Word: laughingly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...take the wrestlers at Boston Garden seriously. Watching a midget scamper around the ring and pretend to be frightened of another midget impressed me as being just about the most demeaning thing a man could do. Seeing someone sacrifice his human dignity and his manliness for a laugh isn't my idea of comedy...
...NEXT are two one-acters directed by Elaine May with a crisp and zany comic flair. Adaptation, written by Miss May, is the game of life staged like a TV contest with the contestants hopping from one huge checkerboard square to another. Gabriel Dell, in a performance that is laugh-and letter-perfect, is the hero who plays the adaptation game from birth to death. Terrence McNally's Next features James Coco, fortyish, fat and balding, as a potential draftee called up for his physical examination. Coco gives an enormously funny and resourceful performance in McNally's best...
Javelin Catcher. The Laugh-In producers put together a whole hour of such material, a sort of all-black Laugh-In called Soul, which NBC ran as a special earlier this season. In a typical bit, Redd Foxx told Slappy White of the first Negro athletic-scholarship winner at the University of Mississippi -"He's a javelin catcher." White observed that Oct. 27 is a Negro holiday - "That's the day when the new Cadillacs come out." In one sight gag, George Kirby stretched out on a beach mat, opened a bottle of suntan oil and slathered...
Obviously, the networks are still caught somewhat nervously between the stereotypes of Supernegro and a campy version of old Stepin Fetchit. Digby Wolfe, a former writer on the Laugh-In and Soul shows, warns that the "here-come-de-judge syndrome can be very dangerous, because it is apt to convince white audiences that Negroes are, after all, just kidding." He misses the point. No matter what the show or how limp the humor, the "Yassuh, boss" jokes are still, basically, satire...
...line from Casablanca, a scene from The Music Man, a bit of police marching from Gilbert and Sullivan--why not run through the most cliched joke conventions as well. But the business of an amusing show is to amuse and author David Patterson's inability to deliver the great laugh makes one suspect that the bad ones are there out of desperation, not for satire...