Make 'Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America

I was grown and educated on Robert Youngson's compilation of 'Golden Age of Comedy' which by the end of the 50s was bringing back to audiences world-wide the great masters of the first decades of comedy in the cinema. The endless collection of gags made me and all audiences roll under the theater chairs with laughs and at the same time taught a lesson I never forgot about the great comedians of the screen - from Keaton and Chaplin to Laurel and Hardy.

The six part series from PBS could have done the same thing, It covers a much longer period, practically the whole 20th century and each part is dedicated to one specific genre - stand-up, family shows, physical comedy, wise-guys parody. The main problem is that the show while quite informative and well written is simply not enough fun. The first episode is especially boring, and if I had to watch it weekly rather than get all six episodes recorded I doubt that I would have shown up the next week at the same hour on the same station. Rather than talking heads we could have used more comedy. Making a too serious documentary about comedy is a capital sin.

(and come on - a the family comedy episode that does not mention 'Married with Children'?)

Yes, it's nice to trot this material around one more time, and there are anecdotes here that may or may not be new to you.

But Buster Keaton said that comedy is in long shot, and these boneheaded producers chose to zoom in for widescreen and hack off the top and bottom in their clips of both movies and TV.

You can't show physical comedians cut off at the knees. These are full-body performers. You lose the feet, legs and space that contains the action, as well as the location information at the top of the screen. In the scene from "Animal Crackers" where policeman Basil Ruysdael pumps Harpo Marx's arm and several hundred knives fall out of his other sleeve, you can hardly see the knives appearing and the entire gag is killed stone dead.

To show the entire frame would have entailed black bars at the sides, but that would have been a lot better than destroying the visuals of Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Fields, Caesar, Ball and just about everybody else who worked in standard format rather than widescreen.

An absolute waste of time. Don't bother.

Way too much pseudo-intellectual and pompous (and political) explaining--by the last 2 or 3 episodes you would hardly know it was about comedy at all. As someone said at the end, if you have to explain comedy, there's something wrong.

Host Billy Crystal does his best to keep the focus on humor, but he's swimming against the tide.

The second episode, on family sitcoms, is the best because it shows a lot of reasonably-long clips. Gracie Allen is the funniest in the whole series.

The good news is that lots of current comics are on the record speaking passionately about the need for free speech, making people (especially those with power) uncomfortable, offending people, and mocking the establishment. These folks are desperately needed in our era of "speech is violence."

5 stars for the bits (sadly, too small a portion of the content) that are hilarious.