when actors apply their highly-honed skills toward depicting the less polished delivery of amateur enthusiasts.
Fun, so long as amateurs, or, by extension, the general non-professional public, doesn’t feel needlessly ribbed.
The trick is to be beguiled into laughing at ourselves. (Not specifically me, because while I enjoy speaking in front of an audience, I don’t feel a yen for the sock and buskin routine.)
1935 saw two of the most delicious examples of the genre hit the big screen
–the entirety of “Doubting Thomas,”
–a scene between Pauline Lord, Basil Rathbone and Louis Hayward in “A Feather in Her Hat”