Smart movie comedies you’ve probably never seen

by David Benjamin

“One after another, films for grownups have failed…”

— Brooks Barnes, New York Times

 

PARIS — My favorite movie genre is the smart comedy, a category born, I believe, with Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 tour de force, Modern Times. The most cohesive and trenchant of Chaplin’s work, Modern Times set a standard by which every smart comedy must be measured.

So, what’s a smart comedy?

I’m glad I asked. A smart comedy is intuitively funny, accessible to any viewer but interwoven with a thread of irony, satire, even sarcasm—wit—that escapes casual scrutiny while gratifying the intellectual snobs (like me) in the theater. You watch a farce once. You watch a smart movie over and over.

There were times when a the fussy filmgoer could depend on a steady trickle of successful smart movies. Lately, however, the common denominator is well below that represented by, say, Bedazzled or Bull Durham. Money now flows to frat-boy lowjinks, penis giggles and what Dave Barry calls booger humor. Nowadays, when a smart comedy defies fashion and emerges from the surrounding muck, it tends to die in the stream bed, little noted nor long remembered.

I collect smart comedies on DVD, a storage format that protects films from being “de-listied” by Netflix, HBO and other arbiters of the public norm. My favorite fifteen smart comedies all predate that sad nexus when farting, puking, mooning and masturbation became Hollywood’s safest laugh-getters.

Here’s my list, alphabetically: Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938), The Court Jester (Melvin Frank & Norman Panama, 1955), Diner (Barry Levinson, 1982), Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964), Fargo (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1996),  His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks,1940), My Cousin Vinny (Jonathan Lynn, 1992),  The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940), The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner, 1987), The Producers (Mel Brooks, 1967)  Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959), What’s Up, Doc? (Peter Bogdanovich, 1972), A Thousand Clowns (Fred Coe, 1965), Working Girl (Mike Nichols, 1988), You Can’t Take It With You (Frank Capra, 1938), Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks, 1974).

Yes, I know. This is actually sixteen, and I left out Preston Sturges. I could write a second list, just as much fun, with The Graduate, Hail the Conquering Hero, at least three Blake Edwards flicks The Apartment, Charade, A Fish Called Wanda, American Graffiti and Tremors (Fred Ward’s greatest moment).

And why The Court Jester? Because you dare not call yourself a movie buff if you can’t recite both versions of the jingle about the the pellet with the poison.

The above list includes movies known to most people with any time on earth. Below, alphabetically, are my sleepers—smart funny films that went barely noticed in the flood of lumpenflicks that fill the movie house and dazzle the riffraff. 

American Dreamz (2006). Hugh Grant plays a burned-out, coldblooded smarmer who hosts a TV talent show, “American Dreamz… Dreams with a Z” (cf., “American Idol”). To stay atop the ratings, he sends out talent scouts in quest of “freaks.” Of course, they find their freaks, among them a sweet Middle Eastern boy in love with show tunes who’s been mustered out of an Islamic terrorist cell because he loves show tunes. One of the movie’s guilty pleasures is Dennis Quaid’s impression of president George W. Bush.

Best in Show (2000). Christopher Guest has been essential to a series of “mockumentaries,” beginning with This Is Spinal Tap, but his finest hour is this sendup of the weird world of dog shows. Casting pros like Bob Balaban,  Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy and Jane Lynch, Guest assembled the best comedy repertory company for a movie since It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.

Big Night (1996). If you’re betting there’s a better movie about cooking and eating, I’ll see your Babette and raise you a hundred feet. Big Night’s co-director is Stanley Tucci, who a) has never accepted a bad script and b) has written actual cookbooks. Set somewhere on the Jersey shore in the 1950s, the film follows the struggle of a gourmet Italian restaurant to establish itself against competition from the spaghetti palace up the street. The cast, with Tucci, Tony Shalhoub, Ian Holm, Minnie Driver and Isabella Rossellini, is superb. The chefmanship is authentic, impeccable and occasionally breathtaking. The humor is sumptuously subtle.

Cadillac Man (1990) is as well-suited to the frantic charm and machine-gun delivery of Robin Williams as was Good Morning, Vietnam. The movie follows the adventures of Joey O’Brien, a car salesman with no money and too many women. Joey finds himself negotiating a hostage crisis at Turgeon Motors, instigated by Larry (Tim Robbins), who is determined to kill the guy who “did” his wife, the dealership’s receptionist. We get a feel for Joey right at the start, when he crashes a stalled funeral procession and, after shoving her husband’s coffin onto a pickup truck, tries to sell the grieving widow a car. You gotta laugh.

Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999) is a murder mystery set in a small town where contestants in a local beauty pageant (including Denise Richards, Amy Adams and Kirsten Dunst) are dropping like flies, while being filmed by a TV crew. Playing every clash and murder for satire, director Lona Williams not only dissects the town’s social tensions, she penetrates the cynicism of pageant culture in ways that Miss Congeniality—although another of my favorite comedies—dodged. The cast, who have too much fun, includes Ellen Barkin, Allison Janney, Kirstie Alley and the always underappreciated Sam McMurray.

Let It Ride (1989) is the only film Joe Pytka ever got to direct. The star is Richard Dreyfuss as Jay Trotter, a cab driver who can’t resist playing the horses. A fellow cabbie (David Johansen) overhears a couple of insiders talking about a “sure thing.” Thenceforth, we follow Trotter into the bowels and antics of a subculture whose credo is: “You could be walking around lucky, and not even know it.” No truer, funnier film has ever been made about the abnormal psychology of the racetrack. The cast mixes unknown actors like Johansen with familiar stars, including Allen Garfield, Teri Garr, Robbie Coltrane,. Cynthia Nixon and Jennifer Tilly—who gets the movie’s best line when someone compliments her legs: “Thanks. They go from my ass all the way to the floor.”

Wag the Dog (1997). Before George Bush and Dick Cheney used fake WMD to stage an all-too-real war in Iraq, Barry Levinson adapted Larry Beinhart’s novel about a campaign consultant (Robert De Niro) who hires a movie producer (Dustin Hoffman) to “produce” a fake war, as a way of rescuing the president’s crumbling re-election campaign. There are, of course, complications along the way, requiring deadpan delivery from an all-star team that includes Ann Heche, Woody Harrelson, Denis Leary (The Fad King), Willie Nelson, Jim Belushi and even Kirsten Dunst. Wag the Dog is arguably the best political film ever made—and certainly the best, darkest comedy about the dark art of campaign chicanery. 

Scroll, if you will, through the menu of British whodunnits, smartass superheroes and cloying Christmas movies available lately on your chosen streaming service and wonder, for just a moment. In these merriment-deprived times, why so few comedies that make you laugh and think at the same time? 

The answer goes back further than Chaplin, perhaps as far back as Shakespeare, to the unknown actor who considered his career prospects and decided to audition for not Puck, but Hamlet.

“Dying,” quoth the prudent Thespian, “is easy. Comedy is hard.”