Dick Shawn's manic wildness is captured forever in a way that is little seen in his few other films. Although he was talented in many ways, anyone unfamiliar with Phil Silvers will see him in a performance that was the epitome of what he was famous for. "Mad World" is most valuable simply because it is a cross-section of comedy in its day. Again, some milk their small roles for what they are worth, giving the movie an undercurrent of true humor beyond the principals: Don Knotts, Carl Reiner, Jesse White, Paul Ford, Jim Backus. The casting of name comics in tiny roles doesn't do them justice: Stan Freberg has nothing to do but watch Andy Devine talk on the telephone Doodles Weaver is an uncredited "Man Outside Hardware Store" the Three Stooges merely show up to be recognized even Jack Benny, in a miniscule role funny merely because he's in it, doesn't have an impact today because too few people remember who he was. Most of the big names in comedy in the 1950s and 1960s made it into the cast (Ernie Kovaks, arguably the brightest of the lot, originally cast in the Sid Caesar role, unfortunately died not long before shooting started). The sequence itself is jaw-dropping and extremely well-done, and not funny for a moment.
One is reminded of the spectacular sequence in "1941" when a ferris wheel breaks loose and rolls off a pier into the ocean. Though lots of dialogue is amusing and all the performances are outstanding, but the movie suffers from a common delusion of people outside comedy, as Stanley Kramer was, that the mere vision of cars crashing is somehow funny in itself. Even armed with the information that an audience cannot sustain laughter for three hours, "Mad World" is not overwhelmingly funny. The fact is, people can only laugh so long. The audience still stopped laughing at fifty-odd minutes, even with what MP assumed the funnier materials backloaded. Thinking it was the material, they recut it so the latter material came out first. Once, when Monty Python was putting a film together, they found that after fifty-odd minutes the audience stopped laughing. True, it's far from being the funniest movie ever. Often accused of being less than the sum of its parts, "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World is one of the most precious gems in filmdom.
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