Word: slapstick
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...Under current rules, producers and directors often find their artistic visions held hostage by the whims of the police, whose tastes run to head-spinning violence and slapstick comedy - but no politics or nudity, please. Fewer than 50 local movies are shown annually in Thailand, and the competition for screens spurs many studio bosses to work closely with censors or risk being shut out. The alternative is self-censorship. "We have learned to self-censor ourselves for a long time," says Pimpaka Towira, director of the critically lauded 2003 feature One Night Husband...
...couldn't have her male lead be an urban Latino whose Cuban accent was thicker than a platter of ropa vieja. You couldn't build a story line around a (gasp!) pregnancy. Lucille Ball's contributions to TV's past are so obvious--Vitameatavegamin, the Tropicana Club, the slapstick routines--that it's better to note what this show says about today's future: sometimes the greatest sign of a future classic TV show is that it doesn't look like classic...
Before M*A*S*H, the line between TV comedy and TV drama was as well demarcated as the DMZ between the two Koreas. This military-doctor comedy daringly combined zany humor--equal parts Marx Brothers slapstick and high-class wordplay--with dark drama, as when the war claimed the life of the base's first chief, Lieut. Colonel Henry Blake. (The show banned canned laughter in its operating-room scenes, presaging today's single-camera, laugh-track-free comedies.) Like many great shows, M*A*S*H stayed on the air a few years too long. But it proved...
...that at some point he has to grow up and accept that friends can be a continent apart and still be close. Or not close: friendships, like erections, can subside. But to find that valuable truth, you have to dig through an avalanche of d--- jokes and strenuous slapstick...
When it became apparent that last month's car bomb attack on Glasgow airport had failed to wreak its intended carnage, people in Scotland felt able to relax, to relish even some of the slapstick quality of the attack's spectacular failure...