SOURCE: "Suckers and Soaks," in The Crazy Mirror: Hollywood Comedy and the American Image, Horizon Press, 1970, pp. 142-9.

In the following excerpt, Durgnat compares Fields and Mae West in terms of their careers and of their antipathy to the mores of their time.

Mae West and W. C. Fields came to the cinema from the regions where theatre interbreeds with vaudeville, and top the bill among the early 30's influx of vaudeville and radio comedians. Ken Tynan described Wheeler and Wolsey as the only American cross-talk comedians whose films will never have a season at the National Film Theatre, but it would be interesting to see more of the comedies of Joe E. Brown and Jimmy Durante (almost the last of the race comedians, indifferently Jewish, Italian, or East European), which may well possess consistently what they possess in extract: the kind of zany fidelity to grass roots...