This is a trifle. A lawyer arrives at home to learn that his young son has been smoking. He makes various efforts to explain to the boy that smoking is not acceptable in one so young.
Come bedtime, he tells his son a fanciful story with an anti-smoking moral, and this seems to persuade the boy not to smoke again. That sets the lawyer to thinking about the ways that we learn and the fact that stories – fables, novels, poems – seem to provide the truth in life, not sermons or laws or facts.
This is potentially an interesting observation? But it just lands like a dead fish at the end of a really boring sketch of a man talking to a little boy.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
For another portrait of a kindly if not terribly effective father, try “Shrove Tuesday.” It’s not a rip-snorter but it mainly aims to entertain and works at that level.
A Chekhov Circus 