Sunday, April 17

If Voting Changed Anything They'd Make It Illegal

The ballots are up in HFPST's comedy film championship. Go vote for whichever film had fewer fart jokes.

Okay, it's all in fun, just like my posing as an embittered, rapidly aging crackpot. I really love this sort of thing, and I hope that comes shining through the curmudgeon dance I do to entertain the kiddies. TV Guide's™ "100 Best Friends Hairdo Moments", or Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Stars Who Played Guitar Or Wore One As A Prop"--these are the moments I live for.

So take these comments as they're intended. Norb is much more talented and intelligent than I, a fact which is obvious to anyone who's read both, but I get the distinct impression--from him, as it happens--that he smokes entirely too much weed. When it comes to funny, you don't want the opinion of someone who smokes weed. You want the opinion of someone with seventeen major central nervous system depressants in his bloodstream. So I'm your candidate.

Seriously, though: it's gratifying that my young friend champions Preston Sturgis (even if we wound up with an Eddie-Brackenless choice) and the great Ealing comedies. But, no Road pictures? Any Bing & Bob made while they could still walk without assistance is the equal of Christopher Guest's best work, which makes any of them better than any of the modern stuff not made by the Coens, not to mention the separate slots for W.C. Fields and Harold Lloyd.


As for fart jokes, look, I'm not a snob. Blazing Saddles is an hysterical movie. But let's recall that the late Johnny Carson famously said of Chevy Chase "he couldn't ad-lib a fart at a bean dinner". He did not say "he couldn't ad-lib a remarkably rich and inventive comic universe based on an historical incident in which grace and violence, poignance and slapstick combine in unforeseen ways to show us a world flying apart in all directions at a bean dinner. And do it without sound."

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