He never does hit the ball

She's THAT old?

@@bobbyfrancis8957 That show was made about 30 years after this, so it seems about right. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_MacGibbon

Me too. I especially like how he draws it out.

What I meant to say was it made it all bearable

09:03

Oh not I. I think this version is much funnier. This one has funnier dialogue (which has been omitted in the newer version) also the newer version doesnt have the other characters walking by.

+gplito - Television existed in experimental forms when this was made (1930), tho commercial television didn't come till the late 40's.

You could see these at movie houses. Even when I was a kid in the late 50's we'd go to the show and stay all day for 20 cents. Shorts, cartoons, more shorts, then the movie, intermission, a short, cartoon or two, then ANOTHER MOVIE!

The slightly later WC Fields film, International House, has an entire subplot about television.

That’s Allen Wood (1906 - 1984). He was about 23 when he did this. He and Fields were friends.

@Gib wise, you can find it on IMDb.

purecolrartist think its the dentist sketch?

+gibwise This had to be to show the house detective got rough with the guys in bandages and slings. (What did the wives of these two injured guys say?) The party the guys were a part of (including the injured guys' wives?) clearly knew all about this flirting wife. And look what the detective did to the poor guy at 1:09. Any of that, and I'd be in bandages and a sling for a year!

That's the point. It's the slow burn.

According to Taylor's bio he did a television joke in International House (involving shooting Rudy Vallee on-screen, who falls after the shot). I've wondered about that too.

StrawmanII Apparently you're including yourself as one of the " unobservant oafs and morons!!!," because you didn't get his line straight ( which was critical to the joke) and because Bell Telephone Laboratories had given a dramatic demonstration of mechanical television on April 7, 1927, which was newsworthy because it was so historically important. Subjects of the telecast included Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. Television historian Albert Abramson explained the significance of the Bell Labs demonstration: "It was in fact the best demonstration of a mechanical television system ever made to this time. It would be several years before any other system could even begin to compare with it in picture quality." Fields actually said...."Any telegrams, cablegrams, radios, televisions?" and the term television had certainly been in the news by 1930, when this film was made and the concept of "visual radio" was already known, which is why he said...."radios, televisions?" and why his exact line was the joke. Fields' genius was that every single word was there for a reason. To just paraphrase him and leave "radios" out destroys the joke, because "televisions" only made sense in the context of "radios". Do you really think Fields would use a joke like that if nobody got it? In 1928, WRGB then W2XB was started as world's first television station. It broadcast from the General Electric facility in Schenectady, NY. It was popularly known as "WGY Television". This film wasn't made until 1930 in Fort Lee, New Jersey ( not far from New York) and the term "television" certainly had been in the news. The joke, of course, was that "televisions" wouldn't be left for him any more than "radios" would be and if anything, much less so, because nobody had them yet! It was a typical Fields "inside joke" including televisions along with radios, implying "visual radio" and people in the know got it.

Thank you for saving me the time of attempting to elucidate the less informed and unenlightened person that posted his ignorance.

They had a television in the 1938/39 worlds fair. But this was shot much earlier.

now THAT'S funny