Word: slapstick
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There are dumb movies, and then there are dumb movies. Making slapstick, the lowest form of humor, successful requires enormous skill and talent. Rowan Atkinson's character, Mr. Bean, whose inspired idiocy traces a direct descent from Charlie Chaplin, infuses new intelligence into unintelligent comedy. It's really too bad that such a well-wrought dumb character finds himself in such a stock dumb movie...
Watching the situation of morals in politics these days is kind of like viewing a silent slapstick film. Just as the actors scurry around the sets as fast as possible hoping for a laugh, our legislators are pulling every trick in the book trying to capitalize on the current vogue for morality. Indeed, spurred on by eager pollsters, the Republicans are convinced these days that the people want moral action. Unfortunately, the people are not very clear about what sort of moral action they want taken, and the Republicans are left spinning their wheels trying to capture the sentiment. Meanwhile...
...musical was adapted by ART artistic director Robert Brustein from a children's story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. But the adaptation is neither sharp nor captivating-instead it relies heavily on slapstick gags and cheap one-line jokes to drag its way through a simple story. Singer's morality tale here is not expanded or satirized; rather, it is presented and left to lie like cold chicken soup, sans matzoh balls, vegetables or even chicken. The adaptation fails to challenge the audience in the slightest, and is not even successful in its irreverence. Much of 'Shlemiel' simply insults both...
What does shine through, however, is the actors' energy and the fast-paced humor racing through the show, even if it is mainly slapstick. The production is worth seeing for the prologue alone--Erik Amblad '99 and Chuck O'Toole '97 in particular draw screams of laughter from the audience with their girlish giggles. Everyone's costumes are a hoot, from the prologue's two-sizes-too-small jogging suits to the servants' funky get-ups. Again, once the actual story begins, some of the more original artistic concepts are sacrificed in favor of both Shakespearean traditions and basic silliness...
...latest and one of the funniest of these vengeful academic burlesques is Richard Russo's Straight Man (Random House; 391 pages; $25). Russo, a former professor at Colby College in Maine and author of The Risk Pool and Nobody's Fool, commences his slapstick when William Henry Devereaux Jr., creative-writing teacher and chairman of the English department at an obscure Pennsylvania college, makes a slighting remark about a colleague's poetry. She whacks him across the face with a notebook, and the metal coil hooks his nose...