So much average

Pretty Good

How sad is this?

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Being a massive Daffy Duck fan and someone who likes Elmer very much, their chemistry while not as legendary as the one between Elmer and Bugs Bunny is always entertaining as well, 'A Pest in the House' is a real treat and one of their best and funniest.The animation is beautifully done, Chuck Jones' style being unmistakable. It's very vibrantly and brightly coloured, there is plenty of rich detail in the background art and all three characters are well drawn especially Daffy.While there may be some bias, seeing as he has as has been said many times always been my personal favourite of the regular Looney Tunes composers (an opinion that is shared by many), Carl Stalling's music is lively, lush, filled with high-voltage energy and character and once again he shows an unmatched ability to not just fit with but enhance the action.'A Pest in the House' is never less than very funny, an absolute riot at its best. The dialogue has plenty of the looney wildness and razor sharp wit, while the gags are visually inventive and beautifully timed. The repeated gag has enough variety to stop it from being repetitive or tired too.Daffy is hilarious here and demonstrates that he works much better when manic than when he is greedy. Sure, he is a jerk but in an enjoyable sense rather than an irritating one. One does feel sorry for poor Elmer, as he suffers as a result of being blamed for Daffy's antics, as well as the businessman in a situation that anybody staying in a hotel with noisy guests can relate to. The voice work from Arthur Q. Bryan and especially Mel Blanc is superb.Overall, one of Daffy and Elmer's best and funniest. 10/10 Bethany Cox

. . . 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.

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.

Back in the fifties, there was a labour shortage and firms were forced to hire whoever they could. It is for this reason that Daffy finds himself working as a bellhop for Elmer Fudd. When a guest arrives requiring peace and quiet to catch up on sleep but Elmer has to deal with the fact that Daffy is insane.Being a massive Daffy fan, nothing saddens me more than to see his late 60's stuff (with the like of Speedy Gonzales), so to recover from one such cartoon I returned to this cartoon to find Daffy in suitably `crazy duck' mood. The plot here has a running gag where the guest returns to the front desk to punch Elmer; this works pretty well but it is the actions of Daffy that are the funniest bits of the film.He is a great character, but he is at his best when he is crazy. His noisy actions are imaginative and hilarious throughout and he dominates the short. Both Fudd and the guest are good but they only really act as punctuation between Daffy's hilarity.Overall this is proof, if proof was needed, that Daffy was never better than when he was crazy and off the wall. This short is a simple cartoon with a funny running gag but it is Daffy's craziness that makes it such fun to watch.