Word: gaggingly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...York Idea by Langdon Mitchell. Though this comedy of manners was first presented in 1906, it is by no means spavined with age. It is the genre itself that has disappeared. We have grown accustomed to situation comedy, sight-and-gag comedy and black comedy. But the last instance of a social comedy based on an assured upper class was probably Clare Boothe Luce's The Women, and that play is now 40 years old. Essentially, the New York idea is divorce and, slightly more scandalously, the notion that divorced couples can be amiable friends...
...contrast, a gag which works far better involves King Lear's obsession with popcorn. A supposedly dignified, elderly figure running around shouting "Pop, pop, Jiffy Pop," is ridiculous enough to be funny, and the Act II opener, "The Popcorn Ballet," which features men with silken flame neckties trying to pop female characters dressed as resistant kernels of corn, is one of the most excitingly choreographed and outrageous numbers in the show...
Simultaneous translation keeps the audience in the picture and, for a few minutes, the show has interesting promise. Very shortly, however, it becomes clear that Playwright Horovitz has only one sort of joke in mind-a set of variations on the old Tower of Babel gag -and that Director Edward Berkeley can think of only one way to play it -stridently...
Section 18 rowdies have not relied solely on the old "why did the chicken cross the ice" joke, or the old sieve gag that is used throughout the collegiate hockey realm...
...cannot resist the occasional opportunity to show that he is more than a mere comic. Yet the show's structure is sound. Danny's son is a Park Avenue practitioner whose sharp dress, smooth manner and cleverness about tax shelters drives the old boy to outrage. The gag writing, at least in the opening episode, is plentiful and sharp-up to Mary Tyler Moore standards...