🎬 #81 It's Hard To Get a Laugh.
Comedy is tough, some say a lot tougher than drama. Imagine saying to a paying audience, come see a comedy film, a film designed to make you laugh and then not getting one, or really enjoying yourself at all. It’s a brutal feeling for both filmmaker and audience.
This week it’s two of my favourite comedies from the same director. To me they are amazing films, unbounded joy, totally unpretentious - like living cartoons. I discovered both when I was quite young and they’ve stayed with me ever since.
Happy choosing, happy viewing
Bry
FILM ONE: THE MAN WITH TWO BRAINS
1983 Dir Carl Reiner
This is the kind of film to put on and let your own brain succumb to its amazingly charming silliness. It’s got all the things I love about comedy, recurring jokes, really dumb [and by dumb I mean brilliant] visual gags and a simple story. This involves Steve Martin’s Dr Hfuhruhurr, a brilliant brain surgeon who's pioneered the ‘cranial screw top method’ of gaining access to the brain. He falls in love with Dolores, played with delicious deception by Kathleen Turner - and with that the calamity really takes off.
At times the laughs are quite brutal, others zany, others overtly sexual, but it’s all held together by Martin’s off kilter, high energy straight man. Reiner harks back to hammer horror films and melds this together with characters that you genuinely care about. It’s not just a series of empty laughs threaded together. This is truly a weird film but that’s one of the best things I can say about it.
As Martin recently said in an interview, his character name still makes him laugh and every so often it pops into my head and always makes me giggle too.
TL;DR Enjoy the oddity of Martin’s hammer horror comedy where Kathleen Turner relishes playing the femme fatale.
*Available for a small rental fee on Amazon, Apple, Google and YouTube in the US and the UK.
Fact: Sissy Spacek voices the disembodied brain of Anne Uumellmahaye.
FILM TWO: THE JERK
1979 Dir Carl Reiner
A few years before the previous film, Martin teamed up with Reiner on The Jerk, an even crazier comedy than The Man With Two Brains, if that’s close to being possible. As the poster sums up, it’s a story of rags to riches to rags - that charts Steve Martin’s character, naive Navin, as he leaves his country home to find his success in the big city. The adopted son of a black family, he believes he’s black and is startled to find out the truth, that he is, in fact, a white man. This is how the film begins, an indication of just the kinds of ridiculous places the film goes.
This film is a really skewed version of Forest Gump - a man’s journey through a world that doesn’t take him seriously. Someone who ultimately succeeds because of his ability to take the world at face value. To pursue things, that other people think are ridiculous, wholeheartedly. It’s kind of a comedic epic that charts a grand silly life. Isn’t that the best we could ever wish for from our time on the planet?
TL;DR Enjoy a heavy dose of silliness courtesy of the magic combo of Martin and Reiner and learn to laugh at truly absurd things.
*Available for a small rental fee on Amazon, Apple, Google and YouTube in the US and the UK.
Fact: According to his wife, this was one of Kubrick’s favourite films.