Old time comedy that does hold up

[yesno]

I've been thinking about Tom's bashing of old time comedy.  I agree for the most part -- stuff like the Three Stooges is like the 1930s equivalent of Adam Sandler.  One nice thing about the weird transience of what people think is funny is that new comedy always feels revolutionary.

BUT:  Here are some old time laughs that I really do like.

(1) Marx Brothers
(2) P.G. Wodehouse
(3) Screwball comedies (His Girl Friday, Arsenic and Old Lace, the Awful Truth, etc etc)
(4) Ambrose Bierce
(5) Mark Twain

and (6):  I like some old time things not because they are funny, but because they are just really strange to watch.  Buster Keaton (my avatar) stuff is like this.  Comedy that is no longer funny is weirdly alien.

Does anyone else have any old timey stuff that they think is funny?

[DannyBoy]

I agree, there are about seven quality Marx Brothers movies that are as good or better than anything that's come along since.

[Man Machine]

I think James Thurber is a riot.

[Gregory]

I think Ring Lardner short stories can be pretty funny.

[Mason]

Most of the supporting comedy is cornball, but I liked the husband and wife interactions of the Thin Man movies. Most old timey movies portray marriage as a humorless inevitability of life. Here it seems like fun.

[gravy boat]

I think the plays of George S. Kauffman hold up pretty well. He's was from around the depression -- a Dorothy Parker contemporary.

[Sarah]

Old-timey things I find funny:

a lot of the so-called screwball comedies (Bringing Up Baby, It Happened One Night, etc.) 

the plays of George Bernard Shaw and some of the movie versions thereof (Pygmalion and Major Barbara spring to mind)

the plays of Oscar Wilde, especially, of course, The Importance of Being Earnest (and the original movie version of it)

Boulting Brothers and Ealing Brothers comedies (not all of them, but a lot of them)

W. C. Fields in small doses

I know there's more, but my brain has gone blank.

[masterofsparks]

Most of mine have already been mentioned:

WC Fields short films
Marx Brothers
Laurel & Hardy's The Music Box
Buster Keaton

[andrew in philadelphia]

laurel and hardy (watched just about every one of their flicks with my pop as a boy and they still make me chuckle)

the three stooges (i never, ever get tired of grabbing a cup of coffee on a sunday morn and watching moe, larry, and _______ bumble through whatever task is at hand.)

abbott and costello (for who's on third alone - never mind the genius that ensued when they teamed up with a morphine-happy bela lugosi and a stinkin' drunk lon chaney jr.)

do the old warner brothers cartoons count?

[TremblingEagle]

Marx Bros. without doubt

[Spoony]

I think it's time to say that Bugs Bunny and other Looney Tunes qualify as Olde Time Comedee. Seriously, they are 50+ years old by now. But the great thing about them is how well they've aged. Wyle E. Coyote and the Roadrunner are as funny to a 10 yr old now as they were to my father when he was 10. 

It's universally humorous, and the amount of detail and love that went into the animation made it funny in it's own right.

[John Junk 2.0]

Yeah, Pepe Le Pew cartoons are funny in a totally manic way.  And what's weird is that, for all their stereotyping, by today's standards those are practically educational films about French cultural life.

[Spoony]

Yeah, Pepe Le Pew cartoons are funny in a totally manic way.  And what's weird is that, for all their stereotyping, by today's standards those are practically educational films about French cultural life.

Or a Cautionary Tale about puberty.

[andrew in philadelphia]

Yeah, Pepe Le Pew cartoons are funny in a totally manic way.  And what's weird is that, for all their stereotyping, by today's standards those are practically educational films about French cultural life.

Or a Cautionary Tale about puberty.

or sexual predators. dude was a total perv..

[masterofsparks]

Yeah, Pepe Le Pew cartoons are funny in a totally manic way.  And what's weird is that, for all their stereotyping, by today's standards those are practically educational films about French cultural life.

Or a Cautionary Tale about puberty.

or sexual predators. dude was a total perv..

Don't you mean "prev"?