I submit that there is never a single non-funny minute in Flirting with Disaster, which is a masterpiece of screwball comedy. How in heaven's name were these actors able to keep a straight face making this? Tea Leoni, especially, greets each new disaster with insincere mortification so effectively that it is the movie's best running gag.

To recap the plot, Ben Stiller is a husband, new father and adopted son of archetypically loud and quarrelsome Jewish New York parents George Segal and Mary Tyler Moore. Ben wants to find his "roots," i.e., birth parents. He has enlisted the help of an adoption case worker (Leoni), whose somber professional manner conceals incompetence of colossal proportions.

So begins a road movie as Ben, Tea, Ben's wife, played by a physically lush Patricia Arquette, and their baby set out on the quest, which seems simple at first. What they are actually plunging into is an incredibly complicated unfolding of an adopted child's real history.

There's no point in going into the plot in more depth. Suffice it to say that no sooner does one set of crazy people, all of whom seem perfectly normal at first, exit the movie than a new set of crazy people pops up.

Favorite scene? I'd have to say LSD "guide" Lily Tomlin trying to talk down an LSD-lit-up Richard Jenkins. The destruction of the post office comes in a close second. Oh, but wait, there's the armpit-licking scene. And ... I give up.

David O. Russell, the writer/director, take a bow.