Bedtime for Bonzo

A. H. Weiler of The New York Times called the film "a minor bit of fun yielding a respectable amount of laughs but nothing, actually, over which to wax ecstatic." Variety described it as "a lot of beguiling nonsense with enough broad situations to gloss over plot holes... Cameras wisely linger on the chimp's sequences and his natural antics are good for plenty of laughter." Richard L. Coe of The Washington Post wrote, "If you can stomach all this, you'll find some giggles in this farce, which is okay when paying attention to the recently deceased chimp, but is perfectly terrible when trying to tell its story. Ronald Reagan, as the naive professor of things mental, must have felt like the world's sappiest straight man playing this silly role, and the others aren't much better off."