Imitation of Wife

Do you remember the comedy short subjects that used to be part of every movie show, or are you not old enough to have to eat only pureed food? Nick Santa Maria and Will Ryan have invented two ex-Vaudevillians, Biffle and Shooster, who starred in many of them, creatures of puns, set phrases an Three-Stooges-like eyepokes and Michael Schlesinger, who has spent thirty years insisting that SHH! THE OCTOPUS is the greatest movie ever made, has written, directed and generally cajoled a lot of professionals who you would expect would have better things to do with their time into helping out with a series of shorts that recreate the lost children of Hollywood's Not-So-Golden Years.

This is a pastiche of those Laurel & Hardy movies -- and Charley Chase movies, and Edgar Kennedy movies and you name it movies -- in which the husband brings his husband home for dinner in order to win the promotion, only to have the wife walk out on him, whereupon the other one (usually Stan Laurel) dresses up like a woman. Glen Taranto does a dead-on imitation of comic foil Vernon Dent as the boss in this one.