Word: slapsticking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Though the supporting performances are strong, John Cleese is always the dominant presence. His progressive breakdown as his life falls apart around him is perfectly rendered with understated humor, frequently punctuated with deadpan slapstick. Both Python cultists and those less familiar with PBS will be pleased...
...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...