Word: spoof
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Billy Wilder, the producer, director, and co-author of the script, probably took some sort of commercial chance when he chose a transvestite setting for his sex spoof. Except for occasional shifting of buttocks, however, the usually queasy Boston audience has little trouble transcending its sidewalk morality-so broad is the funny business, so obvious the references...
...pass our comprehension, we must do what we can with the third." Urbane Satirist Menen has siphoned laughter out of stuffy pukka sahibs (The Prevalence of Witches') and sacred Hindu myths (The Ramayana). Rarely has his comic touch been lighter or more impolite than in this current spoof on science...
From the moment Trouper Verdon turns plain Essie into a glittering song-and-dance girl, Redhead stops being deadhead. Her articulate hands, toes and torso are parts of speech and her lines are more pleasing than the script's. Her body is an erotic spoof spelling sex in quotes, as she overtilts a wayward hip or dislocates an amorous shoulder; in marathon-long dances, the stage is her keyboard, and she never hits a wrong note. Under the bravura assurance lies an endearing Chaplinesque poignance. Smiles of delight cross the wistful, wide-eyed Verdon face, like sudden dawns. Eager...
...fires and misses." By the end of the evening, Hargrove and Orr had worked out a rough plot, chosen their title. Hargrove picked NBC's Gunsmoke as his target, he says, "because it is a tremendously solid show. The characters are sharply defined. It is easier to spoof a good western. A bad western doesn't have anything to get your hands on." Ungrateful Gunsmoke producers, when they got wind of the forthcoming parody, promptly inserted in their show an episode about a lying, cheating heavy named Huggins. Maverick's producer: Roy Huggins...
...there were a conspiracy to get all parody over and done with as quickly as possible, CBS chose the same night, same time slot, to run Jack Benny's long-celebrated Autolight, a 15-minute spoof of Gaslight, the 1944 melodrama in which a Victorian villain tries to drive his wife insane. Filmed in 1952, Autolight was impounded by the courts after M-G-M complained that Benny's hoked-up version hewed so closely to the original that it violated copyright laws. Benny fought the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court (TIME, March...