Word: laughs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Irwin Shaw has taken Patate from the French of Marcel Achard, and he would be well advised to put it back. As a laugh show, this "New Comedy" suffers from a paucity of laughs. And since the script is not a gimmick adorned by gags, in the fashion of most American comedies, but a closely plotted dramatic whole, there seems very little possibility of its being rewritten and rescued by skillful gagsmithing...
...fact that people who have a vivid memory of the horrors of World War II are able to laugh heartily and without uneasiness at this character is a curious phenomenon. If he were obviously a caracature, an unbelievable reductio ad absurdum of certain germanic traits, it would be easier to understand. But Werfel's Colonel, while perhaps exaggerated, is nevertheless real; and the qualities we all find so amusing were terrorizing the world for six years...
...Last Laugh. They laughed when he first sat down to play. Goren acutely recalls a day at McGill when a girl friend asked him if he played bridge. "I knew that girls play bridge in the afternoon," says Goren, "and I didn't see why I couldn't. I sat down to play and made a complete ass out of myself." Goren's girl laughed at him-and thin-skinned Charlie Goren, late of Philadelphia's slums, was no man to be laughed at. "It was like putting a knife through me," he says...
...midnight it is plain that the show is a hit. A cameraman smothers a laugh and says, "Jack's flying. He'll be home now." Henny Youngman, a charter member of the Lindy comedians Jack so often criticizes, has dropped in to watch-as many show business pros do. Says Youngman: "This guy gives 200%; he wants to be double good. He gives out a feeling of love, that's why they look at this man. This is a tough damn...
...condemn you, who have made me an orphan. You attack the logic of religion and laugh, at cocktail parties, over totem poles and pillars. You dismiss mystics as paranoids and prophets as crackpots. You pride yourselves as Men of Logic when your understanding is mechanical. In your anxiety to reason, you have for gotten how to feel...