Star Wars: The Force Has Never Awoken In This One

I feel compelled to begin this blog entry by saying that I DO NOT hate the Star Wars movies. I don’t even dislike them, for the most part. But my horrible confession—the shadowy burden I must release from my soul, is that I just think they’re okay; not amazing or stupendous or life-changing, but just pretty good.

I’m not saying this to offend anybody or to say that I think the gazillion people who do find Star Wars amazing, stupendous or life-changing are wrong, because I don’t; but rather I make this admission to come clean, so I can walk in the light of day without people thinking I am something that I am not.

Indeed, admitting this is difficult, because when people find out that I don’t share their unbridled passion for Star Wars, they often look at me differently—like I’m a cute puppy with really bad halitosis. Okay from a distance, but you don’t want to get too close.

The original Star Wars (I refuse to call it Episode IV or A New Hope, or whatever other ridiculous moniker it has since accrued) came out when I was seven. I saw the movie with my family a couple of months after it came out when the hype surrounding it was at its height. I remember thinking it was okay, but I also remember dozing off at some point during the film and being startled awake by the baleful wailing of a giant furry creature trapped in a garbage disposal. Mostly I remember wondering why all my friends were going bonkers about this movie. It wasn’t bad (although even at seven I recognized some of the acting was) but it certainly wasn’t rocking my world.

Indeed, the sensation that Star Wars caused was a mystery to me. My friends were acquiring Star Wars toys and paraphernalia at an alarming rate—action figures, model kits, lunch boxes, pajamas, and of course the light saber. I will admit that I did want and got a light saber, but not because it had anything to do with Star Wars. I got it because every other kid my age had it and that made me want it. If every other kid played with a neon green, rubber cow I would have wanted that too.

When The Empire Strikes Back came out three years later and Return of the Jedi came out three years after that, I saw them and had more or less the same reaction as I did to the original. Did I enjoy them? Sure. Did I feel compelled to see them over and over and over again until I memorized every line? Surely, not. (Indeed, the only movie from that timeframe that I felt that way about was Airplane!)

When the next trio of Star Wars flicks came out from 1999 through 2005, I eventually got around to seeing all of those in the theater as well. While they each had their moments, these were nothing more than mediocre in my mind. A decade or so later I don’t remember much about this grouping of movies other than the fact that Darth Maul was a badass and, had Jar Jar Binks been crushed under foot by an AT-AT walker in the first five minutes of the first film, it would have made the rest of the series infinitely better.

And that brings us to 2015 and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which, as far as I can tell, everybody on the planet who does not live in my household has seen. In the past nine days since the movie has opened I have been asked by many friends and coworkers when I plan on seeing the film, to which I respond, “I don’t know, maybe March or April when the crowds start to die down a bit.” Sometimes I get a chuckle in response (although I’m not saying it to be funny) and sometimes I get a nasty or incredulous look conveying the unspoken “What the hell is wrong with you?”

The truth is I do want to see it. I’ve heard great things about the new movie and my hunch is that when I finally get around to seeing it, I’ll think it’s okay. And okay isn’t bad. Of course if Airplane! suddenly had a reboot and a new movie hit the theaters I’d be first in line for the midnight showing. Surely I can’t be serious, you say? I am serious! And don’t call me Shirley!

Airplane! Still Funny After All These Years

When the movie Airplane! came out in the summer of 1980, I was just shy of eleven years old. My whole family went to see it in the theater and by the end I was certain it was the funniest movie I had ever seen, despite the fact that I laughed at some of the jokes for the wrong reason. (For example, when the little boy asks the little girl if she wants cream in her coffee and she says, “No thank you; I take it black, like my men,” I laughed heartily, because I thought it was hysterical that a little girl would like black coffee.)

About two years after the release of Airplane! my family became the first on our block to get a VCR. The $900 machine, that was only slightly smaller than a Volkswagen, quickly became the focal point of my existence. To get our video library started we purchased two movies—The Graduate and Airplane! While I cited The Graduate as my favorite movie, it was Airplane! that I kept on watching over and over again. Airplane! to me was what Star Wars was to most kids of my generation. I was obsessed.

Before I knew what a spreadsheet was, I created a spreadsheet to keep track of how many times I watched each of the VHS tapes that we owned. Within a year I would see Airplane! 23 times, according to the penciled hash marks on my loose-leaf paper. I knew the movie by heart and quoted it ad nauseum. While I struggled in my junior high school Spanish class, I was fluent in jive.

As my teen years progressed, the frequency of my Airplane! viewings gradually declined. I moved on to other obsessions like classic rock bands, reruns of Taxi, and the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. I would guess that sometime in my early-20s was the last time I watched the film…until yesterday.

My wife got me the DVD of Airplane! as one of my birthday gifts. (I had never bothered replacing the VHS tape when I switched to DVDs long ago.) So last night, after our kids went down to bed, we watched it—my first time in over 20 years. It was almost a surreal experience watching a film I know by heart after such a long hiatus.

One interesting phenomenon was that I kept on laughing ahead of the punch lines, since I knew exactly what was coming. (This behavior must have seemed strange to my wife who had only seen the film two times previously.) For instance, when Julie Haggerty is walking around in the plane asking if anyone is a doctor and one woman says, “Stewardess, I think the man sitting next to me is a doctor,” I already burst out laughing before they panned over to Leslie Nielsen sitting there wearing a stethoscope in his ears.

Another interesting phenomenon was that it took about 5 or 10 minutes for the movie to grow on me again. I wasn’t laughing that much in the beginning and for a brief time I was very nervous that maybe the movie wasn’t as funny as I remembered. But soon the laughter took hold and I couldn’t stop. I think the slow start wasn’t the movie’s fault, though. I think it was more akin to meeting up with an old friend after 20 years. There might be an initial period of awkwardness, but eventually you feel like everything is just like it was when you last talked.

And so I laughed. I laughed every time Robert Hays missed his mouth because of his drinking problem, and when Peter Graves asks the boy visiting the cockpit if he likes gladiator movies, and when Leslie Nielsen assures the passengers that everything is going to be fine and his nose keeps on growing a-la Pinocchio. And pretty much at everything in between.

At this point I have no idea how many times I’ve seen Airplane! I lost my loose-leaf spreadsheet decades ago. But the movie is still hysterical and now that I’ve got it on DVD I can watch it as many times as I want. And this time I can keep track in Excel.

The Funniest Movie of Each Decade: Yeah, It's My Opinion

I haven’t blogged in a couple of weeks, because I just have not felt very funny. Not sure if it’s my diet or some sort of humor-suppressing virus I might have caught while standing in line at the post office, but the upshot is, whenever I sit down to write, I feel about as amusing as an in-grown toenail. So, rather than trying to be funny myself, I’m going to write about funny movies. Here now, for your perusal, is a list of what I consider to be the single funniest movie in each of the last ten decades.

But, wait—before I give you the list, a bit of clarification may be needed. The list that you are about to see is not what I consider to be the best comedy of each decade, but rather the funniest movie. I’m talking about laugh quotient here, not necessarily quality. This is why “The Graduate,” one of my favorite movies of all time, did not make the list. Very funny movie. Not the funniest movie of its decade, though. So now, really, here’s the list.

1920s

“The Gold Rush” (Directed by Charlie Chaplin) -1925: To be fair, I’ve only seen about half a dozen comedies from the 1920s, and all of them were actually pretty funny. I gave some consideration to Harold Lloyd’s “Safety Last!” and Buster Keaton’s “The General,” but in the end I had to go with Chaplin. The classic scene in which he’s eating the shoe remains hysterical to this day. It’s not so much that he’s eating a shoe that’s funny, but the expressions on his face while he’s doing it.

1930s

“Duck Soup” (Directed by Leo McCarey) -1933: This decade was a no-brainer for me. “Duck Soup” is the Marx Brothers at the height of their glorious zaniness. Groucho, as Rufus T. Firefly, ruler of the fictitious European nation Fredonia, reels off an endless array of one-liners (“I'm in a hurry! To the House of Representatives! Ride like fury! If you run out of gas, get ethyl. If Ethel runs out, get Mabel! Now step on it!”)while Harpo reels off an endless array of sight gags (cutting people’s jackets with a scissor when they’re not looking, making people inadvertently hold his leg, putting his feet in freshly squeezed lemonade, etc.)and Chico constantly gives them both fodder for their shtick. The movie also contains what I consider to be the funniest movie moment of all time…the mirror scene. If you’ve seen it, you know what I mean; if not, I won’t give it away.

1940s

“Arsenic and Old Lace” (Directed by Frank Capra) -1944: I thought a bit about Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” here, but going by my own criteria of sheer amount of laughs, I have to go with Arsenic. This film, based on the play by Joseph Kesselring and penned for the screen by the Epstein brothers, who also happen to have written “Casablanca,” is comedy farce at its best. The plot, about two wealthy old sisters who live together and have made a hobby out of murdering men, is funny enough. But then bring Cary Grant into the picture as their nephew who just got married and is slowly figuring out that something is amiss in his aunts’ house and you have one hysterical flick. Watching Grant’s impeccable comic timing and perfectly executed double-takes leaves me giddy.

1950s

“Some Like It Hot” (Directed by Billy Wilder) -1959: I love “Harvey” and “Mister Roberts,” but no film from the 1950s is as funny as “Some Like It Hot.” You have Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in drag being chased by the mafia, you add Marilyn Monroe in what I consider to be far and away her best role, and then you put the whole project in the very capable hands of Billy Wilder, and really you just can’t go wrong. And while I mentioned how great Cary Grant’s double-takes were above, Jack Lemmon has the single best double-take in the history of film at the very end of this movie.

1960s

“Take the Money and Run” (Directed by Woody Allen) -1969: While it pained me not to be able to include Mel Brooks’ “The Producers” on this list, and while it is a better movie overall than the one I picked, when it comes to the raw amount of laughter a movie creates “Take the Money and Run” is second only to one film. (We’ll get to that in two decades.) Done as a fake documentary years before Christopher Guest popularized the genre, “Take the Money and Run” follows the life of inept criminal, Virgil Starkwell (Woody Allen), as he gets caught trying to escape prison when the fake gun he whittled out of soap turns to suds in a rainstorm, falls in love with a woman whose purse he tries to steal, and gets caught robbing a bank because he misspelled the note he gave to the teller. My wife’s favorite scene is a flashback to his younger years when he played cello in a marching band. As I write this, I realize I’m not doing it any justice. If you haven’t seen it, just do it.

1970s

“Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (Directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones) – 1975: This decade was far and away the toughest for me to pick because the competition is so fierce. If I made a list of the funniest movies of all time, at least half of them would be from this decade, including “Play it Again, Sam,” “Young Frankenstein,” “Life of Brian,” “The Jerk,” and of course, the winner—Holy Grail. The movie is essentially a series of sketches about Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, with each scene funnier than the one before it. The Python crew pulled out all the stops for this one—killer rabbits, Roger the Shrubber, The Castle Anthrax—the list goes on and on. And it’s one of the most quotable comedies of all time: “Bring out your dead!” “I fart in your general direction!” “Let's not bicker and argue over who killed who.” “It’s only a flesh wound.” Classic!

1980s

“Airplane!” (Directed by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker) – 1980: And then there was “Airplane!” Is it a great movie? No. Has any movie before or since been funnier? No. Zucker, Zucker, and Abrahams, co-writers and directors, managed to have a laugh in every moment of this movie for 88 straight minutes. Sometimes the laugh came from a deadpan pun: (“Surely you can’t be serious.” “I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley.”) Sometimes the laugh came from a visual gag: (The stewardess blowing up the automatic pilot.) Sometimes the laugh came from stereotypes: (“Would you like something to read?” “Do you have anything light?” “How about this leaflet—Famous Jewish Sports Legends?”) But always the laughs kept coming. Sorry Eddie Murphy. Sorry Steve Martin. Sorry Bill Murray. You all did some fine work in this decade, but somehow Robert Hays was the star of the funniest movie of all time.

1990s

“South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut” (Directed by Trey Parker) – 1999: With the rise in popularity of independent and art-house films in the 1990s, the knee-slapper kind of comedy gave way to more quirky fare. I love “Waiting for Guffman,” and “Being John Malkovich,” both funny in their own right, but neither are laugh-a-minute style movies. It wasn’t until the very end of the decade when “South Park” hit the big screen that I saw a movie that kept me laughing throughout. The whole arc of the movie, in which the boys discover cursing, which eventually triggers World War III and causes Satan (portrayed as an overly sensitive, neurotic gay man who just wants to be loved by Saddam Hussein) to bring his fury out to the surface is hysterical. The fact that it was done as a musical was simply inspired.

2000s

“Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” (Directed by Larry Charles) – 2006: I knew very little about Sacha Baron Cohen prior to seeing this film. When I walked out of the film he was my favorite comic actor of the decade. The balance that was struck in the movie between being so grossly over-the-top and yet so incredibly clever was amazing. The fact that the majority of the people in the movie had no idea they were the butt of a joke was funny in and of itself. But then, the jokes that they were the butt of were funny as well. I laughed so hard in this movie tears were constantly streaming down my face. One line in particular had me laughing for weeks afterward whenever I thought about it. I refuse to type the line here because of its overall crudeness, but the final three words are “sleeve of wizard.”

2010s

“Ted” (Directed by Seth MacFarlane) – 2012: Okay, we’re not quite three years into the decade, so there’s not much of a selection yet, but “Ted” was very funny. I mean, a boy’s teddy bear comes to life and it’s got Peter Griffin’s voice. You know there are going to be a lot of laughs. I especially like the scene when the parents first discover the bear can really talk and the mom pulls a kitchen knife on him. Funny stuff. Don’t know if it’s strong enough to still be on the list at the end of the decade, but for now it will do.