Elaine May has a considerable reputation for wit and perception and I viewed the beginning of The Heartbreak Kid—… with an expectant smile, which froze on my lips at the first wedding breakfast. I just cannot find anything inherently funny in Jewish weddings—still less in honeymoon nights in which the idiosyncrasies of either partner are held up to ridicule. By the time the stupid bride was writhing in the throes of sunstroke, which the groom was seizing as a Godsent opportunity to date another girl, my lips were tight indeed; not even Almira Sessions nor the late Edna May Oliver ever registered disapproval as wholeheartedly as I. The whole approach to the subject of the non-hero's emotional life—or lack of it, for there was never a more cold-blooded, self-indulgent creep than Lenny—seems to me too sadistic to be funny, and he himself too lacking in...