Word: slapsticker
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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CAMBRIDGE CIRCUS. A band of incredibly funny young Cambridge graduates, with a revue that thinks small and carries a big slapstick. Laughter is all but incessant, and the most hilarious sketch of the evening is a bewigged theater-of-the-absurd British courtroom trial involving a dwarf...
...honored art of pure slapstick is so out of vogue that few people even remember that the word refers to an actual stick-"a device," says Webster, "made of two flat pieces of wood, sometimes used in farce by one actor striking another in such a way as from the loud noise to make it appear that the blow was a severe one." One might think that television would be a wilderness of slapstick, but actually there is remarkably little of it. Last week NBC tried to change this situation by introducing three new slapstick comedies in one 90-minute...
...good guffaw nowadays is hard to find. Onstage and on film comedy has gone cosmic-as if dramatists were engaged in a campaign to laugh wars, capital punishment and lung cancer out of existence. The big news about Cambridge Circus is that it thinks small and carries a big slapstick. The manic, unassuming young graduates of Cambridge University who wrote and perform in the revue would rather tickle a rib than wash a brain, and more often than not they are indescribably funny...
...film begins, a world-famous cellist lies dead, mourned in turn by his critic-biographer, six black-veiled mistresses and his wife. Flashbacks detail the end of the great man's life in a series of slapstick sketches played against the ricky-tick accompaniment of Yes! We Have No Bananas. In the sprawling Villa Tremolo, where he keeps his women (among them such Bergman favorites as Eva Dahlbeck, Bibi Andersson and Harriet Andersson), Maestro Felix is heard but seldom seen. The women are the issue, for the artist's playthings, like his public, adore him, scorn him, help...
Despite an occasional stab of wit, Bergman's portrait of the artist as the victim of his fickle followers and corrupt critics, if it is funny at all, is heavy, testy humor. Teeth clenched, he wields the apparatus of slapstick boldly, but draws neither laughs nor blood because his northern variations on 8½ do not lend themselves to pie-in-the-face comedy. Even the most accomplished cinema stylist can scarcely hope, perhaps, to be the Fellini of the frost belt and a Scandinavian Sennett at the same time...