A Cure for Pokeritis (1912)
George Brown sneaks off to a weekly poker game behind his wife's back, so Mary conspires with her cousin and a group of friends to stage a fake police raid on the game, hoping to scare her husband into reform.
A Cure for Pokeritis starred John Bunny and Flora Finch, the screen’s first great comic duo, whose popular Vitagraph domestic farces helped establish the situation-comedy formula that silent and, later, sound comedy would build on for decades.
Background
A Cure for Pokeritis was directed by Laurence Trimble for the Vitagraph Company and released on February 23, 1912, pairing John Bunny and Flora Finch as a married couple for one of the many one-reel domestic comedies that made them Vitagraph’s biggest stars. Fans called the series “Bunnygraphs” or “Bunnyfinches,” and this entry follows a familiar template: Mary enlists her cousin and friends to stage a fake police raid on her husband George’s weekly poker game, hoping to frighten him into giving it up. The film survives and has been preserved in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry.
What to watch for
Bunny’s heavyset, mugging comic persona and Finch’s gaunt, exasperated foil defined a visual contrast that silent comedy leaned on for years afterward, and the mock police raid lets both actors play broad physical panic without any real stakes attached. The short is a clear example of the situation-comedy format, a domestic misunderstanding escalated and then resolved within one reel, that Vitagraph’s Bunny-Finch pictures helped standardize well before television sitcoms adopted the same structure. At barely a quarter of an hour, it moves through setup, deception, and punishment efficiently enough that the formula still reads clearly today.
