Word: slapstickers
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This use of forceful tactics comes as a hangover from the days fifteen years ago when Jerry Owen was number one sparring partner for boxer Max Baer. Baer moved on to Hollywood as a slapstick comedian; Owen left him and started up the sawdust trail as an evangelist. As Owen explains it, Jesus came down one night to call him to the pulpit. Jesus said "Come on Jerry, I'se got sumpin' for you--I'm gone make you a fisher of men." Then Jesus dropped into the background to brush up on his grammar, and Jerry Owen baited...
Howard Dietz and Garson Kanin did not even try to follow the original text in their new English version. Using the fantastic plot as a framework, they packed both the dialogue and songs with as many jokes, double entendres, and Ogden Nashian rhymes as possible. Combining sex, satire, and slapstick, Dietz and Kanin have produced a vehicle which should become one of the most popular items on the Metropolitan's repertoire, despite its dubious artistic significance...
Probably the best of the longer prose works is Douglas Bunce's tale of Joseph Catchpenny, who picked his wives according to the rigid rules of romantic fiction. Bunce strikes a nice balance between slapstick and satire to keep his story amusing to the end. "Mrs. Fabian's Little Joke," by Michael Arlen, applies a ridiculous ending to an inane plot, and remains humorous in spite of it all. But a short piece on "Answers to the World's Most Famous Letters" falls down badly at the end. The purposely uninformed commentaries by Thomas Edwards, on quantum mechanics and chess...
...Kind of Woman (RKO) is a somewhat lumpy blend of slapstick comedy and dead-serious melodrama. Gambler Robert Mitchum, after being alternately wooed and walloped by gangsters, finds himself in an isolated Mexican resort trying to cope with a plot that defies analysis. While awaiting the arrival of the criminal mastermind (Raymond Burr), Mitchum patches up a newlyweds' quarrel; exchanges terse dialogue and melting looks with bosomy Jane Russell; plays straight man for Vincent Price, a hammy Hollywood star...
Written by Radio Scripter Cy (My Friend Irma) Howard, That's My Boy reaches its comedy high in the opening slapstick sequences between Mayehoff and Lewis, then runs steadily downhill through a thicket of Freudian ABCs and the labored plot complications that lead to Jerry's coming through in the big game...