Tonight on TCM, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello team up, as they’re wont to do, for a few Abbott and Costello classics, Hold That Ghost, Buck Privates, and In the Navy. Abbott and Costello were one of the greatest comedy teams of the classic era but there was plenty of competition. Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges (the members changed in that one), and the Marx Brothers may be the most familiar (and the Marx Brothers definitely had the best movies, or at least, averaged out over time they did) but there were many others, some making appearances more often than not in otherwise dramatic movies. One example would be Caldicott and Charters (Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford) who showed up in two non-comedies, The Lady Vanishes and Dead of Night, and were never a comedy team in the sense that they carried their own series of movies like the Marx Brothers or Abbott and Costello. But what about the greatest comedy teams of all time that weren’t comedy teams at all but kind of were for at least one great team up. Sometimes they even tried to have lightning strike twice, and succeeded, still without actually becoming a team. What am I talking about? Let’s get started.
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For the first great comedy team that wasn’t, I present Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert from It Happened One Night. Sure, they never teamed up to do comedy again (but they were in Boom Town together) but they could have. Watching Gable and Colbert in It Happened One Night is watching two great comedians in total sync with each other. Their timing is impeccable, their interplay flawless. In fact, their chemistry is so great that many of the smaller throwaway moments get lost among the bigger, more famous moments. Certainly Colbert’s car stopping leg show is justifiably famous but just before that moment, when Gable slumps back defeated, after having talked up his hitch-hiking prowess so much he figures he should write a book about it, and says, “I don’t think I’ll write that book after all,” Colbert pats him on the shoulder and, without missing a beat, says, “Yeah, but think of all the fun you had.” It’s a deadpan delivery, cynical and ironic, and with a modern cadence and feel, revealing the comedy to be squarely rooted in the modern era of sound. That was no moment of big, vaudevillian delivery, it was the assured punchline of a new, more sophisticated comedy. And it all works because Gable and Colbert are still one of the greatest one-time comedy teams ever.
35 years later, another team consisting of two actors most people don’t associate with comedy at all, in a genre most people never associate with comedy (though it’s certainly had some great ones, and I don’t just mean by Mel Brooks), had such great chemistry most people still think of them in tandem, even though they only made one other movie together. The actors were Paul Newman and Robert Redford and the movie was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and I don’t care what you say, I think those two had some of the best timing the movies have ever seen. “The next time I say, ‘let’s go some place like Bolivia,’ let’s go some place like Bolivia!” “Next time!” Or how about, “Think you used enough dynamite there, Butch?” When they teamed back up for The Sting, it wasn’t the two of them exchanging banter. The Sting may be a better movie, or at least a better constructed one, but I’ll take there earlier buddy movie any day.
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Now let’s shoot forward again a couple of decades to the comedy stylings of Robert de Niro and Charles Grodin in Midnight Run. Now that’s a comedy team! I saw this one in theater and while I don’t really remember the plot, I do remember two things: Yaphet Kotto was, as always, great (that’s for you, Bill) and de Niro and Grodin were simply perfect together. Great timing, great interplay, great chemistry. They never became a comedy team delighting audiences with a new movie each year but, let me tell you, they could have and I wouldn’t have complained.
This time, let’s go back a few years. Cary Grant made more than his share of comedies but in one of them, my personal favorite comedy of his, he’s one part of a great comedy trio that never graced the screen again. Too bad, they were perfect. That trio is Grant, Myrna Loy, and Melvin Douglas and the movie is Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. Man, that is a great comedy team!
Plenty of actors have great chemistry in one particular movie and, naturally, Hollywood pairs them up again as soon as they can. Sometimes, it works, sometimes, it doesn’t. Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine made a great team in The Apartment but, for my taste, not so much in Irma La Douce. And sometimes, it does. Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau did great work together in The Fortune Cookie and even better work the next time around in The Odd Couple. At that point, they became a true comedy team and, thus, disqualify themselves from this list, which is reserved for those one time great team ups. It’s the one time teams that fascinate because one wonders what it would have taken to get them together again. Anyone else ever thought Peter Sellers and Sterling Hayden may well be the greatest comedy team in history? I have. Hell, that may be the single best pairing of two actors who never worked together again ever. As always, a complete list isn’t the point so feel free to add, add, add (and it doesn’t matter if they’re the leads or not). That’s what the comments are for. There are enough great one time comedy pairings that I bet we could come up with a hundred in less than a day. It’s bittersweet when you realize that two actors were so great together, comedicly, that a whole comedy team career was missed out on by not having them work together again but that another movie just might have ruined it. Better to have the one success than a minefield of failed attempts. Here’s to the comedy teams that weren’t, yet were. May they always be together. Once.