"Towed in a Hole" (1932) is one of Laurel and Hardy's greatest films, and is a great demonstration of the delights of their sound shorts. In it Stan and Ollie are fish peddlers, and Stan gets the bright idea of eliminating the middleman by catching their fish themselves. For this purpose they buy an old fishing boat in order to repair it, but since they're unable to properly perform the simplest tasks (including but not limited to installing a radio antenna and carrying a piano up a flight of concrete stairs), it goes about as well as one would expect.
Being a Laurel and Hardy film it of course has the expected (and wonderful) slapstick, but one element it has that most of their sound films don't is tit-for-tat games of one-upsmanship, which were mostly phased out after their transition to sound. (Some of the films they appear in include "Two Tars" [1928] and "Big Business" [1929].) Moreover, they involves Laurel and Hardy fighting with each other rather than an outsider. Accidental mishaps erupt into an all-out retaliatory war, with the two of them pouring buckets of water down each others' pants and spraying each others' rear ends with hoses. Eventually Hardy says, "Isn't this silly? Here we are, two grown men, acting like a couple of children"- which sums up a lot of Laurel and Hardy's behavior in general.
It also includes a lot of the other elements that make their films great. It includes some of Stan Laurel's trademark surreal gags, like a hose writhing like a serpent. It also displays Oliver Hardy's penchant for looking at the camera and giving the viewer a plaintive, "Why me?" look after suffering from some misfortune or mishap.
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