Laugh-In, whose title reflected Sixties sit-ins, be-ins and love-ins, was a brightly coloured anarchic mix of one-liners, sight gags, slapstick, and non sequiturs, a comic "trip" presided over by a pair of traditional stand-up comics, the urbane Dan Rowan, slightly tipsy and bemused, and the ditzy Dick Martin.
What begins as an awkward, blackly comic road trip, cameras trained on Geiger counters, becomes even more discomfiting as they interview traumatized residents, document the retrieval of bodies and are told, more than once, to stop filming.
But nostalgia ruled the night, as "Hugo," about another silent star, Georges Méliès, won a string of less prominent awards, and "Midnight in Paris," a comic time trip to Paris in the 1920s, took the prize for original screenplay for Woody Allen.
Morgan Spurlock, who clogged his arteries eating nothing but McDonald's food in "Super Size Me" (2004) — a perilously comic death trip — has put himself at risk in another mock quest: he travelled all over the Arab world asking astonished people in the street where the unkillable Al Qaeda leader was.
Theatre By The Lake regulars who know her work from Jordan, which played here two years ago, may be surprised by this comic road trip through the dark ages undertaken by Ymma of Normandy as she journeys to meet her future husband, Silence, Lord of Cumbria".
"Stronger" was featured in the set list for the group's Overloaded tour, in which the performances were accompanied by footage of their Comic Relief trip to Africa.
True enough for "Tristram," a masterpiece whose comic side trips, like Don Quixote's, are both mockery and affirmation of a graver straight line running beneath.
And a rangy stand-up comic keeps tripping himself up, even after he labors to prevent mistakes through dictionary drills, relaxation rituals and abs crunches.
A lot of the fun in "The Catechism Cataclysm," a horror-comic head trip from the writer-director Todd Rohal ("The Guatemalan Handshake"), comes in the form of silly, strange line deliveries: nonsense songs in strained falsetto, crisply over-articulated cuss words, syllables distended into schoolyard taunts.
I just really don't get fucking any of Ryan McGinley's comics or any of his "naked comic road trips".
But let's say that you were the kind of person that wanted to spend your own money on a Comic-Con trip.
