Judge — February 1937 — page 37: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

I certainly like a good laugh show as much as anyone else and do not wish to presume to posture snootily at my col- leagues’ expense. The only difference between us, it seems, is that I don’t like a poor laugh show. The critics of whom I have been speaking are my brothers and friends of the daily newspapers. But the critics on the periodicals frequently equal them in this prejudice in favor of theatrical laughter. There is, for example, no drama critic practicing amongst us today who enjoys a greater shrewdness and, generally, a more pointed perception than Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch, of The Nation. Yet he, too, would often seem to over-cherish the form of theatrical exhibition that has laughter as its aim. In his digest of the plays current at the time of writing, for instance, he recom. mends, out of a total of twelve, all of ten on the ground that they are funny. Beginning with the Gilbert and Sullivan bill, he recommends Idiot’s Delight as “exciting and funny,” On Your Toes as “held over from last season but still funny,” Stage Door as providing “some good gags,” The Country Wife as “irre- sistibly funny,” Tonight At 8:30 with THE THEATRE (Continued from page 19) the observation that “the funny ones are very funny,” Tovarich as “amusing,” Boy Meets Girl as “probably the fun- niest thing of its kind since Once In a Lifetime,” Red, Hot and Blue as “not so good as Anything Goes but it's good nevertheless,” and Johnny Johnson as “‘serious’ but also entertaining.” Of the laugh plays produced since my last public address on this platform the Hart-Kaufman You Can't Take It With You, endorsed by all the critics, seems to me to be the best and the Monks-Finklehoffe Brother Rat, en- dorsed by all the critics, the poorest. The former is a healthy and very jolly excursion into imbecility that combines with its beaming lunacy an undercur- rent of droll philosophy and that, ex- cept for an occasional slight let-down, lifts the essentially ridiculous above it- self and onto a plane of amusing intel- ligence. The latter is an attempt to put youth amusingly on the stage and suc- ceeds only in making it, in the critical sense, juvenile. Laid in the Virginia Military Institute, it trots its stage cadets through the paces of the routine neck- ing, athletic and economic trials and humors familiar to Frank Merriwell and collegiate fiction from time on end and heavily endeavors to saucify the picture with touches of “‘sophistication” relating to water-closets and abashed young girls with imminent babies. I'll take You Can’t Take It With You and give Brother Rat to my confréres as a delayed Christmas present. They asked for it. Now that I have got to this point, I think I can hear my critical friends say, Go on and rib us about the laugh shows if you want to, but where are all the worthy serious plays that you ask us to take an interest in? Getting to this point in turn, I am afraid that I have to answer, Damned if I know. For the sad truth of the matter is that, so far as the serious drama is concerned, the present season has been a banana. At least up to this moment. What has befallen our more: sober dramatists, European as well as Yankee, is hard to make out. Either they aren't writing anything at all or what they are writing is wholly unimportant and often pretty shabby. Maybe, like the critics and the public, they're spending too much of their time at laugh shows. How the doctor chooses from hundreds of laxatives OST of us recall, with gratitude, some crisis in our lives when the doctor's vigilance and skill proved price- less beyond words. 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