The sequence itself is jaw-dropping and extremely well-done, and not funny for a moment. One is reminded of the spectacular sequence in '1941' when a ferris wheel breaks loose and rolls off a pier into the ocean. Though lots of dialogue is amusing and all the performances are outstanding, but the movie suffers from a common delusion of people outside comedy, as Stanley Kramer was, that the mere vision of cars crashing is somehow funny in itself. Even armed with the information that an audience cannot sustain laughter for three hours, 'Mad World' is not overwhelmingly funny. The fact is, people can only laugh so long. The audience still stopped laughing at fifty-odd minutes, even with what MP assumed the funnier materials backloaded. Thinking it was the material, they recut it so the latter material came out first. Once, when Monty Python was putting a film together, they found that after fifty-odd minutes the audience stopped laughing. True, it's far from being the funniest movie ever. Often accused of being less than the sum of its parts, 'It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World is one of the most precious gems in filmdom.
