Word: laffs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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BLACKFACE is out; homos are in. Everywhere homosexuals are in. On the stage, they have become the sixties' equivalent of minstrel show niggers. Yes, fellas, step right up and see 'em smile, see 'em singin' and dancin,' and jokin' too, lawdy how they do joke! And laff! How they laff...
...they were happy. They had to be happy. We wouldn't admit they might not want to accept our society, a society built on their sweat and labor. So we denied them their full humanity and we put them up there on that stage and we jes let 'em laff it up. We couldn't admit they were a problem...
...home-brewed from traditional materials that the boys have assimilated on their pub crawls. At its frequent best, their hard-edged raucousness restores even the most familiar ballads to the folk sources where they were spawned. A song like the traditional Weila Waile, which the Clancys turn into a laff riot, comes off in The Dubliners' brawny hands as the grisly epic of infanticide that it actually is. The often sentimentalized Rising of the Moon becomes in the Dubliners' ver sion a powerful, harrowing hymn of revolutionary heroism...
...Family Way is a tale about a couple of Cockney families whose psychological problems are solved in 105 laff-filled minutes. One father loves his daughter to distraction; the other bullies his son out of house and home. The mothers stand at the ringside fretting with jealousy or issuing reprimands, teeth-clenched. Meanwhile their offspring fall in love, get married, and don't live happily ever after because they can't consummate their marriage...
What also makes the picture rather staid is that the dastardly plan works perfectly. Equipment doesn't go on the blink, nobody misses connections, thievery's too easy. A little fumbling and a little suspense would have made the situation more of a laff-riot. Even punchlines are terribly understated. It's as though the writer-director didn't intend us to die laughing: that's not refined...