The King of Comedy

What’s the funniest movie of the 1970s?

There are three possible answers to that question.  Two of them were directed by Mel Brooks:  “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein,” both released in 1974.  The third, released two years earlier, is “What’s Up, Doc?” starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal and directed by Peter Bogdanovich.

Bogdanovich died this past Thursday, and since nearly all appraisals of his filmmaking career have focused on his two excellent early dramas, “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon,” I would be profoundly remiss not to devote maximal attention to the comedic farce he made in between.

To be sure, I do not regard this as a difficult or onerous assignment.  Seeing “What’s Up, Doc?” for the first time a quarter-century ago ranks among the most pleasurable 90-odd minutes of my life, and in the many instances that I’ve compiled a list of my all-time favorite movies, “What’s Up, Doc?” has never fallen out of the top five.  Among pure comedies, only Brooks and the Marx Brothers can compare.

In one sense, trying to explain why a movie is funny is like trying to explain why a cheeseburger is delicious:  The truth can only reveal itself through personal experience.  To my knowledge, no person has ever seen “What’s Up, Doc?” without savoring every moment of it.  If such people exist, I can only offer my condolences.

Like “The Last Picture Show”—and in the manner of latter-day cinema geeks like Quentin Tarantino—“What’s Up, Doc?” is an overt and deliberate homage to the classic films of Bogdanovich’s youth, and none more so in this case than “Bringing Up Baby,” the immortal Howard Hawks farce from 1938 starring Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant.  As it happens, I didn’t see Hawks’s movie until I’d watched Bogdanovich’s quasi-remake a dozen times or more, and was rather alarmed how much I enjoyed it.  Indeed, for a hot minute there, I almost agreed with the prevailing wisdom that “Bringing Up Baby” is the superior of the two pictures, and the feeling felt nearly like a betrayal.

Broadly speaking, the success of “What’s Up, Doc?” owes to the fact that it knows exactly what kind of movie it is and has no pretensions to be anything else.  Like its source, it is a so-called “screwball comedy,” in which silly, ridiculous people engage in silly, ridiculous behavior in service of a silly, ridiculous plot that proceeds with the logic of the Three Stooges and the physicality of the Looney Toons (hence the title).

Specifically, “What’s Up, Doc?” concerns the movements of four identical plaid travelling cases, whose owners don’t know each other initially but happen to be staying on the same floor of the same hotel at the same time.  Naturally, the cases containing the most valuable items—priceless jewelry and secret government documents, respectively—belong to characters wholly incidental to the story, whereas the near-worthless items—igneous rocks and undergarments, respectively—are the property of the two leads, played by Streisand and O’Neal.

Certainly, the business with the cases is a MacGuffin if ever there was one—i.e., an artificial plot device designed to propel the action—and it’s a credit to the movie’s integrity that we are never made to truly care which case ends up where.  In the end, it doesn’t make a dime’s worth of difference anyhow, and the unspoken understanding of this between Bogdanovich and his audience is an integral part of the fun.

The real narrative of “What’s Up, Doc?”—like the real narrative of “Bringing Up Baby”—centers on the goofy romantic tension between its two stars, with Streisand’s free-spirited vagabond, Judy Maxwell, insinuating herself between O’Neal’s neurotic Howard Bannister and his frumpy, uptight fiancé, Eunice, played by the one and only Madeline Kahn in her film debut (it is surely no mere coincidence that Kahn also appears prominently in “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein”).  As with everything else, Judy’s single-minded, borderline-sadistic fixation with poor Howard is neither explained nor excused.  It is what it is, and so long as it draws our interest and amusement, no such rationalization is required.

The other key character is the city of San Francisco, to which Howard and Eunice have traveled from their native Iowa to attend a musicologists convention (whatever that is), where Howard is in the running for a $30,000 grant for his groundbreaking research into the musical history of Paleozoic rocks.  That’s assuming things go according to plan.  Alas, with the appearance of Judy and her insatiable appetite for mayhem, they don’t.

All of which eventually leads to the epic and deliriously absurd chase that stretches from one end of San Francisco to the other and involves pretty much every mode of street-level transport known to man short of a unicycle and a Sherman tank—a sequence made all the sweeter upon learning from the DVD commentary track (narrated by Bogdanovich himself) that the filmmakers didn’t trouble themselves with obtaining the necessary permits prior to shooting.

On my first-ever trip to the Bay Area at age 15, our family based a great deal of our self-guided sightseeing on “What’s Up, Doc?” locations, from Lombard Street to Chinatown to Russian Hill to possibly the very hotel where all the trouble started (three-plus decades of remodeling made it hard to know for sure).  Indeed, it would not be hyperbolic to say my entire adolescent conception of San Francisco—that most bewitching of American cities—was forged by two movies.  (You can probably guess the other one.)

While virtually every critic and cultural historian in America rests the legacy of Peter Bogdanovich on “The Last Picture Show”—an undeniably great film that features career-defining performances by the likes of Cybill Shepherd, Cloris Leachman and Jeff Bridges, among others—I have a sneaking suspicion that, marooned on a proverbial desert island, a disproportionately high number of those same folks would just as soon pop “What’s Up, Doc?” into the VCR—and have, in fact, done exactly that regularly since 1972.

Why do I think that?  Because it is an essential component of human nature to get an easy laugh every now and again, and “What’s Up, Doc?” provides as many easy laughs any movie I have ever seen.  To watch it is to adore it, and I would seriously question the character of anyone who feels otherwise.

That might seem like a needlessly harsh and exacting standard to hold regarding such a cartoonish, lighthearted movie.  But let’s face it:  If you can’t laugh at Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal driving a stolen VW Beetle at full speed off a pier into San Francisco Bay on the off-chance they’ll land on the deck of a departing ferry, what else is there to laugh at?

The 94-Year-Old Man

What does it say that when the news broke last week that Carl Reiner had died at age 98, my first and only thought was, “How’s Mel doing?”

It says quite a lot.

Mel, of course, is Mel Brooks, the 94-year-old elder statesman of American comedy, who formed both a professional and personal kinship with Reiner in 1950 on the set of Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows,” and the two men remained close for the next seven decades—a relationship that outlasted both of their marriages (Reiner’s wife, Estelle, died in 2008; Brooks’s wife, Anne Bancroft, died in 2005) and would surely be included in any pantheon of great celebrity friendships.

Onstage, their most enduring partnership was unquestionably “The 2,000-Year-Old Man,” their recurring standup bit with Brooks as the titular über-senior citizen and Reiner as the unflappable reporter who draws him out.  Offstage, they became known—thanks, in part, to a priceless episode of Jerry Seinfeld’s “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee”—for the dinners they would have at each other homes on a near-daily basis, which they enjoyed on plastic tray tables in the living room while watching “Jeopardy!” or some old movie.  While Seinfeld offered them such delicacies as corned beef and brisket, Reiner was reportedly never happier than with a good old-fashioned hot dog.

In truth, my exposure to Carl Reiner is relatively limited, having never watched, say, “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” nor any of the Steve Martin movies Reiner directed in the 1970s and 1980s.  (His son, Rob, is another story.)

Brooks, by contrast, looms in my mind as very close to a deity.  As a movie director, his work proved as foundational to my budding interest in cinema as any:  I watched (and re-watched) “Young Frankenstein” long before stumbling upon the “Frankenstein” classics from the 1930s, “Blazing Saddles” before discovering the Westerns of the 1940s and 1950s, and “High Anxiety” before delving endlessly into the collected works of Alfred Hitchcock.  That my ignorance of the source material had no adverse impact on my enjoyment of Brooks’s parodies is a testament both to Brooks’s writing and the zany genius of his actors, including such comic luminaries as Gene Wilder, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman and Kenneth Mars.

Culturally, Brooks’s crowning achievement may well be “The Producers”—both the 1968 film and the 2001 Broadway musical—which told the story of a financially desperate theatrical shyster who plots to swindle millions from his investors by way of a maximally appalling production called “Springtime for Hitler,” a scheme that goes haywire when—surprise!—the show becomes a smash hit.  I’ve had few experiences of live performance to match seeing Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick devouring the scenery at the St. James Theatre in New York during a brief reunion of the show’s original cast in early 2004.  While Brooks himself didn’t appear onstage, he played a leading role in a 90-minute PBS program about the recording of the cast album, which saw him at his high-octane, free-associating best.

Increasingly, Mel Brooks is to me what Ruth Bader Ginsburg is to most liberals:  My own mental equilibrium is dependent upon his being alive and in relatively good health.  In a way, this makes little sense, as Brooks hasn’t directed a new movie since 1995 and his more recent credits—mostly voiceover work—have flown straight under my radar.

On the other hand, it was less than four years ago that I actually saw the great man in person (albeit from a distance) when he came to Boston’s Wang Theatre to screen and reminisce about “Blazing Saddles”—an evening made more poignant by the fact that Gene Wilder had died just a few weeks earlier.

Now that Carl Reiner, too, has shuffled off to the great beyond, I worry—nay, dread—that Brooks will soon follow.  Just as couples who’ve been married since World War II tend to synchronize their deaths to within days, hours or minutes of each other, it would make a certain cosmic sense for these platonic partners-in-comedy to depart Earth in rapid succession.

I hope I’m wrong, of course, as I’m not sure a world without Mel Brooks is one I’d want to live in.  While some figures in popular culture seem to be truly immortal—looking at you, Queen Elizabeth and Betty White—the specter of death hangs over us all, causing us, in our better moments, to appreciate those we have for as long as we have them.

Speaking of appreciation, at this juncture I feel duty-bound to note that the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., has been handing out the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor annually since 1998—including to Carl Reiner in 2000—but that not one of its honors has ever gone to Mel Brooks.  While Brooks has certainly amassed his share of recognition through the decades (including by the Kennedy Center in 2009), it does seem a bit odd that the nation’s most prestigious life achievement award for comedy—one that has already been bestowed on the likes of Will Farrell and Tina Fey—has somehow eluded the man who all but invented an entire genre of film humor and is widely beloved because of it.

While it is generally true that taste in comedy is subjective, Gene Siskel was correct in noting, “There is a point when a personal opinion shades off into an error of fact.”  It’s high time this particular error were corrected once and for all.  Lest we forget, the Twain Prize can only be given to a living person, and Mel Brooks ain’t getting any younger.

It’s Pronounced Fronkensteen

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory was my original favorite movie.  Like every former child, I remember vividly the first time I saw it.  My parents were out and the babysitter popped the VHS into the VCR.  Hip to my apparently short attention span, she fast-forwarded through the boring bits—i.e. the first hour or so—picking it up just as we enter the marvelous candied fun house itself and meet its whimsical, bizarre, borderline psychotic chocolatier-in-chief.

The one particular thing that stands out from that initial Wonka experience is the ominous, psychedelic boat ride through the chocolate tunnel, during which a series of random, unnerving images flash across the screen as Wonka pleasantly sings, “There’s no earthly way of knowing / which direction we are going.”

Did I say pleasantly?  Sorry, I meant menacingly.  Predatorily.  Sadistically.  By the time that short ride was over, I’m not sure whether I was more in need of a lollipop or a shrink.

Indeed, reflecting on it now, I realize my first impression of Gene Wilder was one of abject terror.  His Willy Wonka—a character so idiosyncratic that not even Johnny Depp could handle him 34 years later—was the stuff of nightmares for six-year-old me.  That Hollywood executives in 1971 thought a movie about a moody, enigmatic sociopath would be perfect for kids is a testament to the respect that the film industry used to have for children’s intelligence and sophistication.  That Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory remains one of the most beloved of all films suggests there may be hope for the human race yet.

And it’s all thanks to Wilder, a thoroughly warm and decent man who, in Mel Stuart’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s trippy book, created a candy magnate who is endlessly charismatic and charming even as he behaves like a shrieking, irrational tyrant, merrily skipping through the halls one minute while allowing his guests to float up into a giant fan the next.

In the few interviews he ever gave, Wilder explained that Wonka’s first appearance—a cane-aided limp followed by a somersault—serves as a metaphor for his entire persona.  “From that time on,” said Wilder, “no one will know whether I’m lying or telling the truth.”

And we don’t, do we?  I’ve seen his performance billions of times and I couldn’t tell you whether he’s on the level at any given moment.  A slave-driving CEO by trade and a recluse by habit, he makes a point of not letting anyone know—until the very last moments of the film—what he’s really thinking.  He’s a mystery wrapped in a chocolate bar.

It’s for that very singularity that Gene Wilder will forever be associated with Willy Wonka in the mind of everyone who was ever a frightened child.  Just as Judy Garland never escaped the shadow of The Wizard of Oz, Wilder’s Wonka first appeared to us in our most vulnerable, impressionable period, branding our memories with a visceral, almost supernatural force that few movie characters are able to do.

If Willy Wonka is a signpost from my own adolescence—a bridge between innocence and guile—then Wilder’s other great leading role, as Frederick Frankenstein in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, carried me across that same chasm in an entirely different way.

By age 13, I had already watched Young Frankenstein more times that I could count and, if prodded, could recite entire scenes from memory.  But as it happened, I decided to pop that particular disc into my DVD player on the evening of September 10, 2001.  As ever, the next hundred-odd minutes were an embarrassment of comedic riches, from Igor (pronounced “eye-gore”) telling Dr. Frankenstein (pronounced “fronk-en-steen”) to “walk this way,” to Dr. Frankenstein getting crushed by a rotating bookcase (“Put…the candle…back”), to the good doctor not only creating a living, breathing monster from spare parts, but teaching him to sing and dance (and eventually, by accident, to rape and pillage).

I imagine I went to bed that night utterly carefree, with a smile on my face and a song in my heart.  Then I woke up the next morning and witnessed the world turned upside down.

Now, there’s no point drawing more symbolism than necessary from this arbitrary sequence of events.  The September 11 attacks didn’t happen to me personally—although I lived close enough to see the billowing smoke from a nearby hilltop—and I can’t say my own life was changed as swiftly and dramatically as the nation’s as a whole.

Nevertheless, 9/11 was certainly eye-opening to a 13-year-old suburbanite who had never given any thought to concepts like terrorism and religious extremism and who probably couldn’t locate Afghanistan on a map or explain how any of the above were related to each other.  (Admittedly, some days I still can’t.)

And so—at this moment—I think it’s worth mentioning how I spent my final evening of relative ignorance about the real world—the world beyond my house, my family and my values—in the company of Gene Wilder, with all the frivolity and gleeful fright that comes with it.  If 9/11 was the turning point in my generation’s conception of reality, it seems fitting that an actor who could so finely juggle the wonders of childhood with the cruelties of adulthood would happen to be in the forefront of my mind at the very moment I needed him the most.

The world needs him still.  That he remains so beloved, despite having not made a single movie since 1991, suggests it was the depths of his humanity—not just the heights of his acting chops—that made him such a special part of our lives.

He was the man giving out golden tickets.  Little did we know that the shiniest ticket of all was him.