Slight, with glasses, and typically wearing a rumpled sweatshirt, Mr. Kaplan favors intricate and highly verbal jokes.
But the wordplay is as creative as the slapstick, and the most delirious premises come where physical and verbal jokes meet.
"I prepared a little bit of everything that I do, from pure physical comedy to working with props, magic, clown accidents, verbal jokes and skills like juggling".
The pages jump with verbal jokes and tricks and dire half-rhymed puns ("toque of the devil"—he has to manoeuvre the junkie daughter into an unlikely hat to get that one in).
The film is packed with the kind of detail that adults will like, too, with visual and verbal jokes that make references ranging from "Modern Times" to "Star Trek".
(The verbal jokes I will leave for you to discover and repeat with your co-workers in the break room.) Mike Tyson shows up to sing along with a Phil Collins song.
There are visual and verbal jokes aplenty throughout this thorned re-creation of Baum's enchanted land, where Glinda and Elphaba get to know each other long before a little brat named Dorothy shows up.
And far more complicated versions of it have been developed right up to the present day, including some very influential theories that put incongruity, or the unexpected, at the very heart of verbal joking ("When is a door not a door?" "When it's a jar" being only the most obvious example).
In this study, an attempt is made to segregate the neural substrates of incongruity detection and incongruity resolution during the comprehension of verbal jokes.
The screen explodes with verbal jokes, twists in the plot and visual bonanzas that can only be fully digested in the third or fourth viewing.
Their ugliness of spirit compounds a disinterest in verbal jokes and a reliance on brutality (which isn't the same as artfully violent slapstick), and nobody involved seems to care about making the talk snappy or keeping a scene moving forward.
