A lot of the commentary here has highlighted the relatability of the family dynamic played out in the sketch. We've had this conversation with our own mothers. Certainly, that feels like a hallmark of Nichols and May's work. A great deal of the enduring power of The Graduate draws from the intense identification of young audiences with Benjamin. That said, there are another couple of points of craft that come into play here and particularly run through Elaine May's work. First, it's so critically important that the son is a rocket scientist. The discontinuity between the banality of the mother's complaints and worries ("they're going to take it out of your paycheck") with the work that's kept him so busy helps to juice the comedy whenever it might run out just on the nagging alone. Obviously, we've talked about this discontinuity or disjunction around the break-up scene in The Heartbreak Kid. Where would that scene be without the periodic visits from the waiter to remind us of the pleasure that Grodin promised Jeannie Berlin. The other comic thread here is just the relentlessness of the mother. This is another of our themes from class and something May's direction in movie's like The Heartbreak Kid and A New Leaf (which someone mentioned in another comment). She's a master of the unrelenting stream of words. There are few better examples of comic relentlessness than Eddie Albert in The Heartbreak Kid. What could be more relentless than a "brick wall" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqYlm3xc9ww)? His scene with Grodin here turns on that one word, "determination." We've seen it again and again -- in Abbot and Costello, Peter Falk, even Woody's Virgil Starwell and his marching cello -- characters just sticking to the perverse task at hand no matter what the opposition.