any movie that makes me laugh and cry is a fine movie in my books. Stan & Ollie is not a great big super-movie, it is not a great movie at all.  It is a fine movie,   a sweet endearing small movie, one everyone in the family could see and perhaps like.

I absolutely recommend it.

I don’t know about you, but I need to laugh, and I need to feel, and this movie delivers on both counts.

I left the theater feeling warm and touched, like taking a warm bath.

I saw one woman near me bringing out a handkerchief to cry laughing, and the same one out again to cry in sadness.

I highly recommend it.