Some thoughts prompted by Channel 4’s 50 Greatest Comedy Films, shown last night:
No point in bemoaning the choices – that’s in the nature of these lists – but the order of Mel Brooks’ films was exactly backwards. The Producers (no. 50) was his best by far. Young Frankenstein (no. 20) had it’s moments, but not many of them. Blazing Saddles (no 8) – well, farting is intrinsically humourous, so it takes a special kind of genius to have a whole scene devoted to farting (the cowboys round the campfire) which is completely and totally unfunny.
Like most of my generation I have a special fondness for the Carry On films. How can you go wrong with a cast list including greats like Kenneth Williams, Sid James, Charles Hawtree, Hattie Jacques? Yet a problem arises when you lower your gaze from that great Platonic Carry on film and actually start to watch a particular example: you’ll find after 10 minutes that it’s virtually unwatchable. Every discussion of the Carry Ons will quote the old line, “Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me”, simply because it’s the only decent joke in the whole series.
The comments from talking heads are nearly always a waste of time, but there’s usually one commenter who stands out as particularly useless, and this time we got another celebrity who’s spent far too much time and money being psychoanalysed: the once great Gene Wilder. No, we don’t want to hear yet again how comedy is a powerful weapon against evils like Nazism.
The original ground-breaker for the whole lamentable Richard Curtis Brit-comedies-aimed-at-the-American-market was A Fish Called Wanda. How did Cleese and co. aim to attract those US dollars? By having a couple of British grotesques – Cleese as his usual upper-middle class pompous repressed idiot, and Michael Palin as a stuttering pathetic working class inadequate – come up against a couple of vibrant and neurosis-free Americans, prompting the Cleese character to declaim on how wonderful Americans are, and how pathetic we English are by comparison. Yes, it did well at the US box office. Imagine France, say, coming up with a comedy aimed at the US market about a couple of French grotesques – a womanising buffoon with personal hygiene problems, perhaps, who runs away at the first sign of trouble, and an intellectual who smokes gauloises non-stop, and lectures on the glories of the working class while living a life of luxury in a smart arrondissement of Paris – who are rescued from their follies by a couple of American heroes. Not something we’re likely to see any time soon.
And only one Ealing comedy (The Ladykillers at no 43)? What about Kind Hearts and Coronets?
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