OLIVER: (speaking to Stanley) Do you have to ask your wife everything? I never realized that such a deplorable condition existed in your home…I go places and do things and then tell my wife…OLIVER’S WIFE: If you think you’re gallivanting off…over my dead body! I’ll put you in jail first. (speaking to Stanley) And you too! With the rest of the Sons of the Desert, Oh, the Sons of the Desert! Ooohh!
-The Sons of the Desert, 1931, in which Laurel and Hardy sneak off to the convention of their fraternal order Sons of the Desert
I thought I should buy a television set for the house while I was away. I’d be far from home and out of contact. Maybe she’d be lonely and need some distraction. So I bought a big Sony and put it on a stool in the living room. I was going to the desert and “may be some time”, as Capt. Oates said about going into another desert before he froze to death out there. But when I got back two months later, she said she’d never watched the television, not even turned it on. It was still unplugged. So I told her a few stories, about how over those forty days on the trail David and I had become Abnaa’ al-sahraa’, Sons of the Sahara. But in America, if it wasn’t on tv, it didn’t count. That’s why I had to go again and make a movie.
