Editing Double act (section)

===Early development===
[[File:Lyons and Yosco.jpg|thumb|150px|left|[[Lyons and Yosco]], vaudeville act and ragtime composers from the 1910s]]
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".
[[File:Gallagher-Shean.png|thumb|150px|right|[[Gallagher and Shean]], a popular vaudeville act of the 1920s]]
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 films|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 (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.