Another poor hour wasted with Uncle Miltie. It's no wonder that NBC allowed him to go over to ABC- they were sabotaging their competition. The canned applause and laughs is over the top, even for the regular Hollywood Palace production crew's lead finger approach. Jayne is pretty much a toss away, singing in a number at the start and then feeding one straight line in a blackout later. Probably Milton really loved to give as much time as possible to Martha because she shared his bombastic sense of humour. They both scream and pull faces nearly without let-up. That would be fine if it paid off in laughs, but most of those come from the aforementioned "sweetening" and their own phony breakups.
Instant replay and footage slowdowns were new then, and thus inspired a skit about a football match played in slo-mo. It's embarrassingly staged on a tiny stage, and the comedy is dependent on Miltie's ill-fitting costume and grimaces. And it makes no sense; there's no women in a football game, yet Martha, now wearing a sweater and long grey skirt with a huge propeller beanie, gets into the game. It goes on and on and on, pointlessly, painfully. The last skit, supposedly derived from a Noel Coward-style upper class English play, is an utter farce, as one would count on Berle to deliver, complete with guns shooting, gorillas coming in and out, and furniture breaking up. But he does it without the sharpness, or speed he did it in a 1949 Texaco episode I've also seen. Knowing his (self-publicised) penchant for taking other's material, the whole sketch probably started out in an Olsen & Johnson stage show. Another weak and tiresome effort, which is sad, because Berle was once so much better.
Instant replay and footage slowdowns were new then, and thus inspired a skit about a football match played in slo-mo. It's embarrassingly staged on a tiny stage, and the comedy is dependent on Miltie's ill-fitting costume and grimaces. And it makes no sense; there's no women in a football game, yet Martha, now wearing a sweater and long grey skirt with a huge propeller beanie, gets into the game. It goes on and on and on, pointlessly, painfully. The last skit, supposedly derived from a Noel Coward-style upper class English play, is an utter farce, as one would count on Berle to deliver, complete with guns shooting, gorillas coming in and out, and furniture breaking up. But he does it without the sharpness, or speed he did it in a 1949 Texaco episode I've also seen. Knowing his (self-publicised) penchant for taking other's material, the whole sketch probably started out in an Olsen & Johnson stage show. Another weak and tiresome effort, which is sad, because Berle was once so much better.