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or Laughini
You Never Can Tell What the
Next Fellow Thinks Is Funniil^
III
y p
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By Hal K. Wells
But I've sort of outgrown those juveni ideas of wit. I've even reached the intellectual stage where I no longer regard the injection oi either limberger cheese or a belligerent skunk into a scene as being the very last word in exquisite humor.
No one can doubt, in the face of the evidence above, that the girls of today get plastered. Or, from that at the right, that the young Holly^^ood clubwoman doesn't do active work
THERE can be little doubt that the tworeel comedy still remains the cross-e%ed stepchild of the motion picture industry'.
It alone of all the screen's varied entertainment has failed to show any real progress whatever since those dear dead days
of yore when the first Keystone cop socked the first custard pie into the shrinking countenance of the first dignified old gentleman in a high silk hat.
Today the average two-reel comedy has attained an innate triteness, childishness, and absolute vulgarity that is little short of appalling.
Xo, I haven't gone high-hat. I still have a sense of humor that regards a good stag party anecdote superior to the best treatise on relativity ever written, and I still prefer Ring Lardner to Sherwood Anderson any day in the week.
But I am becoming most thoroughly fed up with the alleged comedy of the two-reelers. Several years ago, when I still thought that a stick of striped peppermint candy was Heaven's one great pft to a starving world. I got a big kick out of seeing a screen funny man fall on his terminus. I screamed with glee when he got a broadside of gooey pastn,' on the snout. I howled with joy when a large gob of ice cream slid down the back of a lady's evening gown.
58
Too Much Tripe (
A ND I believe that among the motion picture audience
^^ of this country there are several million other adulti
above the mental age of six and one-half years who fe
the same way I do about it.
We tolerate the present gosh-awful crop of two-re( comedies for the simple reason that we can't get anythi better. We don't expect caviar, necessarily, in the tw reel field. But we are getting mighty tired of tripe. ,•
There are a very small number of current sho comedies that really are clever, original, and reasonab". j subtle. But these exceptions are so few and far betwedi that they merely make the rest of the product loom vvf as more crude and hackneyed than ever.
These few different comedies have, strangely enougi proved riots wherever shown. They appealed to tl (Continued on page 86)
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