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able to the weightier factors that made wackiness so wacky in My Man Godfrey ?" The answer to that analysis is this : Everybody undoubtedly has something in mind they would like most to do. That idea is in itself tremendously appealing, but when that idea emerges into action as it did in You Can't Take It With You, its appeal narrows to those few who like ballet, manufacturing firecrackers in the basement, writing plays, playing the xylophone and philosophy.
Along with that, always doing the thing we want most to do is impractical. In other words full-time hobby-riding is an absurdity. However, the play had to stage those hobbies with real people and in surroundings familiar to everyone, which only served to accentuate their absurdity.
With the idea upon which the stage play was based too impractical for conviction, with a minimum of believability in prospect, there was only one course left open to scripter and director. They had to exaggerate the variations of doing what one wants most to do for all the laughs they could get, and in so doing Capra and Riskin were saying: "Yes, we know it's silly, but isn't it swell fun?"
True that dialog might have given those hobbies the appeal of Holiday's desire to live, but how could those hobbies in the wanting bring about a banker's conversion to the philosophy of getting a little fun out of life ? It takes a heap of actual happiness to convert a dispeptic Gibraltar of Finance to anything but accumulating wealth and power because that pursuit means happiness to him to the same extent it does to others. And piling up money, wealth, power, becoming important is a universal pursuit, universally appealing. Maybe it shouldn't be but it is just the same.
Regarding My Man Godfrey there was nothing absurd in the so-called wackiness of the family he worked for. For the kind of idle rich they were, sophisticated mocking birds whose lives were given to a continual round of parties, night life and slumming, that family's behavior was most normal.
In You Can't Take It with You, members of the family actually doing what each wanted most to do,
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