Word: joking
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Impossible Years contains every cliche ever put on magnetic tape for a family-situation series, every joke bandied about virginity since the Etruscans, and every stereotyped symbol of the rock-'n'-roll rebel from blue jeans to narcotics. All the pay-TV show at Broadway's Playhouse Theater lacks is a knob to turn...
...Loved One, copiously advertised as "the motion picture with something to offend everyone," is an overstuffed sick joke trying to make the grade as a capital offense. Beneath the comedy's excesses lie the bones of Novelist Evelyn Waugh's slight, graceful satire of love and death in southern California. The hero is still a bumptious English poet (Robert Morse) employed at the Hap pier Hunting Ground pet cemetery. He woos a corpse cosmetician named Aimee Thanatogenos (Anjanette Comer), who is beloved by her boss, Mr. Joyboy (Rod Steiger), the chief mortician at Whispering Glades memorial park. Ultimately...
...rest of the film is equally far-out but seldom funny. Obviously enamored of Dr. Strangelove, Scenarists Christopher Isherwood and Terry Southern (also co-scenarist of Strangelove) commit the funereal folly of thinking that any joke about death is worth repeating To cremate a pet cheerfully, embalm a baby, or mold crazy expressions onto the face of a corpse (John Gielgud, for example) may be good for laughs among professional crapehangers, but on a giant screen such gags seem merely gratuitous...
...there are ways to overcome the problem. Take the laughter of the audience. For a good out-joke ("Sure we have the right of free speech, we just don't have anything to say.") everyone laughs in unison. In-joke laughter is different. First there's a high peal of feminine laughter. Then that dies down while the girls turn to explain to their dates what's so funny. Finally a low grunt of masculine approval rings in and then everyone shuts up for the next joke...
...Very Rich Woman has ague in its funny bones. Actress-Playwright Ruth Gordon has tried to create a drawing-room comedy about old age-and the chief reason that the play cannot sustain itself is that old age is no joke...