DVD UPDATE: Abbott & Costello go insane!

"How dare you remind me of somebody I hate?!" With that woman passerby's out-of-the-blue stoopside smack attack, umbrella whack and furious stomp-away, I was hooked.

The Abbott & Costello Show makes absolutely no sense. It's virtually Dada-esque in its spontaneous insanity. Free-form verbal torrents give way to thunks and wallops. Blitzes of banter explain how 7 x 13 = 28.

If "who's on first" is how you know Abbott & Costello, this new complete-series DVD set is a great chance to dive more deeply into slap-your-own-face lunacy. The burlesque comedy couple turned movie blockbuster team would throw out even the pretense of reason when they tackled TV in its early years with their own syndicated comedy show (1952-54). Beholden to no network, financing their own 52 episodes of stream-of-consciousness idiocy, they let loose a memorable parade of -- well, nothing.

That's right. "Nothing." The same kind of nada-ness that would make Seinfeld a '90s TV sensation. Forty years earlier, mustachioed straight man Bud Abbott and rotund buffoon Lou Costello were laying down a legend that Jerry Seinfeld would absorb as a Long Island tyke watching slapstick reruns. His eventual series descendant might have a little more slickness and substance (relatively speaking) than its spiritual ancestor. But Abbott & Costello embody a raw directness that's more primal, that goes for the gut rather than the mind.

In other words, The Abbott & Costello Show is simple. Really simple. No, even simpler than that. Their lead characters are two losers who live and don't-work together, a la Laurel & Hardy and other they-just-are comedy teams. Their daily lives are a surreal succession of run-ins around their backlot neighborhood with their angry bald landlord (Sid Fields), the local cop on the beat (Gordon Jones), some foreigner-of-the-week (Joe Kirk), a sleek blonde neighbor who's essentially just The Girl (Hillary Brooke), and an utterly inexplicable 40-year-old spoiled sissy tot in full Easter-best outfit (Joe Besser, soon to be one of the latter-day Three Stooges).

They're just types. The jokes are gags and pratfalls, or routines probably older than burlesque itself. The plots aren't even paper-thick. If the contemporaneous success of I Love Lucy was paving the way to the future of the TV sitcom, The A&C Show was documenting an art form that was practically out the door already. The burlesque stage was where Bud and Lou had honed their hoary routines -- "their" being used loosely, since the likes of "Slowly I turned" and "Crazy house" had been done for decades by anybody and everybody. Puns, double meanings, misdirection and general confusion reigned amid "storylines" that were really nothing more than conjunctions to hold together random outbreaks of absurdity.

That whimsical world is well served by E1 Entertainment's 9-disc DVD box The Abbott & Costello Show: Collector's Edition, which holds the entire oeuvre, if you will. Each of the show's two seasons comes in its own 4-disc fold-out set, with another single-disc bonus package that also includes four oversized collectible postcards of the team. If not best of all, then at least equal to any of these is the 44-page Commemorative Book with a comprehensive episode guide (indicating what routines are in which episodes), cast biographies, and essays to provide context for both the show's and the team's place in American comedy history.

Bonus features range from the professional -- the 1978 Hey, Abbott! tribute hour hosted by that other joke memorializer, Milton Berle -- to the personal, with home movies hosted by Costello daughters Chris and Paddy.

The black-and-white episode transfers look pretty good, and they include chapter stops and English subtitles. (Plus a handy reel that collects the most classic routines.)

The Abbott & Costello Show: Collector's Edition is available with a generous discount from Amazon here.

Also out April 6:

Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years 1954-1965 -- Henry Hampton's acclaimed 1987 miniseries documents the landmark civil rights movement in 6 hour episodes on 3 discs. Bonus filmmaker interview.

Sharpe's Challenge/Sharpe's Peril -- The two latest Sharpe adventures from Bernard Cornwell's period novels follow the 19th century British officer (Sean Bean) to India. Each available on both DVD and Blu-ray.

The Unusuals -- ABC's quirky NYC cop series with Amber Tamblyn and Jeremy Renner is exclusive to Amazon.com (click on title link), where one reviewer calls it "Barney Miller on speed and on the streets."

Blood Ties: The Complete Series -- Lifetime's vampire private-eye import (based on Tanya Huff's Blood Books) now offers both seasons on either DVD or Blu-ray.