Word: laffs
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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...
...violence"). Off Broadway successes include America Hurrah and The Deer Park ("searing indictments"). Even our theatre of the boulevard is mining social commentry. Two successful musicals of the Broadway season were Cabaret, which touches on Fascism, and Hallelujah Baby, which is nominally concerned with Negroes: Neil Simon's newest laff riot, The Star Spangled Girl, is all about the relations of two leftist students and an America First blond...
...unnoticed a few years ago These writers demand attention with a maverick, inventive, acidulously adult outlook that delights in salting the sores and needling the niceties of the megaton-megalopolis age. They deserve notice because their brand of comedy is so clearly not the saccharine hilarity packaged by commercial laff merchants not the bad-boy snigger of contemporary bedroom farce. Nor does it necessarily appeal even to sophisticated tastes; it is for those who prefer mountain brooks to mainstreams. But it is strong, dark laughter, echoing-if not equaling-the bitter merriment to which other ages moved Juvenal, Rabelais...
...customers were obviously irritated by the imperfections of the Cinerama process: the fuzzy vertical lines between the three panels of the picture; the jiggling of the panels and their variations of color and brightness; a degree of distortion that often makes the picture look like something seen in a laff mirror. For another thing, the Stanley Warner Cinerama Corp...
...terrible. Jokes about the Kennedy family, sneers at Time, and a couple of anti-FDR cracks that haven't been heard around Harvard for some years--these are not inherently funny things. Nor are puns, hairy-legged kicklines, topical names like Ev and Charley, liquor, or sex, automatic laff riots. You have to work hard to make material like this fresh, and Wilson hasn...