"What the Butler Saw," by Joe Orton

White golliwogs, cross-dressing coppers, bellboy rapists, insanity, incest, and Winston Churchill’s giant member all play their part in this trouser-soilingly funny BBC production of Joe Orton’s farcical, bitingly satirical 1969 play, in which the head psychiatrist of a lunatic asylum, when trying to conceal the attempted molestation of his new secretary from his wife, only succeeds in making himself (and everyone else) look completely round the bend.

Reference: What the Butler Saw (1987). 

Partial Text

What the Butler Saw, by Joe Orton

I remember Leonard Barkan, back in my days at Northwestern University.  He was my favorite among the professors I knew, and I was grateful that he taught Shakespeare and also comedy.  Not comedy in the sense we may conventionally expect, but comedy in literature and drama.  I remember him having half-impish, half-scholarly qualities, and such balance helped him bring what he was teaching marvelously to life for us.  He'd do on-the-spot monologues from plays we were studying, for instance.  Moreover, What the Butler Saw was a platform on which to play up his bawdy side.