Leave It to Adam Sandler to Ruin a Classic Comedy Routine

The statue routine has been making audiences laugh for hundreds of years.  It is amazing to see this timeless comedy business fall with a resounding thud in Sandler's newest comedy, Grown Ups 2 (2013).

It is a great pleasure to see a classic routine done well.  In a recent documentary about the British sitcom Open All Hours, David Jason talks about his success with the mannequin leg routine.

Admirably, Jason is still in the comedy game at the age of 73.  I enjoyed recently seeing the actor play an Inspector Clouseau-type character in the sitcom The Royal Bodyguard.  The series' writers, Mark Bussell and Justin Sbresni, are fans of classic comedy.  This is made evident by the situations of the fourth episode, "The Royal Art of Blackmail" (2012).  Jason crosses paths with a band of art thieves hiding out in an ice cream truck and unwittingly causes the refrigeration unit to explode and fill the truck with ice cream.  (See my article about the "evil ice cream truck" trope at http://anthonybalducci.blogspot.com/2011/11/evil-ice-cream-truck.html.)

I would like to close today's post with a clip from the early days of film comedy.  Last year, I wrote about a water fountain routine performed by Lou Costello in Who Done It? (1942).  At the time, I did not remember that Roscoe Arbuckle performed a similar routine in Fatty's Chance Acquaintance (1915).  Here is that routine.