Word: slapsticker
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...little one, about Jack and Zack (Waits) and the chatty Italian murderer (Roberto Benigni) they meet in prison. Planning their escape or simply getting to tolerate each other, they are three shaggy humans looking for a way out, and they communicate their anxiety through a kind of existential slapstick: Godot meets the Three Stooges. If you can get into the rhythms of Waits' disk-jockey patter, Benigni's fractured English and Lurie's sullen explosions, you may find Down by Law mildly ingratiating. Otherwise you will sympathize with the jailbirds as they mark off the days in their cell...
...happiest find indoors is George Abbott's first hit, the 1926 Broadway, which invented what have since become the cliches of backstage sagas and gangster melodramas. Pat Patton's staging abounds with campy cabaret numbers, menacing slapstick and chorus-girl goofiness, and centers on a superbly acted struggle for the heroine between a sinuous mobster (Castellanos) and a cheery hoofer (Brian Tyrrell). Broadway celebrates the gutsy traditions and restorative powers of the theater. Some 2,500 miles off Broadway, Ashland does the same, season after season...
...what we get here are a series of unfunny slapstick scenes and running jokes which leave the viewer with a frozen smile on his face. The only really funny shtick has been shown on television commercials so many times that it loses its value...
...face had a cartoon-like directness: big mustache, Magic Marker eyebrows, oversize cigar. Yet few TV entertainers were a more intriguing set of contradictions than Ernie Kovacs. A boisterous cutup who relished tacky props and low-down slapstick, yet a closet highbrow who orchestrated comedy to Bartok and Beethoven. A talk-show pioneer, yet the creator of a classic half an hour that included not a single line of dialogue. A TV "star" who never had a network series that lasted more than two seasons, yet who influenced video comedy for the next two decades, from Laugh-In to David...
...From touting others, he has turned to writing his own epic tragedy, The Spanish Armada. At a rehearsal, everything goes wrong. The actors drop whole swatches of dialogue as turgid and unplayable. The bit players upstage the leads, who swat them. A sword fight is a model of slapstick ineptitude. A Minister of State (Petherbridge) comes out, stares at the audience long and balefully, and departs; he is, Mr. Puff explains, contemplating politics but discreetly not discussing it. When at last the battle with the armada unfolds, it is a clash between two tiny, hand-manipulated boats, reminiscent...