Word: slapsticker
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...Slapstick Tragedy. The most obvious thing about the show is its broad exaggeration of soap-opera calamity. Mary is held hostage by a crazed gunman, then propositioned by the rescuing police officer. Her friend, Loretta, who dreams of a career as a country singing star, is battling paralysis after her car was struck by another car full of nuns...
...slapstick tragedy is not the only reason why people are watching Mary Hartman. The show's fascination lies in its oddly shifting tone. Almost all of the characters are confused. Mary herself is usually slack-jawed with bafflement-about her sister, who has fallen in with the local massage-parlor king; her grandfather, "the Fernwood Flasher"; and most of all by her stolid and truly enigmatic husband Tom. Though he is having an affair with Mae, a comely co-worker at the plant, he is impotent with Mary. The situation makes him terse and glum...
...love with the cozy scene and an attractive woman he observes through a bungalow window. He insinuates his wares and himself into the woman's dwelling and finally marries her. Gradually the view through that window to the world outside comes to seem irresistibly attractive. This turnabout is slapstick, but the problem behind it is not belittled by O'Faolain. Both the dealer and his new wife learn something about the treachery of fulfilled desires before their struggle is over...
...superlatives. Louis Malle's Souffle de Coeur is one of the funniest films ever made, and certainly the Funniest Film About Incest ever made. It captures French bourgeois life with the accuracy of a Palestinian guerrilla looking for hostages. The spinach throwing scene is the best piece of cinematic slapstick since Chaplin. The subtler pieces are all there too: the way the mother, for example, sits down on the bed in the hotel room before agreeing to take the room is a gesture peculiar to the European bourgeoisie. Souffle du Coeur is at heart a comedy of sexual manners...
...find his wife at the J-Bar Korral by driving through it in a truck. Aurora's plain, long-suffering daughter is as poignant as her mother is flashy, and her grim fate at the novel's end seems out of keeping with all the earlier slapstick. Yet McMurtry's skill and compassion all but hide his incongruities...