When will playwrights learn that it takes more than a string of funny lines to make a comedy? Actually, Neil Simon's The Gingerbread Lady purports to be more than a comedy, and the lines, for the most part, are less than funny. Less than funny for several reasons. 1) They traipse over the same old terrain, from sex-starvation to unquenched-thirst jokes, from kinky-sex to show-biz in-jokes, from Mafia to Polish jokes. (There are no elephant jokes.) You may not have heard precisely these jokes before, but your surprise is no greater than at hearing the triumphal march from Aida played on water glasses. 2) There are too many of them. Hardly ever is anyone, regardless of age, background, or calling, allowed to speak in anything but funny lines. Whether he is touched, anguished, or crushed, it is all converted into jokes. They end by tripping one another up, and a joke slipping painfully on the peel of the previous joke is no laughing matter. 3) The jokes do not, except superficially, rise out of character or an individual way of looking at the world. (p. 301)
Jokes are not really funny in a vacuum; or at most are funny only one at a time…. Jokes must grow out of some meaningful human soil, must tell us something also about the teller, about a society, about life itself. They need the resistance of a hard surface off which to bounce: bits of dialogue, realities, that are not funny. And if the play is to have any value, they must aim at something more ambitious than a mere detonation in the auditorium—something, perhaps, resembling the truth. (pp. 301-02)
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