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Where’s Poppa?

George Segal stars as put-upon attorney Gordon Hocheiser in the Carl Reiner comedy classic Where’s Poppa?. Gordon lives with his aging, senile mother, deliciously played by Harold and Maude‘s Ruth Gordon, and would have put her in a home ages ago if he hadn’t made a solemn promise to his father not to. This leaves him in a bit of a pickle when he falls in love with his mother’s new nurse, who doesn’t much care for the old lady’s shenanigans. How Gordon navigates this conundrum is the source of many laughs in this absurdist masterpiece.

“There is a certain kind of humor that rises below vulgarity. It isn’t merely in the worst possible taste; it aspires to be in the worst possible taste. Where’s Poppa? is the best example of the genre since The Producers.” – Roger Ebert

Where’s Poppa? deals with an exceptionably viable mixture of local jokes and black comedy that works as well as it does because everybody in the film possesses either enough good humor or outrageous imagination to promote his own worldview.” – Roger Greenspun, The New York Times

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