"No film could be more devastating, more bitter in its humor, more brackish, with the richness of the invention constantly aggravated by the poverty of the situations, with the uneasy spectator at first forcing an unwilling laugh, then feeling ashamed, laughing again mechanically, seized in a pitiless mesh of imbecilities, and ending by roaring with laughter because it isn't funny at all. It is, in other words, an acme of stupidity...." --Jean-Luc Godard (in Milne, "Godard on Godard") Dean Martin is the artist, a designer of horror comics; Jerry Lewis the (Greenwich) village idiot hopelessly addicted to the stuff, spending his days enamored of the image of Bat Lady and his nights in a horror comic of his own subconscious creation. Shirley MacLaine plays the model for Bat Lady, who lives with roommate Dorothy Malone in a world straight out of 50s glamour photography. Director Frank Tashlin, a former cartoonist himself, retains something of a cartoon surface, speed and iconoclastic inanity in his comedies which, writes Ian Cameron, "show a synthetic world in a way that is itself synthetic," and chronicle "the mutation of America, land of promise, into a land of illusions...." Focusing on the immersion of the individual into the media - TV, advertising, cinema, comics, the movie star cult, the big-breasted blonde goddess, etc. etc.- "(Tashlin's) satire... is founded on amusement rather than hate.... directed at things that make life less real, and therefore less pleasurable.... Characteristically, even his attacks are intended as fun, if not in fun...." (in Movie, No. 7)