Word: gagged
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...contestants on the game show Double Dare compete for prizes by tossing clumps of mashed potatoes at one another, rummaging through huge pizzas and plunging down a sundae slide into a vat of whipped cream. Underage comics on You Can't Do That on Television assault one another with gag lines rather than food, but get drenched with a bucket of green slime every time they utter the phrase "I don't know." The action on Kids' Court is only slightly more decorous. On one show a youngster stood accused of taking his brother's water pistol and hiding...
Like Airplane!, Naked Gun turns everything into a gag. Drebin can't park his car or pick up a pen without something calamitous happening. Many of the gags, in fact, are obvious, but that's part of the film's charm; the movie operates on bringing out the silliness of the rote plots and personalities that characterize endless episodes of TV cop shows...
...build up the pot. But the interactive concept may catch on. Youngsters last season could blow away TV villains in Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, and Mattel is developing six more interactive TV products. Guess the culprit on Murder, She Wrote, perhaps? Divine Alf's gag lines in advance? Nah -- too easy...
Sitcoms, too, are playing it safe this fall; the ambitious "dramedies" of the past few seasons have mostly been supplanted by old-fashioned gag comedies. That isn't necessarily bad. The season's funniest new show, NBC's Dear John, hardly advances the art of the sitcom, but it surely restocks it with human-scale humor. Judd Hirsch stars as a divorced schoolteacher gingerly exploring the single life. On his first visit to a singles group, he meets a sly assemblage of oddballs, including a group leader fixated on sex and a hilariously sleazy skirt chaser (Jere Burns doing...
...simple. He would walk into the Manhattan office of the Tonight writers an hour or so before airtime, when they were still desperately scrambling for ideas. "I'd say, 'Would you like to freeze me in a block of ice and see me escape?' They'd say 'Great!' and gag it up somehow, freezing me with a halibut on my chest, or whatnot...