Word: slapstick
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Much of what goes on between is vintage burlesque-blackouts, slapstick, even knock-knock jokes. Yet, by exploiting the full range of such technical possibilities as zooming closeups and quick cuts, the show has fashioned a fresh new form of rapid-fire TV comedy...
...Irony. Richler, 37, a Canadian who now earns his chips in London as a TV and film writer, delivers his blue bits with the relish of a nightclub comic shocking an audience of miniskirted grandmothers. It is totally irrelevant that the setting of the novel is England; despite its slapstick, Cocksure is well within the American mode of contemporary black humor that U.S. Critic Kenneth Burke has called "the drastic irony of paranoia...
SMASHING TIME. Lynn Redgrave and Rita Tushingham participate in this romp à la mod, which has too much bashing to be smashing, as it substitutes claptrap slapstick for the once refined art of British comedy...
Australian-born Zoe Caldwell, who was awarded a Tony for her performance in Slapstick Tragedy, camouflages the plight of a play that has said its all in the first 20 minutes by resolute diversions of voice, manner and meticulous comic timing. Unfortunately, she would rather see through, than be, Miss Brodie. She does not trust the role enough and kids it in a slyly satirical put-on instead of letting herself be consumed by it. If she had created a warped, vulnerable, fitfully valiant and perpetually self-deluded human being, playgoers might have laughed with Miss Jean Brodie...
...funny moments are provided in Lynn's nightmarish seduction by Ian Carmichael playing a guards officer type as impeccably drunk as he is dressed. But Smashing Time has too much bashing to be smashing-and is added evidence that slapstick has replaced satire in the once fine and delicate art of British comedy...