Double act
A double act is a form of comedy originating in the British music hall tradition, and American vaudeville, in which two comedians perform together as a single act, often highlighting differences in their characters' personalities. Pairings are typically long-term, in some cases for the artists' entire careers. Double acts perform on the stage, television and film.
The format is particularly popular in the United Kingdom where successful acts have included Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Flanagan and Allen, Morecambe and Wise, The Two Ronnies, and French and Saunders, Armstrong and Miller, and Mitchell and Webb. The tradition is also present in the United States with acts like Wheeler & Woolsey, Abbott and Costello, Gallagher and Shean, Burns and Allen, Olsen and Johnson and Lyons and Yosco. The British-American comedy double act Laurel and Hardy has been described as the most popular in the world.
Format
Humor is often derived from the uneven relationship between two partners, usually of the same gender, age, ethnic origin, and profession but drastically different in terms of personality or behavior; each one serves as a foil to the other. Typically, one member of the duo—the "straight man", "feed", "dead wood", or stooge—is often portrayed as reasonable and serious, while the other one—the funny man, "banana man", or comic—is portrayed as funny, less educated or less intelligent, silly, or unorthodox, although there are also double acts in which neither partner is the straight man or even both. When the audience identifies primarily with one character, the other is often referred to as a comic foil. The term "feed" comes from the way a straight man sets up jokes and then "feeds" them to his partner.Despite the names often given to the roles, the straight man is not always humorless, nor is it always the comic who provides the act's humor. Sometimes the straight man gets laughs through sarcastic reactions to the comic's antics, such as Stewart Lee's deadpan, reasoned reactions to Richard Herring's ridiculous antics in their pairing. When the straight man serves no specific comic purpose, but acts as a device to make the comic look good, he is known as a stooge. Sometimes considered a derogatory term, "stooge" began to fall out of use by the 1930s with The Three Stooges. Most often the humor in a double act comes from the way the two personalities play off of each other, rather than from the individual players. In many successful acts the roles are interchangeable.
History
Early development
The model for the modern double act began in the British music halls and the American vaudeville scene of the late 19th century. Here, the straight man was needed to repeat the lines of the comic because audiences were noisy. A dynamic soon developed in which the straight man was a more integral part of the act, setting up jokes for the comic to deliver a punch line. Popular draws included acts like George Burns and Gracie Allen, Abbott and Costello, Flanagan and Allen, Gallagher and Shean, Smith and Dale, and Lyons and Yosco. Occasionally both partners would be comedic or madcap, such as Olsen and Johnson. The dynamic evolved, with Abbott and Costello using a modern and recognizable formula in routines such as Who's on First? in the 1930s and Flanagan and Allen using "cross talking".Though vaudeville lasted into the 1930s, its popularity waned because of the rise of motion pictures. Some failed to survive the transition to movies and disappeared. By the 1920s, double acts were beginning to attract worldwide fame more readily through the silent era. The comedy was not derived from "cross-talk" or clever verbal exchanges, but through slapstick routines and the actions of the characters.
The first double act to gain worldwide fame through film was the Danish duo Ole & Axel, who made their first film together in 1921. The latter half of the same decade introduced to the world the inimitable team of Laurel and Hardy. The pair had never worked together on stage, though both had worked in vaudeville—Stan Laurel with Charlie Chaplin as part of Fred Karno's Army and Oliver Hardy as a singer. Laurel could loosely be described as the comic, though the pair were one of the first not to fit the mold in the way that many double acts do, with both taking a fairly equal share of the laughs. The pair first worked together as a double act in the 1927 film Duck Soup. The first Laurel and Hardy film was called Putting Pants on Philip though their familiar characters had not yet been established. The first film they both appeared in was Lucky Dog in 1921. Laurel and Hardy adapted well to silent films, both being skilled at slapstick, and their nonverbal interplay with each other and the audience became famous—Laurel's cry and Hardy's downtrodden glances to the camera whenever something went wrong—and were carried over to their later talkies. They were one of the few silent acts who made a successful transition to spoken word pictures in the 1930s, showing themselves to be equally adept at verbal wordplay.
1940s–1960s
Laurel and Hardy released Saps at Sea, in 1940; it was their final film for long-term producer and collaborator Hal Roach. Later their popularity declined. In 1940s America the double act remained a cinema draw, developing into the "buddy movie" genre, with Abbott and Costello making the transition from stage to screen and the first of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby's Road to... series in 1940. Further acts followed. For example, the first pairing of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis occurred in 1946. About the same time The Bickersons became popular on radio. Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner started their 2000 Year Old Man recordings and subsequent television appearances in 1961. The genre has continued to exist in cinema while making a successful transition to radio and later TV via The Smothers Brothers and Rowan and Martin's Laugh In.In Britain, double acts were confined to theatres and radio until the late 1950s, when double acts such as Morecambe and Wise and Mike and Bernie Winters slowly began the transition to TV on variety shows such as Sunday Night at the London Palladium. These acts came into their own in the mid- to late-1960s. When Morecambe and Wise teamed up with writer Eddie Braben, they began to redefine what was meant by a double act, with Wise, the straight man, being developed into a comic character in his own right. They provided the link between music hall and modern comedy for double acts. As the two leading double acts of the day, Morecambe and Wise and the Winters brothers enjoyed a playful rivalry—the Winters mocked the slight edge Morecambe and Wise had over them in popularity, while Morecambe, when asked what he and Wise would have been if not comedians, replied "Mike and Bernie Winters".
A series of black-and-white films based on Don Camillo and Peppone characters created by the Italian writer and journalist Giovannino Guareschi were made between 1952 and 1965. These were French-Italian coproductions, and starred Fernandel as the Italian priest Don Camillo and Gino Cervi as Giuseppe 'Peppone' Bottazzi, the Communist Mayor of their rural town. The titles are: The Little World of Don Camillo, The Return of Don Camillo, Don Camillo's Last Round, Don Camillo: Monsignor, and Don Camillo in Moscow. The movies were a huge commercial success in their native countries. In 1952, Little World of Don Camillo became the highest-grossing film in both Italy and France, while The Return of Don Camillo was the second most popular film of 1953 at the Italian and French box office.
Franco and Ciccio were a comedy duo formed by Italian actors Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia, particularly popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Their collaboration began in 1954 in the theater field, and ended with Franchi's death in 1992. The two made their cinema debuts in 1960 with the film Appuntamento a Ischia. They remained active until 1984 when their last film together, Kaos, was shot, although there were some interruptions in 1973 and from 1975 to 1980. Together, they appeared in 112 films. They acted in films certainly made in a short time and with few means, such as those shot with director Marcello Ciorciolini, sometimes even making a dozen films in a year, often without a real script and where they often improvised on the set. Also are the 13 films directed by Lucio Fulci, who was the architect of the reversal of their typical roles by making Ciccio the serious one, the sidekick, and Franco the comic one. They also worked with important directors such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Taviani brothers. Considered at the time as protagonists of B movie, they were subsequently reevaluated by critics for their comedy and creative abilities, becoming the subject of study. The huge success with the public is evidenced by the box office earnings, which in the 1960s, represented 10% of the annual earnings in Italy.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the traditional formula was shunned by The Two Ronnies, who completely dispensed with the need for a straight man, and Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, two Oxbridge-educated comedians who used the double act to deliver satire and edgy comedy.
1970s
Internationally the most popular double act of the 1970s was the Italian duo Terence Hill and Bud Spencer. The team had already made three straight westerns together during the 1960s but turned their act towards slapstick in their fourth, with massive success.Light entertainment in Britain in the 1970s was dominated by Morecambe and Wise, who enjoyed impressive ratings, especially on their Christmas specials. Although Mike and Bernie Winters's popularity declined, The Two Ronnies' success grew while Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sporadically produced acclaimed work, in particular, their controversial recordings as Derek and Clive from 1976 to 1978.
The mid-to-late 1970s saw a resurgence in American double acts. Blazing Saddles featured a memorable performance by Mel Brooks and Harvey Korman. Saturday Night Live, first broadcast in 1975, provided an outlet for comedians to appear in sketches as double acts and continues to do so. It was here that Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi honed their characters The Blues Brothers, who were soon pulled to fame in the 1980 buddy movie of the same name. Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor also embarked on a string of successful buddy films in the 1970s. Cheech & Chong also gained massive popularity during this time.
Occasionally, the straight-man/funny-man dynamic appeared in unexpected contexts between characters not normally thought of as comics. This often appeared in the James T. Kirk /Mr. Spock relationship in several episodes of the original Star Trek series.