The world’s most iconic bumbling fall guy began his career as a meticulous, obsessively controlling theater manager, studying the same 12-minute reels 30 times a week from the projection booth. Oliver Hardy was never just a fool.

This episode goes beyond the mustache and the slapstick to reveal a man building himself out of profound grief and ambition, mastering comedic timing from behind the screen, and accidentally finding the partner who would make him half of the greatest comedy duo in history.

• The tragic origins of a boy named Norvell, who pulled his own drowned brother from a river and later adopted his late father’s name as emotional armor
• How his 300-pound frame first typecast him as a silent-film villain before he flipped the script into the sympathetic victim
• The hot leg of lamb that hospitalized him and pushed gag-man Stan Laurel in front of the camera
• The ‘comedic seesaw’ of director-brain Laurel and actor-brawn Hardy, and the genius of the slow-burn fourth-wall stare
• The studio system’s creative gutting at Fox and MGM, the disastrous final film Atoll K, and his devastating final years