The pink panther (or is slapstick still funny)

You obviously haven't seen enough movies from this time frame, or a diverse enough selection. Or perhaps what you see as a comedy differs from what I do.

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"Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

I loved the first Pink Panther...I loved it...It made me feel as if I was not the only one with that kind of terrible luck...

I don't know why this films worked for me, but it did...Land of the lost, did not, but the Pink Panther did...I mean both films resort to that same basic physical humor method...

I guess since the Pink Panther dealt more in reality, I could relate to it more...
It told me that even when you have bad luck, to still keep your chin up...

The film also showed me that being innocently ignorant, can shield you from a lot of dirt being tossed on you by the world...

And the Detective did just that...his ignorance and nietivity, kind of kept him shielded from the world around him...
I mean he couldn't even kick a soccor ball without it bouncing off a beam and hitting him in the head....I did a lot of laughing, at his expense...poor guy...

I know I'm in a minority, but I never thought the Pink Panthers were that funny and I like slapstick comedy. It's because of Blake Edwards, not Sellers. I think his timing and choreographing of slapstick sequences is rather poor. That scene in The Pink Panther Strikes Back, where Sellers is at the castle entrance when it comes down, he should be submerged underneath the moat without us seeing his legs touch the bottom first, which lessens the impact of the gag. As the series progresses, Edwards just keeps repeating the same gags over and over from film to film.

IMO, The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) is the funniest of all the original PP movies. Yeah, Blake Edwards might push a bit hard to keep the gags running, and it may get a bit cartoonish at times, but Peter Sellers' brilliance makes the movie such a fun flick that you can watch it again and again.

Watching him tap dance in the hallway when his grocery bag spills rice on the floor kills me every time. Sellers was the best.