Word: slapstick
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...that the government planned to abolish jamming. At the Semafor, a cellar theater in Prague, S.R.O. crowds gather three nights a week to laugh and cry out in shocked surprise at a musical satire, The Last Stop. In two hours of leggy displays, big-beat tunes, psychedelic lights and slapstick chases, the production fearlessly dissects the incompetence and corruption of the old set of Communist leaders and even lampoons...
...EXISTENTIAL SLAPSTICK. This genre seems to mix Mack Sennett and Samuel Beckett. A woman, responding to the call "Where's the Open Pit?", dashes across the lawn with a bottle of Open Pit barbecue sauce and disappears into an open pit. A baker, having carelessly forgotten his Vicks Cough Silencers, tosses pizza dough into the air, coughs and catches it splat in the face. Splat again, as the Pond's girl gets schlopped in the eye with cold cream. And whack! umph! and aaagh! as a mousy little guy, sploshed with Hai Karate after-shave lotion, brutally chops down...
Overweight and festooned with stale situations and weary wisecracks, Yours, Mine and Ours relies for its levity on two unassailable assets: Fonda and Ball. At 62, Fonda can still leave a line wry and dry. At 56, Ball commands a solid slapstick style that none of her younger rivals can match. Her squint-eyed search for a false eyelash that has managed to wander to her forehead, for example, is converted into the kind of classic comedy chase that has been absent from films for too long. And they are ably backed by a surprisingly supple comedian named Van Johnson...
...list of guests to be invited to a party at the producer's house. And that is how Peter Sellers happens to show up in brownface with a mild Oriental smile and a wild Oriental eye to turn a black-tie dinner into a hectic crescendo of slapstick, sight gag, pratfall and pandemonium...
...good part of the evening is pure vaudevillian slapstick-coffin-lid play, unscheduled entrances, involuntary exits, stashing the money where the corpse was and vice versa. The macabre jocularity involves such bits of business as tossing the dead mother's dentures across the room as casually as a pack of cigarettes. All of this demands the split-second timing of a Feydeau farce, and unfortunately Director Derek Gold-by is no Mike Nichols...