Word: farceur
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...Like the Looney Tunes character Pepe Le Pew (another bon vivant blithely ignorant of the way the world saw and smelled him), Norton exuded a sweet assurance that life would treat him as he treated life: with an easy shrug and an eager guffaw. That's how an acute farceur humanized a sewer rat for audiences of the '50s and every TV generation since. --By Richard Corliss
...farceur's instincts never deserted Lemmon; almost alone, he kept upper-middle-class comedy alive long past its prime. In the precision of his diction, the seeming intimacy of his asides, and that dry cackle of a laugh, he was the movies' Johnny Carson. Surely no one devoted as much intelligent energy as Lemmon did to chic, Hollywood-style humor in its mature years. Out of his mouth came acerb insights fashioned by Billy Wilder (seven films), Blake Edwards (six) and Neil Simon (four). The list includes The Apartment, Operation Mad Ball, the Odd Couple--and the all-time funniest...
...Zero Mostel. Though only 40 and only Irish, Lane is the mystic repository of the ancients' physical gag bag. A double take is concrete poetry when he does it, and a pratfall a plie. He also elevates some of his more plebeian colleagues. Mark Linn-Baker, no natural farceur, is at first uneasy as the fluttery Hysterium. But when he gets into dead-virgin drag and Lane sings a mock-passionate "You're lovely," Forum reaches its Seven Hills peak...
This review is not the cry of a prude. Frankly, we don't care if a joke's funny as long as it's dirty. But in switching writer-directors, from the first film's Tom Shadyac to Steve Oedekerk, Carrey lost a clever farceur and got what Ace would call a la-hoo-za-her (loser). The star plays more than ever to himself; the cast stands around starched and embarrassed, like white-tie judges at a wet-T shirt contest. Wearying, stupefying, dumber than dumb, When Nature Calls would be a career ender for Carrey--except that...
...with his wife and daughter. They are mistaken for spies, and take refuge in an American embassy being run temporarily by the ambassador's bumbling son (Michael J. Fox). Despite its dated cold war plot, the 1966 play shows that Allen even at this early stage was a skilled farceur. The Hollanders' presence in the embassy causes mounting chaos involving a visiting emir, a fugitive priest who does magic and a stuffy embassy official who gets conked on the head and thinks he's the Wright Brothers. Both of them...