Word: gaggingly
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Guido & Grower. The gag had an unlikely beginning. It was born in Toots Shor's Manhattan saloon one afternoon in 1956, when Pat and a pal, Lynn Phillips, were relaxing from their jobs as time salesmen for NBCTV. They were already practiced hands at the dialect spoof. Pat had picked up a talent for mimicry from his father, a successful nightclub comic of the '30s, and he and his friend used their skill as a "sales adjunct" when they wanted to warm up prospects with a laugh or two. That afternoon in Shor's, the Andrea Doria...
...best parts of the film, however, do not come under the sight gag category. Then, as now, parody was one of the movies' strongest sources of comedy, whether it was Will Rogers playing Robin Hood, or Ben Turpin as the latin lover. The best visual humor, only fleetingly dealt with here, was really the "dictionary of facial expressions" which could turn answering the telephone into a momentous occasion...
What the boys at 20th Century Fox have done is the old familiar gag of buying the screen rights to a famous novel paying the author enough so he'll keep his hands off and then making a movie, ignoring the book as far as possible...
...saves the policy, captures the villain, gets the girl (Rhonda Fleming). Conclusion: as the grateful townsfolk gather around and promise to erect a statue of the hero in the public square, Hope strikes a statuesque attitude, suddenly finds himself occupied by a passing flock of pigeons. Best spot gag: Hope saunters over to a small boy who is playing the piano at a Missouri wingding, pats his head, gently inquires, "What's your name, son?" The boy looks up, peering uncertainly through thick glasses. "Harry Truman," he says...
...would take an inspired director and a truly brilliant production to make something satisfactory out of The Adventures of King Pausole. Albert Willemetz's libretto, based on a novel by Pierre Louys, is an incoherent and frequently boring farce, moving from one extended gag to the next within a ridiculous plot. The pre-occupation with sex makes even the usual Hasty Pudding obsession seem mild, while the amours of various hermaphroditic characters is embarrassingly unfunny. The play's tasteless broadness clashes incongruously with Arthur Honegger's witty and sophisticated score which is its only saving grace...