"The Laurel and Hardy Show"

HISTORY: According to Scott MacGillivray's LAUREL AND HARDY: FROM THE FORTIES FORWARD, this radio pilot was recorded three months after THE WEDDING NIGHT. None of the other usual Laurel and Hardy books mention it, not even Glenn Mitchell's LAUREL AND HARDY ENCYCLOPEDIA in the section on "radio". Since so little is known about it, it bears a fuller description here.

Laurel and Hardy are butchers who work for Mr. Slayer. On a delivery run, they mistakenly wind up at the home of some gangsters, who mistake them for a pair of hired hit men they've been waiting for. Soon after, the police arrive and arrest everybody, including The Boys.

As in the films they were making at Fox at the time, The Boys are once again cast as "mental midgets" who unwittingly get mixed up with gangsters. A few gags from their later films pop up in a police grilling scene. When an officer tells The Boys they'd better start talking, they immediately begin to chat with each other ("What do you want to talk about, Stan?" - "I don't care, what would you like to talk about?"), which was one of the more amusing gags from THE BIG NOISE. They also reprise "Mairzy Doats" from the same film.
It doesn't sound like Stan wrote the script. Too much of the dialogue is devoted to descriptions of killings, cutting off heads, and dipping bodies in boiling water, and most of this talk comes from Stan and Ollie. However, there is a nice feeling behind the sketch, in that Stan and Ollie drive everybody else crazy while they remain blissfully unaware of the reality of their situation. And there are a few amusing lines, such as when Stan asks the Warden for an extra key to his cell (he likes to take a walk after dinner, Ollie helpfully explains.)

It is a shame that The Boys never made it to radio. No doubt, if they had, their radio work would not have eclipsed their film work at Roach, but like we have with W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers and their respective radio work, we would at least have more Laurel and Hardy to enjoy.