[One, Two, Three] is 1961's best comedy. Which is a rather sad fact, for Wilder comedy is socially disintegrative. It amuses, but it devitalizes, and we are less, not more, after it's over. However, while it's unreeling it's engrossing.

Au fond, or au naturel, Wilder is a bird of passage, a luftmensch, an intellectual vagabond. He bites the back, not the hand, that feeds him. Not only is nothing sacred to him, but nothing is ever on the level, and his wit consists in tilting truth until even the staidest mind is unsteady. To what end? Nothing, really, except a sort of verbal revenge of the "out" upon the "in".

Wilder burlesques everybody—the Coca-Cola tycoon …; the South; nubile fillies from the South; Coca-Cola's go-getting sales director in Berlin; West Germans and East Germans; ex-Nazis and Prussian aristocrats; German Communists and Russian Communists; communism and capitalism; marriage and...