Studio: Fleischer Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
Betty is baking a cake when Irving, a practical joker with a bag of tricks and a braying laugh, comes to call. He shakes her hand with a false one that comes off, squirts her in the face with a lapel flower, offers her exploding cigars and snapping gum, and finds every one of his jokes funnier than she does. Betty telephones Grampy. He puts on his thinking cap and rigs his apartment so that each of Irving's pranks rebounds: the squirt comes back at him, the chair collapses under him, the joke hand grips and will not let go, until Irving, out-jested, departs. Grampy and Betty light the candle on the cake, which Irving has replaced with a firecracker, and it goes off in their faces; Irving laughs last, until the picture of a warship he is standing beside fires a continuous jet of water at him.
Why It Matters
- The duel between the joke-shop prankster and the inventor is the Grampy series' tidiest plot, with the machines for once used defensively, and the double ending, two last laughs in succession, is well judged; Irving, voiced by Jack Mercer, is a fine portrait of a type everyone has met.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, and it is one of the last Grampy cartoons, the character retiring after The Candid Candidate two months later; Frank Endres and Thomas Johnson, who animated it, went on to the Popeye series into the 1950s.
Notes and Trivia
- Novelty-shop jokes of this kind, the squirting flower and the exploding cigar, were a 1930s craze, sold by the Johnson Smith catalogue.
- The warship picture that fires water is a gag Grampy had used on a smaller scale in earlier films.
- See also: House Cleaning Blues (1937), The Candid Candidate (1937), Cookin' with Gags (1955).
