The Spice of Life No. 3 Review: Reading 100-Year-Old Dad Jokes

Look, unless you're a massive archive nerd who gets excited by dusty 1920s novelty shorts, you can safely skip The Spice of Life No. 3. It’s basically a fossilized version of a TikTok scroll, and anyone expecting actual comedy will probably hate it. 🥱

But if you like seeing how early sound cinema tried to figure itself out, it's a weirdly fascinating disaster.

The whole thing is built around "Doc" Rockwell, a vaudeville guy who stands there and lectures us before reading jokes.

And when I say jokes, I mean stuff culled from old newspapers. There is some jokes here that make absolutely no sense today.

Doc Rockwell has this bizarre, frantic energy that doesn't quite translate to the screen.

He keeps waving his hands around like he's trying to swat a fly that isn't there.

It reminds me a bit of the random novelty of Say It with Music, where the movie just hopes the novelty of sound will keep you from realizing there's no actual plot.

There's a gag about a mule that goes on for a solid minute, and the punchline is so flat you can almost hear the silence in the studio.

I swear, at one point, Milton Schwarzwald’s musical direction tries to rescue a joke with a slide whistle, but it just makes it sadder. 🎺

The print I watched had this constant, low hiss, which actually added to the spooky, time-capsule vibe of the whole thing.

It’s not exactly The Skeleton Dance in terms of artistic merit.

Still, I kind of love how cheap the backdrop looks. It looks like it was painted by a high school drama club on a Tuesday afternoon.

You can see a wrinkle in the canvas right near the top left corner.

Why did they make three of these? I guess people back then were just desperate for anything that talked back to them.

Anyway, it's six minutes of my life I won't get back, but I don't totally hate that I watched it.