For International Taxi Driver’s Day: On “The Taxi Boys”

March 22, by some mysterious decree, has been designated International Taxi Drivers Day, the ideal time, it would appear, to introduce Hal Roach’s “Taxi Boys” comedies. The Taxi Boys were a late attempt to replicate the successes Roach had had with such series as Our Gang (the Little Rascals), The Boy Friends, and the Hal Roach All-Stars, which had produced the team of Laurel and Hardy. The relative obscurity of Taxi Boys comedies (there were about a dozen) indicates how well they fared.

Del Lord, later associated with Columbia and the Three Stooges, directed most of the Taxi Boys shorts between 1932 and 1933. The main two guys in the series were Billy Gilbert and Ben Blue, in a pretty obvious (and unsuccessful) attempt to recapture the magic of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Others in the series include Franklin Pangborn, Clyde Cook, and Billy Bevan. The comedies bore titles like Thundering Taxis, Taxi Barons, What Price Taxi? and Taxis for Two. “Taxi Boys” are of course, just cabbies, not some insidious cross between Rent Boys and Taxi Dancers, which it kind of sounds like to my instigating ears. Hacking a cab is theoretically a great engine for comedy, as we know from later scores like the team of Jack Burns and Avery Shreiber, and of course the ’80s sit-com Taxi. There is an endless stream of comic business that results from the temperaments of the passengers, whatever stuff, they’re carrying, etc. But to this day, viewers are pretty resistant to the Taxi Boys, mostly in reaction to the performances of Ben Blue.

A decade later, when Roach was experimenting with his “streamliners” concept, he made three more Taxi Boys comedies, this time starring William Bendix, Joe Sawyer, and Grace Bradley. The last of them, Taxi, Mister, was made in 1943. By then the competition wasn’t just Laurel and Hardy (who’d left Roach by then), but also Abbott and Costello at Universal, and Wally Brown and Alan Carney at RKO. Soon television would have Jackie Gleason and Art Carney on The Honeymooners, with Gleason as bus driver Ralph Kramden, which gets us pretty close to taxies. Gleason, like Bendix, had also starred in The Life of Riley. (Comedy people call that a “call back”.)

Tip your driver!

For more on silent and slapstick comedy films including those of Hal Roach please check out my book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.