(Scott) 'THE RINGER' (PG-13, 94 minutes) A hilarious and resourceful cast of intellectually challenged actors smartens up an otherwise brain-dead comedy produced by the Farrelly brothers.
Apart from Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers, earlier comics to whom the duo's strange skipping dance at the end of their shows was an intentional homage, perhaps no other long-dead comedy act has had such a persistent afterlife.
STONY POINT "Drop Dead Perfect," comedy by Erasmus Fenn featuring Everett Quinton.
SHOWROOM "Beethoven's Not Dead," a comedy show with Mitchell Zeidwig and Jeanne Castle.
Out of respect for the dead, most comedy clubs shuttered for a week or more.
The "dead dad" comedy show is now much mocked: it's seen as a cliche, and a cheap way to give your Edinburgh show emotional ballast.
But there are those who will wonder if the dead wife comedy offers yet more evidence of the Kirk star's increasingly eccentric behaviour.
A play about the mishap-prone coming together of people who have either been rent asunder or (worse) thought dead, this "Comedy of Errors" tilts in the direction of such late-Shakespearean romances as "The Winter's Tale," allowing us to glimpse in the Bard's theatrical infancy the seeds of themes to which he would return.
30 March Otley Courthouse; 31 March, The Forum, Barrow-in-Furness; then touring John-Luke Roberts In one of the more eye-catching shows on last year's Edinburgh fringe, the Alternative Comedy Memorial Society man revives his dark, demented and unsentimental take on the "dead dad" comedy set.
Cue this genius YouTube comment reenactment from Dead Parrot comedy group.
Right around this time last year, we wrote about the pains of the dying practically dead romantic comedy.
