The eleven minutes of The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film immediately established [Richard Lester's] rapport with Goonery, [the British comedy school of the 1950's]. With it Lester found a visual style that was absent from earlier Goon films … and present only intermittently in the television Goon programs which he directed…. There is the use of silent film techniques, the camera trickery, the Sisyphian surrealism of scrubbing the grass, the brutal slapstick of the hand luring the simpleton across the field only to sock him for his pains, the comic chauvinism of the Union Jack-bedecked kite being prepared for spaceflight, and the nostalgic sepia tone print of the film itself. All these elements together with the mood of tough yet relaxed inconsequentiality, the pursuit of logic beyond the bounds of sanity, the rather disturbing national ambivalence … were to reappear later. (p. 369)

[With It's Trad Dad!, Lester] seized the...