Goofy Comedies

Goofy comedies are one of the truly great movie genres. You just don't see really goofy humor in other entertainment media much.

I can only really think of one TV show that has pulled off goofy humor very well consistently and the Simpsons is pretty brilliant, an American classic, so that shows how tough it is on TV. (Seinfeld could be pretty goofy, but, to me at least, the brilliance of that show was in how all these loose ends would get started and get tied back together in one episode, not that the humor was goofy, although the time that George ran out of the bathroom with his pants around his ankles yelling "Vandeley Industries!" was awfully goofy.)

Music isn't goofy very often. Weird Al Yankovic, of course, but how many geniuses like that are there? Barenaked Ladies' first song was good and goofy (Hot like wasabi when I bust rhymes/I'm like Leann Rhimes 'cause I'm all about value . . . Like Harrison Ford, I'm feeling frantic/Like Sting, I'm tantric/Like Snickers, guaranteed to satisfy . . . Like Kirosawa, I make mad films/OK, I don't make films/But, if I did, they'd have a samurai), but the rest of their songs, while decent, haven't been good and goofy. So it's really movies that can pull off goofy. I guess it's just easier to put together two goofy hours one time than to put together little bits of silly for years.

Books seems to have a hard time being really goofy. I may not be looking hard enough, but I don't think that I have ever read a really good goofy book. I read an attempt at such a book in the last several months, Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalpyse, and it was OK, but I found large swathes of it to be kind of irritating. It may be that, to be really good, a goofy story needs a visual component. Maybe it is difficult to get past your natural disbelief of the incredible unless you are seeing actual people (or representations of people in the Simpsons' case) doing things that you otherwise wouldn't believe.

And The Muse and I have seen two good and goofy movies lately, specifically The 40-Year Virgin and Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. Neither of them quite match up to the holy trilogy of Goofy Movies -- Animal House, Airplane! and There's Something About Mary -- although The 40-Year Virgin comes awfully close. (It had just a little too much sappy stuff to get to the very top rank, at least to me.)

The crucial thing about making a goofy movie is the commitment. To make a good one, the people involved have to be willing to commit that the characters are doing to do crazy, stupid things and the actors have to commit to behaving like the stuff they're doing is totally reasonable. No winking at the audience is allowed. This is why Ben Stiller is great for these types of movies. The man commits. The script calls for him to get parts stuck in a zipper? He shows you the pain. The script calls for him to howl like a kid who got exactly what he wanted on Christmas and then had it taken away? He'll howl. Will Ferrell similarly commits (see Zoolander and Elf), but I haven't seen him in a really great goofy comedy yet. Old School didn't cut it. The story about saving the house and the pathos of whichever Wilson brother was in that one kind of screwed up the goofiness. (I haven't seen Anchorman, but the previews with Ferrell yelling "Let's make a baby" aren't encouraging.)

Paradoxically, it's goofy movies' commitment that seem to cause critics and others to not give them enough credit. Yes, there are jokes involving disabled people in There's Something About Mary, but they aren't making fun of the disabled people. Instead, they're tools to show how idiotic and ridiculous the character Matt Dillon (speaking of commitment to the part) is. Yes, a lot of the humor in The 40-Year Virgin is real crude, but that could happen if a 40-year virgin's younger, kind of dumb guy friends decided that they had to help him out. (Now I can't believe anyone would behave like the characters did at the end, but, hey, they commited to that dancing and it was seriously funny.) Harold and Kumar is really a goofy fable about living your life and those guys committed to showing you what that meant for those guys. There's a certain resistance to appreciating a movie's ability to go to the extreme of goofiness, but that is what takes to make a great goofy movie.

Go see a good goofy movie. It will take your mind what's bugging you and make you laugh a lot.

Just as an aside, here are the grades that I'd give some goofy movies:

Animal House -- Film. Pretty much genius, starting no later than when Belushi smashes the folk singer's guitar and then sheepishly says "Sorry." Could've done without the storyline about Karen Allen and her boyfriend who no one ever heard from again.

Airplane! -- Film. If nothing else, Mrs. Cleaver's interpreting jive talking put it in the stratosphere of funny. One of the greatest moviegoing experiences of my life involved going to a double feature at the Kings County drive-in where we saw Raiders of the Lost Ark and Airplane! back to back. That was sweeeet when I was 11. For good or ill, Airplane! may have affected my sense of humor generally and certainly presaged my taste for Weird Al Yankovic.

There's Something About Mary -- Film, close to a Film Plus. There is so much great stuff in this movie. Beans and franks. Both scenes with the dog, the one where Matt Dillon gives the dog an electric shock and the one where the dog flies out the window. Matt Dillon's teeth. The scene where Ben Stiller confronts Matt Dillon in his apartment. The scene where Ben Stiller is walking down the street howling. Ben Stiller can't pronounce Brett Favre's name. Even the sappier stuff is good. In a pretty extraordinary step for the movies, they used an actual disabled actor to play Mary's brother. The little bit at the end where Ben Stiller lifts his ear muff to talk to him and nothing happens is very effective. My only complaint is that I could have done without Chris Elliot's dermatological problems. It is a mark of this movie's brilliance that it was able to make Chris Elliot worth watching at all.

The 40-Year Virgin -- Film minus. Really good stuff.

The Jerk -- Film minus. Hilarious stuff like "I was born the son of a poor black sharecropper" and "It's the cans! He hates cans!" I realize that the story wasn't the point, but, still, it was really dumb. I have a friend who claims that this movie is the source of all modern movie humor.

Caddyshack -- Film minus. Some truly classic stuff, especially from Bill Murray. I heard the part that he adlibbed about winning the Masters on the radio the other day -- "This Cinderella story about to win the Masters, former greenskeeper, the shot's up, oh my God, it's in the hole! It's in the hole!" -- and still laughed out loud. Plus, this movie gave us the eternal chant for someone to choke, "Noonan! Nooo-nan!" But, man, there's way too much Chevy Chase acting snarky.

Elf -- Movie plus. The stuff about being an elf is really good, especially any portion of it that involves Bob Newhart. The family stuff is actually done pretty well, but it's a drag on the goofiness.

Fletch -- Movie plus. Yeah, I know, I just ripped on Caddyshack for having too much Chevy Chase and this movie is all Chevy Chase, but it's really funny and Chevy Chase commits to all of those goofy costumes and pseudonyms. The key here is that he doesn't act like a smart ass jerk the whole movie. Plus it has Dana Nicholson, who I thought was something when I first saw this movie in 1985 or so.

Harold and Kumar -- Movie plus. Very funny, if you're not bothered by drug humor. Neil Patrick Harris continues his good work in playing off of his Doogie Howser persona. It had a strange mix of reality and unreality, though, that didn't exactly work sometimes. It also played on the Studious Asian and Studious Indian stereotypes too much for my tastes.

Old School -- Movie. Like I said, too much stuff about saving the house and the Wilson brother finding himself and Frank the Tank's relationship problems, blah, blah. Vince Vaughn was really funny, though.

Top Secret -- Movie. The Airplane! model not done that well.

Hot Shots -- Movie Minus. Again, the Airplane! model not done very well. The thing that I remember most about this movie is that I saw it with my roommates at the time and one of them, Allen, had seen Charlie Sheen in what he said was this terrible movie with Clint Eastwood called The Rookie and he kept talking about how there was a scene where Charlie Sheen got shot and the other cops were taunting him, saying "The rooookie! Got shot in the back!" It was funny and spared me from ever considering renting The Rookie.

Finally, before you ask, no, I haven't seen Wedding Crashers.