About You Can't Take It With You
With its spirited defense of lives lived for sheer joy rather than for achievement, ambition, financial gain or rank, the 1936 play You Can't Take It With You proved an escapist tonic in the midst of the Great Depression. It has remained irresistible in the decades since, in particular to anyone ambivalent about that overrated concept of the work ethic. The prototype for countless comedies about wacky families blithely out of step with the world around them, this giddy romp by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman is a perennial favorite.