Word: gagged
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Michael Hfuhruhurr (for a sample of this movie's longest-running gag, try pronouncing that name aloud) has been under a strain. A desperately randy brain surgeon ("I had the top of her head off, but that's as far as it went"), he marries one of his patients, only to discover that Dolores (well played by Kathleen Turner) is not as nice as she looks. After six weeks, she still refuses to consummate their union, although when someone has just undergone Hfuhruhurr's specialty, the cranial screw-top procedure, one tends to believe her when...
...influence does not guarantee indulgence. As the great Russian scrutinizes the great Spaniard, revisionism becomes the order of the day. Sancho's celebrated proverbs are in fact "not very mirth provoking . . . The corniest modern gag is funnier." Don Quixote's attempts to act like an old cavalier show "a rather limited schoolboyish imagination in the way of pranks." As for the author, "Cervantes. . . seems to have had alternate phases of lucidity . . . and sloppy vagueness, much as his hero was mad in patches." Don and squire wander and blunder through Spain, tilting at customs and rituals, obscure priests...
...material they're acting becomes supremely irrelevant. When Terry Jones dresses up as an old crone this time as a sort of Mother Hubbard, dancing and singing with her 90 ragged children--he she looks exactly like 39 other Jones crones from Holy Grail or earlier. And fortunately, the gag is just as ridiculous the fortieth time around. There must be some deeper meaning to life--even Monty Python says so--but with all the commotion from the dancing goldfish and waiters and children and file cabinets, it's hard to put your finger on just what it could...
...jokes fall flat now and again. Heath after encountering mass hissing for a pun, turns unpleasantly to the audiences and says. You think that's joke' Look at your date. But such gattes are more than offset by other yuk yuks meluding one American Express gag that deserves to be kept quiet...
...otherwise bland progression of the storyline. The standard comedic treatment of psychiatry as a profession--which makes Saul Benjamin, the Dudley Moore character, slowly turn as nutty as most of his patients, while the script simultaneously mocks all other psychiatrists with their idiosyncracies--falls flat this time because each gag seems isolated, expected to sustain itself. Benjamin's patient merely represent all the familiar crazies of past sitcoms, such as the patient who thinks he is a bird or the frustrated middle-aged woman who drones on and on. One particularly bizarre patient, who collects trash and wears paper foil...