Showing posts with label Airplane!. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Airplane!. Show all posts

Thursday, February 11, 2016

Laugh at me. Please.

I frequently lament the absence of a good nonsense movie in today's world. I once explained Monty Python to my brother as "do you find a sheep exploding to be funny? Then you laugh."  The end of their show and the beginning of the Monty Python movies pretty closely overlapped by the rise of the Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker movies and National Lampoons. The early 80s was probably the high water mark of the nonsense comedy film.

Airplane. 
Because the Catholic Schoolgirls In Trouble clip is just too damn funny for family consumption.

I would suggest that these are the best of the nonsense movies because the laughs come first. The jokes run the spectrum from high-brow word play to slapping each other with fish. But the jokes are never second to a plot point and they are never abandoned for a happy ending.  At the end of Airplane! or Animal House, the characters are victorious in landing the plane or destroying the parade, but they don't give up what made them funny.  The characters continue to be horrible people, and we are still laughing.