Double act

A double act (also known as a comedy duo) 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 (Cook's deadpan delivery contrasted with Moore's buffoonery), 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, and Lyons and Yosco. The British-American comedy double act Laurel and Hardy has been described as the most popular in the world.

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.^{[citation needed]}

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.

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 (who initially operated with Burns as the comic but quickly switched roles when Gracie's greater appeal was recognized), Abbott and Costello, Flanagan and Allen, Gallagher and Shean, Smith and Dale, and Lyons and Yosco. 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 (they did as of 1940), 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.

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.