i'd suggest you watch it first before getting into my ~analysis~ below:
seven minutes of intense, hilarious cruelty. the short starts in medias res with porky pig tied to a conveyor belt frantically trying to answer a quiz show question before he's sawn in half. porky begs to go home from the show; daffy either ignores him or cajoles him into continuing. my personal highlight is when daffy shoots an audience member dead with a gun (and the cartoon pans away QUICKLY as though nothing happened.) it sounds horrible as i write it but i assure you it is unrelentlessly & shockingly funny.i'd say chuck jones slightly edges out tex avery as the most famous looney tunes director, but i feel as though his star has dimmed a little in recent years with the suggestion that he took a lot of credit for the jokes/shorts that michael maltese wrote (in Chuck Jones' autobiography CHUCK AMUCK, for instance, he lists a bunch of rules that Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner must follow; Maltese, who wrote most of those shorts, said that he had never heard of those rules until Chuck wrote his book). i used to be a Jones-head as a kid but as i get older i've really come to appreciate the wild, unhinged animation of Clampett, or the lasciviousness of Avery; Jones just didn't have that anarchic dog in him. but my god could the man do facial expressions. just LOOK at these incredible faces:
just the GOAT. no one is better at faces than him. and it's important for this short because it feels like a bottle episode; a single background scene, not a ton of complicated animations, only two characters, lots of action alluded to off-screen, etc. the facial expressions pick up a lot of that work, but there's also some really subtle and gorgeous mannerisms as well: daffy adjusting his mic stand, for instance, or when he picks his duck teeth (?) with a toothpick while porky answers a question. incredible work all around. i never tire of it.
