Word: slapstickers
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...late Ernie Kovacs, smatterings of early Sid Caesar and Steve Allen, and a-pie-in-the-face splat or two of Soupy Sales. But on Laugh-In, the calculated aim is to create a state of sensory overload, a condition that audiences nowadays seem to want or need. Blackouts, slapstick, instant skits pinwheel before the eyes; chatter and sound effects collide in the ear. Other TV variety shows can be dropped intact onto a theater or nightclub stage, but Laugh-In would be impossible anywhere but on television. For one thing, each show is stitched together from about 350 snippets...
HIGH SERIOUSNESS. Matthew Arnold, you remember, said the greatest art displayed a High Seriousness. That's not to exclude the serious masquerading as comic, or even the outright Slapstick farcical comic. It may not be the greatest art, Arnold said, but we-all-love-a-good-joke-hey-boys...
Garner and Reynolds desperately try to carry on in the tradition of the Rock Hudson-Doris Day sex farces of the '50s. But they are swiftly undone by shameless mugging, slow-running gags and hurried slapstick. This is the kind of comedy that calls for gales of canned laughter on television-which is really the only kind that canned comedy deserves...
...French, they run a funny race. Give them somebody else's genre-Hitchcock suspense, slapstick à la Sennett-and they can dominate the field. But ask them to run on their own course-amour, with plenty of gallic-and, pouf!, they fall apart...
This latest arrival from the Czech cinematic surge is both sad and slapstick in an old-fashioned way. It is a Chaplinesque morality play about simple innocence in the rapacious world, aptly matched with direction and photography that point up the pastiche without collapsing into camp...