Word: gagged
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...inevitable and delightful that our hero should also chew up one of the party streamers festooning the room. Buckets of water in the face, stones accidentally falling on innocent toes, police as easily misdirected as the Keystone Cops: it's all there. And in the only specifically aural gag, Chaplin swallows a whistle to create a hilarious variation of the hiccupping concert-goer who can't stop when the aria begins...
...Baby, but influence, allusion and satire run infinitely wider--from D.W. Griffith to Bugs Bunny. Eisenstein to Erich Segal to Bogart. It is a movie made out of movies, and right from the opening credits presented as pages in a storybook. Bogdanovich wrings every cliche to its uttermost. Every gag, every twist of plot, has been aged in a thousand earlier uses...
...point, the defense called for a mistrial based in part on the fact that Judge Herman had "summarily denied" a request by married jurors for conjugal visits. That in turn led trial-goers to pass the time by envisioning such headlines as SEX-STARVED JURY CONVICTS CELIBATES, a gag based on the fact that six of the seven defendants are or were priests or nuns...
Foxx's delivery of such gag lines is like a rasp drawn gently across the funnybone. With timing that would take an atomic clock to measure, he teases a laugh like a yo-yo on the end of a string. A figure of grizzled aplomb, he can get up from a spread of ham hocks and pinto beans, then strut through a junky living room as if he were Louis XIV in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles...
This question of balance springs from a tension in Shapiro's work, a tension between ideals of consistently hilarious comedy and of valid political and social commentary. Perhaps the two most insightful portions were the ones which tended least to be bombardments of gag lines, in particular, a mock anti-drug program and another "message from the President" on riots in Detroit. Richard Beltzer, who plays the President as well as other roles, delivers his philippics with a devastating sense of timing...