Unfortunately the sound is out of synch on these clips, but I loved Elaine May telling off Woody Allen's character, here:
...and making small talk out of the weather report, here.
From the review of Small Time Crooks at Salon.com:
"It's Elaine May as Frenchy's cousin, a chatterbox simpleton, who walks off with "Small Time Crooks" in what is the funniest performance you're likely to see this year or the next. She's simply flabbergasting. Groucho Marx once said that Margaret Dumont was so good because she didn't get the jokes. May, whom Bill Murray once described as having "a major coconut on her shoulders," acts as if she doesn't get the jokes. She seems to be beaming in from some universe of her own devising, so far inside her character's addlebrained confusion that everything she says (often in a slightly slurred accent that suggests George Jessel) is funny."
