National Post (National Edition)
FUNNY HA HA
BBC’S POLL OF THE BEST COMEDIES SUGGESTS A BIT OF EVERYTHING IS THE BEST RECIPE.
Are you sure you know what’s funny? It’s a fair bet you haven’t seen all or even most of the 100 comedies listed in a recent BBC poll that asked critics worldwide to pick their favourites. 1966’s Sedmikrásky (Daisies), from Czechoslovakia, anyone? Anyone? Bueller? (Actually, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off didn’t make the cut.)
It’s also guaranteed that if more than a few of your own favourites were made in 2010 or later they’re not on the list, which includes just three from the last seven years: Bridesmaids; the lowbudget New Zealand vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows; and the German Oscar nominee Toni Erdmann.
In contrast, five films from the 1920s — silent movies featuring Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin — made the top 100, as did a staggering 13 films from the 1930s. Two of those even cracked the top 10: Keaton’s The General from 1926, and Duck Soup, featuring the Marx Brothers, from 1933.
There’s probably an element of self-censorship in the lack of recent films; no one wants to declare something a classic and have history declare them a fool. (I recently found an old VHS copy of Woody Allen’s Bananas with the blurb “a harvest crop of laughs.” I guess the critic didn’t want to stick her neck out with “bumper crop.”) So you might have enjoyed Trainwreck, Napoleon Dynamite, Zombieland or Sideways, but they’re not part of the critical canon, at least yet.
Critics were happy, however, to lavish praise on the ’80s, making it the only decade to outperform the ’30s. Eighteen “greaties” made the list, including This Is Spinal Tap at number nine (pity it wasn’t at 11), and Airplane! at number seven.
The No. 1 film, which also topped the American Film Institute’s best-comedies list back at the turn of the century, was 1959’s Some Like It Hot, co-written and directed by Billy Wilder, and starring Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe.
The BBC points out that its themes of reinvention and tolerance remain vital even 58 years later, noting that the director had been born Samuel Wilder, that the stars were once Bernie Schwartz (Curtis) and Norma Jeane Mortenson (Monroe), and that Curtis’s character spends part of the movie disguised as a woman and the rest pretending to be a millionaire and imitating Cary Grant, whose real name was Archibald Leach. Wheels within wheels!
Of course, it’s a weird challenge to try to define what makes comedy funny, or even what constitutes comedy in the first place. Is Singin’ in the Rain (No. 35) a comedy, or just a funny musical? What about Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, which placed at No. 46? Is comedy a surrealist dinner party in which the guests can’t leave (The Exterminating Angel, No. 92)? Is it a man dangling silently from a clock tower over a busy street (Safety Last!, No. 83 and the oldest film on the list)? Is it romantic comedy (Annie Hall, No. 3) or Cold War satire (Dr. Strangelove, No. 2)?
A bit of everything seems to be a good recipe. Ever since the movies started talking in 1927, they’ve been telling jokes; It Happened One Night, Duck Soup and other motor-mouthed comedies date from the very early years of the talkies. But it’s the rare comedy that doesn’t also feature some sublime physical humour, whether it’s Mongo punching a horse in Blazing Saddles (No. 20), Bill Murray doing the same to Ned Ryerson in Groundhog Day (No. 4), or the invisible-door gag in Playtime (No. 8).
Many names crop up multiple times on the list, including Rob Reiner (The Jerk, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally ..., Spinal Tap), Jacques Tati (Monsieur Hulot’s Holliday, Mon Oncle, Playtime), Howard Hawks (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday) and the Pythons (A Fish Called Wanda, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Life of Brian).
And what of Kubrick, who followed up his sublime satire of Dr. Strangelove with sci-fi (2001: A Space Odyssey), a thriller (A Clockwork Orange), horror (The Shining), war (Full Metal Jacket) and whatever was Eyes Wide Shut? We’ll leave you with the same last words as Some Like It Hot: Nobody’s perfect.
CHRIS KNIGHT’S TOP 10 COMEDIES
Duck Soup (1933), Groundhog Day (1993), Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Airplane! (1980), It Happened One Night (1934), The Blues Brothers (1980), The Princess Bride (1987), Young Frankenstein (1974), Withnail and I (1987), Toni Erdmann (2016)