. . . is the susceptibility to be easily bamboozled. Non-Americans are particularly adept at hoodwinking the soft majority of U.S. citizens, who fancy themselves to be bleeding hearts, eager to turn the other ventricle. Aliens aggressively abuse the feckless fellowship of this ilk, who are eager to give them their last cookie, as well as their tot's final bottle of milk, and the key to the family safety deposit box WITHOUT even being asked! Elmer Fudd is the title character of A PEST IN THE HOUSE. As this Warner Bros. animated short opens, the narrator implicitly designates Daffy Duck as an unqualified Alien Hotel Hiree, signed on to save Upper Management a few bucks by not paying a living wage to a Genuine American Citizen. It's clear that Daffy actually is a Professional Disrupter--an Agitator out to sabotage the "Gland Hotel." This loud-mouth saboteur wages a Reign of Terror against one of the Gland's last few paying customers. Tortured to the end of his rope through sleep deprivation, this patron rightly punches out Daffy's mealy-mouthed enabler--Elmer Fudd--six times. Totally inept in his supervisor's role, Fudd deserves worse. Just before I played A PEST IN THE HOUSE, I heard Ted Cruz explain during CNN's Wisconsin "Town Hall Meeting" exactly WHY America cannot coddle such pests any longer. Warner just recognized the problem 69 years before Ted did.

Elmer's the manager of a hotel and Daffy's the bellboy. A tired (and very large) businessman checks in and makes it very clear to Elmer that he needs his rest and if anyone disturbs him, Elmer will suffer the consequences. So Daffy spends the entirety of the short doing one thing after another that disturbs the poor man. Elmer gets the crap beat out of him repeatedly because of Daffy's actions. Fun Elmer & Daffy cartoon, with Daffy as annoying as possible. Several amusing gags and lines. Great voice work from Arthur Q. Bryan and Mel Blanc. Nice animation with lovely colors. The music is lively and whimsical. How much you'll like this probably depends on how much you like earlier Daffy when he was all about being wacky and zany.

This is a particularly good Daffy and Elmer cartoon. There will be spoilers ahead: This is a very funny short with a simple but effective premise. It sets up a basic situation where there is potential conflict and then introduces an irritant to exploit that potential for conflict in order to get laughs.Much to Elmer's sorrow, there's one constant running gag, a punch line of sorts, all through this short and Daffy is the trigger with Elmer the unfortunate "beneficiary" of Daffy's misplaced enthusiasms. If I were the tired businessman, duck would be on the menu. But Daffy is like a kid brother. No matter what he does here, he always seems to get away with it, while you get grounded for a month because of what he did. Life isn't fair.Would someone please send an ice bag, some aspirin and bandages to the front desk? This short is relatively easy to find, is on one of the Looney Tunes Platinum Collection sets (Blu-Ray/DVD) and is well worth watching. Most recommended.

At face value, "A Pest in the House" looks like the average wacky Looney Tunes cartoon, as bellboy Daffy Duck keeps awaking a sleepy guest who proceeds to punch clerk Elmer Fudd in the nose. But I notice something else. At the beginning, the narrator says that there was a labor shortage, so places would hire anyone...or anything (at which point we meet that famously loony member of the genus Anas*). This cartoon was released in 1947, the year of the Taft-Hartley Act. The Taft-Hartley Act cut off unions' power. Therefore, not only would a labor shortage have made sense, but one could say that they were hiring non-union labor in the form of Daffy Duck.OK, I've gone irrevocably overboard in trying to analyze this cartoon. I'm sure that in reality, it was just intended as zany entertainment to get shown right before a feature film (and it is really funny). So check it out. And the next time that the phone rings, don't answer; it might be a fist (although in this age of text-messaging cell phones, we're probably safe).*Anas is the genus to which ducks belong.PS: the guest looks a little bit like Arthur Q. Bryan, who provided Elmer Fudd's voice. I don't know whether or not that was just a coincidence.