Comedy Part One: The Glance

My appreciation of Oliver Hardy goes way back. I've got a home movie of my brother and I (I was the fat one, about 10, while my brother was a skinny 8 year old) in what looks like a shoving match, but was really our Laurel and Hardy imitation, the result of many hours of TV time.
Hardy mastered "The Glance": Laurel or someone else would do or say something particularly stupid, and Hardy would glance at the camera, as if to say: "Do you see what I've got to put up with?" or "Can you believe this?" And now I am absolutely certain that the root of this glance is Shakespearean: in "Midsummer's Nights Dream" Puck turns to the audience and says: "What fools these mortals be."
Hardy wasn't the first to do this in a movie. Fatty Arbuckle did it a few times in shorts made between 1915 and 1919. Arbuckle was the Godard of Comedy: he'd toss off idea after idea after idea, then he'd just walk away from them and let everyone else use them.
"The Glance" forms a bond between performer and viewer and gives us that ontological tension too: just who is it looking at the camera? the character in the script? or is it Oliver Hardy himself?
All this, and it's funny, too.
Charlie Chaplin tried it once (I think), Eddie Murphy does it, and Steve Martin has tried it. But Oliver Hardy, the master of economical comedy, perfected it.
The most famous glance at the camera is not funny at all, and it's the glance of Raymond Burr (the murderer) in "Rear Window."I'd say the whole movie is built around that glance.