On the comedy beat from Broadway to vaudeville to movies, thinking of two terrific icons of silver screen humor, both of whom crack us up, only every time. One is star of stage, screen, Ziegfeld Follies, etc. Leon Errol, born in Sydney, Australia on July 3, 1881. Here's Leon with Lou Costello in The Noose Hangs High (1948).
The other is Mel Brooks, because the gang here somehow missed the comedy maestro's 100th birthday last Sunday!
While Leon Errol is arguably best known for his later work - his appearance in W.C. Fields' hilarious 1941 opus Never Give A Sucker An Even Break, the Joe Palooka series and the eight Mexican Spitfire feature films co-starring comedienne, singer and dancer Lupe Vélez, he had a lengthy and illustrious show business career as comedian-singer-director-writer before 1930 and even appeared in several silent films (in the following co-starring with stalwart comedienne Dorothy Gish).
Mentioning how expertly the thorough Forgotten Australian Actors website chronicles Errol's five decade show business career, we note that the rubber-legged comedian began performing on stage, acting, singing and directing theatrical troupes as he worked in burlesque and vaudeville, starting at the turn of the 20th century.
He toured Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain and Ireland, worked extensively as a director and writer with Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. and co-starred in sketches with the legendary Bert Williams in the Ziegfeld Follies.
Mr. Errol is also among a slew of comedians in the enjoyably eccentric and unrelentingly grotesque version of Alice In Wonderland directed by Norman Z. McLeod and produced by Paramount Pictures in 1933.
We are quite fond of the 2-reelers Leon starred in during the first year of Jules White's Columbia Shorts Department, consider the uninhibited group to be slapstick masterpieces.
ONE TOO MANY is quite the curio, directed by Our Gang series creator Robert McGowan (on a break from the Hal Roach Studio) and written by the insanely prolific Harry McCoy.
Also love the two Technicolor Vitaphone musical shorts from 1934, both directed by Roy Mack, later a producer of very enjoyable Soundies.
The wonderfully cheesy time-traveling Vitaphone musical GOOD MORNING EVE (1934), one of the last gasps of pre-Code naughtiness, in glorious 3-strip Technicolor, is a personal favorite Leon Errol flick.
Greg Hilbrich of the The Columbia Shorts Department wrote, "upon completing HONEYMOON BRIDGE for Columbia, and after an argument with studio executives who cited "creative differences", Errol left for Radio Pictures."
So, in 1934, Leon began starring for RKO in a series directed and written by legendary gagmeister Al Boasberg.
There are LOTS of RKO Leon Errol short subjects on YouTube. In one produced in 1936, none other than Lucille Ball (who has a cameo as Leon's secretary in the 1934 Columbia 2-reeler PERFECTLY MISMATED) plays a housekeeper. No doubt Lucy was taking notes when working at the Columbia Shorts Department in 3 Stooges and Leon Errol 2-reelers.
Errol's co-star in ONE TOO MANY, ONE LIVE GHOST and many other films is the always formidable former Ziegfeld Girl and Hal Roach Studios stock company player Vivien Oakland, who, along with the equally formidable Dorothy Granger, would be a frequent collaborator.
Our favorite of all the Leon Errol RKO short subjects is THE JITTERS (1938), an astounding version of his rubber-leg routine.
Leon starred in 2-reel comedies for RKO through the 1940's, long after Mack Sennett and Educational Pictures closed and Hal Roach Studios ceased making short subjects. He often played a lecherous philanderer who unsuccessfully attempts to conceal booze, broads and gambling from his wife. Would expect no less from a comedian who starred in the 1933 Paramount short subject Three Little Swigs!
As of July 2026, clips from this series are practically nonexistent online. Fortunately for comedy geeks, all eight Mexican Spitfire features are available as a 4-DVD box set.
Too bad Lupe wasn't around 30 years later to bring her wacky and unabashedly over-the-top sensibility to western deconstruction Blazing Saddles - which brings us to Mel Brooks.
We're thrilled and delighted that comedian-writer-director-producer Mel Brooks made it to his 100th birthday last Sunday!
Here, Mel celebrates his 100th with TV producer-writer (Everyone Loves Raymond), documentary host (Somebody Feed Phil), actor and enthusiastic gastronome Phil Rosenthal.
Noting our June 28, 2021 post celebrating Mr. Brooks' 95th birthday and Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog's February 21, 2026 tribute to the mighty and ridiculously talented comedy writers and performers who created Admiral Broadway Revue, Your Show Of Shows and Caesar's Hour, in closing, here's one of our favorite Mel contributions to a movie, approved enthusiastically by the Psychotronix Film Festival!
Thanks for the laughs, Leon and Mel! Now it's time to re-watch the four Columbia 2-reelers, then watch those Video Yesteryear compilations of Leon Errol comedies, starting with volume 1. Then on to The Flustered Comedy Of Leon Errol volumes 2, 3 and 4.
Needing laughs big time today, along with guffaws, chortles, chuckles, giggles and howls, so slapstick scenarios involving funny fat guys falling down sound FANTASTIC! Thankfully, film historians, authors and silent movie experts have posted a bunch of pratfall-packed Ton Of Fun 2-reelers from the late 1920's on YouTube.
These slapstick flicks star the rousing and rotund trio of Kewpie Ross, Frank Alexander and Hilliard Carr, a.k.a. Ton Of Fun, and were produced by former Vitagraph star Joe Rock (from the comedy team of Earl Montgomery and Joe Rock) for Standard Film Corporation/F.B.O.
Do the cheerful yet corpulent stars of the Ton Of Fun comedies remind this always too-enthusiastic slapstick fan of any funmakers from more recent memory? YES - this guy!
While Mr. Farley loathed and detested being typecast as a “fat comic”, he was an inspired slapstick performer who, like fellow comedians Roscoe Arbuckle and John Candy, left us way too soon.
We're thrilled and delighted that the exploits of A Ton Of Fun still survive 100 years after they were first produced.
Film historian Dave Glass has posted a bunch of the trio's absurdist adventures on his silent movie-filled YouTube channel.
Our only unfulfilled slapstick wish here is that the very funny plus-sized comedienne Babe London, hilarious in the role of Oliver Hardy's fiancée in Our Wife (1931), did not co-star with Carr, Alexander and Morgan in Ton Of Fun adventures.
As remains the case with the "slapstick ballets" by Comique Productions co-starring Roscoe Arbuckle, Buster Keaton and Al St. John, these comedies deliver numerous sight gag-filled belly laughs.
Along with the slapstick series he and Earl Montgomery co-starred in for Brooklyn's Vitagraph Studios, Joe Rock is best known for the twelve Stan Laurel solo comedies he produced in the mid-1920's. He would go on to produce documentaries in the sound era.
These Stan Laurel solo comedies featured talent both behind and in front of the camera who would subsequently be key contributors to the Hal Roach Studio's Laurel & Hardy series.
Hopefully, these vintage comedies shall be enough to tide us over until National Silent Movie Day this fall.
Today we tip a battered top hat worn by a boisterous and three sheets to the wind Ted Healy to the great Moe Howard, ace of slapstick!
After a decade performing in vaudeville and stage and films as part of the popular knockabout act Ted Healy & His Stooges, Moe succeeded Ted as "the head stooge" when the team and Healy parted ways and The Three Stooges began starring in short subjects for Columbia Pictures in 1934.
Still hear the comedy team's various theme songs whenever I see the "A Screen Gems Film Presentation: Television Subsidiary" logo.
And now for some choice slapstick snippets. . .
As we continue having a rough go through 2026, a bit of "laughter is the best medicine" from Moe Howard, born on this day in 1897, and the Three Stooges, starting with the following excellent documentary by his son Paul, proves a most worthy Rx.
Love this interview with Moe.
Moe's daughter, Joan Howard Maurer, appeared on Late Night with David Letterman in February 1983. The early 1980's NBC incarnation of Letterman's freewheeling program frequently booked guests representing the golden age of classic comedy from movies, TV and radio.
Now it's time, on Moe's natal anniversary, for some big time Stoogery! This comedy fan is especially fond of the first 2-reelers they made for Columbia in 1934-1935.
The blonde in the following opus looks vaguely familiar. . .
Thinking, as we do often, of movie comedians who successfully transitioned from silents to talkies.
Some studios and funmakers did better than others. Mack Sennett had his problems adapting to the new medium but did employ the likes of Harry Gribbon, Vernon Dent and Andy Clyde - and a couple of years later, the brilliant W.C. Fields.
Next: comediennes in early talkies, led by the following bravura performance of Marie Dressler in Hollywood Revue Of 1929. She must have been devastatingly great on stage!
Marie & Polly Moran both made Mack Sennett comedies back in the WW1 era and actually worked as a comedy team in 1927-1931 MGM features. Here they are in the Al Christie talkie DANGEROUS FEMALES.
Another actress who got big laughs in both silents and talkies was "baggy pants comedienne" Louise Fazenda, former star of Universal Joker, Mack Sennett and Educational (Jack White) Comedies - and later a key supporting player in Warner Bros. musicals. She plays a Calamity Jane gunslinger type in the following "when men were men and sheep were nervous" scenario.
While the spotlight on silent movie comediennes who successfully transitioned to sound should definitely include Marion Davies, there are no short excerpts from her early talkies available via YouTube, Daily Motion and Internet Archive, just complete features. Alas, Mabel Normand, Wanda Wiley and Alice Howell did not make any sound movies. Have read that Fay Tincher's last film, All Wet (1930), was a Universal Pictures talkie 2-reeler starring Syd Saylor, but have never seen it.
Then there's Educational Pictures, which featured the often inspired and memorable comic Lloyd "Ham" Hamilton, then in his second run with the prolific comedy films distributor, in 1929.
Lloyd Hamilton's sound pictures from 1929-1931 represent a comeback after a stretch in which personal problems including multiple injuries, homelessness, unfortunate presence at drunken brawls and hard partying in general got him banned from the screen for a year.
In Toot Sweet, Hamilton does a good job of bringing his unrelentingly snakebit, shabby sad sack character from silents to sound.
Don't Be Nervous, featuring Ham in a dual role, would be my favorite of the Lloyd Hamilton Talking Comedies, along with the extremely funny Prize Puppies from 1930.
Hamilton continued starring in very funny talkie 2-reelers through the early 1931 Educational releases.
Before his decades as a megastar of British movies and stage shows (Me & My Girl), Lupino Lane starred in short comedies through the teens and twenties.
A favorite of the musical comedy aficionados at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog remains this very wacky number co-starring the ever-charming Lillian Roth with the ever-tumbling Lupino from the Ernst Lubitsch feature The Love Parade.
Now it's on to the Hal Roach Studio. A bunch of the Lot Of Fun stars and stock company members, including Max Davidson, Thelma Todd and Eddie Dunn appear together in this Edgar Kennedy 2-reeler.
100 years after his heydey, Harry Langdon remains both among the funniest and most polarizing of all movie comedians.
The gang here are among the few who are not only okay with Langdon's utter oddity and consider it his m.o. as a performer, but actually find his much maligned Hal Roach talkies quite funny in a very unorthodox way.
Devoted an entire post to these films - here's one of them!
Robert McGowan created the Our Gang series and helmed the films in silents by speaking the directions to the child actors, so these first talkies, in which he absolutely could not do that, are fascinating.
They are also interesting in blending the series' silent era stars, a.k.a. Hal Roach's Rascals, with the group that would increasingly carry the first season of sound Our Gang comedies.
Can't omit Laurel & Hardy from this mix. Berth Marks is notable for establishing something of a Guinness World Record for the amount of screen time devoted to one bit. The unrelentingly claustrophobic scene in the Pullman car features rather amazing extended physical comedy by Stan & Babe.
Our favorite of this bunch of early talkie comedies by far is Charley Chase and Thelma Todd in CRAZY FEET!
Are Charley and Thelma irreverent, extremely goofy and hilarious? Yes.
Acknowledgments: Weirdo Video, Geno Cuddy, Ralph Celentano, The Library of Congress, Dave Glass and all those involved at Sprocket Vault (Kit Parker, Richard M. Roberts especially) in making the 1929 Hal Roach talkies available on Blu-ray and DVD.
We're not kidding - June 8 indeed is National Name Your Poison Day.
Charlie Chaplin kicks off Name Your Poison Day with this boozy bit from PAY DAY.
Here, a bon vivant version of Charlie celebrates with fellow inebriate Roscoe Arbuckle in the 1914 Keystone comedy THE ROUNDERS.
Charlie plays both a bamboozled bon vivant and a rowdy ruffian in a filmed version of the Fred Karno troupe "Mumming Birds" sketch that brought him to prominence.
Following Keystone and Essanay, Charlie fights a losing battle with the DTs in one of his Mutual masterpieces, One A.M.
In another Mutual masterpiece, THE CURE, Charlie attempts to get un-inebriated, 20 years before 12 step programs and over 60 years before the Betty Ford Center.
This scene from MODERN TIMES gets one wondering if by happenstance The Little Tramp knew Errol Flynn!
That noxious powder will, before it takes a person out entirely, inevitably prompt one to sing a song like this for no apparent reason.
We continue reeling in no uncertain terms from bad news from last week. Our friend Dorothy Bradley, President Emeritus of the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, always friendly and always on hand at Niles' Edison Theater, passed at 80.
Missed writing a post last weekend due to grief over Dorothy's passing. This is an incalculable loss to the historian and film preservation communities, Niles, CA - and to an increasingly doltish nation struggling to remember anything for more than 5 minutes.
The gang here are still - and with much difficulty - processing the passing of Silent Locations author John Bengston, the guy who knew where EVERYTHING was filmed, earlier this year.
While the gang at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog have not yet visited the British Institute or the George Eastman House, we had the tremendous good fortune to see the reels roll at Niles on numerous occasions.
The museum website adds: We are sad to announce the passing of Dorothy Bradley, Museum President Emeritus on Tuesday, May 26th, 2026.
Dorothy was born, raised and lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for her entire life. She graduated from UC Davis with a degree in chemistry, and worked in that field until retirement. Dorothy moved to the historic district of Niles, located in Fremont, in 1996.
Wanting to learn more about the community, she became a member of the Niles Main Street Association, where some members were interested in focusing on the film history of the district. The Niles Essanay Preservation Committee was formed, and the first Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival took place in 1998.
Dorothy's dedication to history, the sciences and the arts cannot be overstated. We will miss her dearly. She had turned 80 this past December. A memorial will be planned in the near future. Those wishing to send condolences can do so to the museum via email, or via our Facebook page.
For the silent movie lovin' gang here, it is a fond and premature farewell to Dorothy.
We wish her a peaceful journey and send all at NESFM our condolences.
The Edison Theater was a home away from home for the guy who writes Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, whose Infiniti G20 sedan can be seen here in 2012 parked in front of the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum and ready for big screen fun.
Was it more than we could stand to say goodbye to the wonderful Dorothy Bradley and also bid adieu to an all-time favorite from the world of music, Sonny Rollins, on the same day? Yes! So today, the Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog movie and music mavens raise a respectful toast to Dorothy Bradley, followed by a second one for Sonny - and a third in which we hoist one for Broncho Billy!
Since vintage silent films and maestro Sonny Rollins' melodic, mellifluous and marvelous sounds have been reliable go-tos for the gang here, it's time to enjoy tunes from Rollins' 1957 classic Way Out West album, followed by splendid G.M. Anderson films photographed in Niles Canyon back before World War I (and screened frequently at the museum as part of the Broncho Billy Film Festival).
Memorial Day Weekend is here. 2026 still looks like this.
So that means it's time to cheer up by watching lots of vintage WW2-era cartoons on Memorial Day Weekend.
A good way to celebrate Memorial Day a few days early is with the World War II version of Popeye. In particular, we're big fans of the early Famous Studios Popeyes and Noveltoons directed by Dan Gordon!
And Private Snafu. . .
Snafu's close cousin was Mr. Hook.
In addition to all-time favorite World War II propaganda cartoon Der Fuehrer's Face, Walt Disney Productions made numerous wartime flicks, some as theatricals, others as training films.
The best closer for Memorial Day Weekend after all those service comedies starring Laurel & Hardy, Abbott & Costello, Martin & Lewis, etc. is Bugs Bunny.
Spoiler alert and best line from the following Chuck Jones cartoon: "so they're inducting rabbits".
These cartoons cheer the crew up here as we wish we could have trekked out to Ohio for big screen fun at this weekend's Columbus Moving Picture Show film festival and also bid farewell to The Late Show, one of our favorite TV programs going back to the 1990's David Letterman years.
