However this may be, wherever actors foregather and talk about bits of stage business that have won and always will win laughs for them, there are a score or more points on which they agree. No matter how much they may quarrel about the effectiveness of laugh-bits with which one or another has won a personal success—due, perhaps, to his own peculiar personality—they unite in admitting the universal effectiveness of certain good old stand-bys.
Weber and Fields—before they made so much money that they retired to indulge in the pleasant pastime of producing shows—presented probably the most famous of all the sidewalk comedian slap-stick acts. [1] They elevated the slap-stick sidewalk conversation act into national popularity and certainly reduced the business of their performance to a science—or raised it to an art. In an article entitled "Adventures in Human Nature," published in The Associated Sunday Mazagines for June 23, 1912, Joe Weber and Lew Fields have this to say about the stage business responsible, in large measure, for the success of their famous two-act:
The capitalizing of the audiences' laughter we have set down in the following statistics, ranged in the order of their value. An audience will laugh loudest at these episodes:
(1) When a man sticks one finger into another man's eye.
(2) When a man sticks two fingers into another man's eyes.
(3) When a man chokes another man and shakes his head from side to side.
(4) When a man kicks another man.
(5) When a man bumps up suddenly against another man and knocks him off his feet.
(6) When a man steps on another man's foot.
[1] The great success of the return of Weber and Fields to vaudeville in 1915-16, with excerpts from their old successes, is only one more proof of the perennial value of sure-fire business.