Calling All Pa's (1942)
** 1/2 (out of 4)
Mildly entertaining short from MGM and Pete Smith has Dave O'Brien playing Joe Thunderstruck, a happy new father who learns the hard way that there's a lot of pain in becoming a dad. I ended up watching five days after the birth of my own child so I expected a lot of the humor to hit home with me but it actually didn't. I'm a big fan of these Smith/O'Brien shorts but this one here was filled with way too many easy jokes and in the end it didn't end up as funny as I was hoping. There were a few nice jokes including the whole passing out cigars, which end up going from one father to the next and so on until the point it gets back to the original owner. The entire joke with the mother-in-law stepping over your grounds didn't get the type of laughs that you'd expect nor did the entire trying to put on a diaper sequence. The one gag that did end up working was entire gag of which parent was going to get up in the middle of the night to feed the crying kid. Speaking of crying kids, whoever played the kid here certainly appears to have gone through quite a bit as she is constantly crying and appears to be incredibly upset so I hope the studio paid her well.