SOYOUWANNA COMEDY MOVIES

An old rule of show business is Tragedy + Timing = Comedy. We've all seen a movie that's supposed to tug at the ol' heartstrings, but the timing is so off that everyone in the theater bursts out laughing (prime example: Showgirls). A good comedy can be so hard to pull off that we think that they deserve a little notice (despite what the Academy thinks). So without further ado, here are our choices for some top comedies.

Note that the films on our list all involve some kind of subversiveness, be it cross-dressing, political incorrectness, or the mocking of airline disasters. It's the challenging of traditional values that makes us giggle uncomfortably in our seats. And if you don't like our list, just imagine: we could have put Jerry Lewis on it. Now that would have been a tragedy. . .

1. AIRPLANE! (1980)

Airplane! has more laughs per minute than any other recent movie. Period. A parody of all of those disaster films so popular in the 70s (Airport, Earthquake, The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure…), Airplane! throws every conceivable joke, pun, and off-color insult up on the screen, and dares you to not laugh.

The plot is simple: Ted Stryker (Robert Hayes) is an ex-war pilot trying to reconcile with girlfriend Elaine (Julie Hagerty), an airline stewardess. He gets on her flight to surprise her, when the pilots suddenly get food poisoning. Despite his post-traumatic stress disorder, Ted is the only one who can land the plane.

But such an explanation drains all of the fun out of the movie. Imagine:

• Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as one of the co-pilots
  
  
• Barbara "Beaver Cleaver's Mom" Billingsley as a woman who can interpret "Jive" to the Jive-impaired
  
  
• Ethel Merman as a shell-shocked soldier who thinks he's Ethel Merman
  
  
• The airplane captain asking a 7-year-old boy if he'd ever been in a Turkish prison

And there are as many bad puns and visual jokes as the brain could possibly take in. An extremely quotable film (while a man is on the phone talking to the Mayo Clinic, the operator interrupts, saying that he has a call from Mr. Hamm on line five. The man's response: "Give me Hamm on five, hold the Mayo."), it must be watched several times to get all the punchlines.

Now, this movie is not for everybody. If you hate dumb jokes, require a plot, are politically-correct, or don't appreciate a good old-fashioned joke about fecal matter, then this definitely is not the film for you. It's brazenly tasteless, making fun of African tribes, the disabled, nuns, and bestiality. But it wears its tastelessness like a badge of honor. Courage like that must be embraced.

2. THE BREAKFAST CLUB (1985)

No matter how much you might recoil at the sight of Emilio Estevez and Judd Nelson these days, you must put away your revulsion to appreciate the full wonder of The Breakfast Club. This movie is a cultural pillar for many, many people in their twenties and thirties - and it's not their fault. Although John Hughes's work would eventually deteriorate into unbearable stupidity, leading to atrocities like the Home Alone plague, it was at its zenith with this film. The stereotypical teenagers we know and hate so much today were foreign and fresh when they debuted in The Breakfast Club: there was the popular but unapproachable rich girl (Molly Ringwald), the good-looking jock (Emilio Estevez), the withdrawn weirdo (Ally Sheedy), the outcast rebel (Judd Nelson), and the well-behaved straight-A student (Anthony Michael Hall).

Though those types may be too worn to take seriously now, the dialogue that glues this film together is still tremendously enjoyable. Think about it: the entire movie takes place in essentially one indoor setting over the course of a couple of hours - the only things this film has going for it are the characters and the dialogue. And both are great.

A generation before thirteen-year-old girls spent their weekends watching Titanic 25 times, this is the movie that withstood the same scrutiny by all adolescents. Except this one isn't insipid, saccharin, or infected with the lunatic howlings of Celine Dion. In fact, it has one of the best closing soundtracks of all time - Simple Minds belt out "Don't You Forget About Me" as the pack head their different ways. We'll never forget you guys!

Notes:

• The Breakfast Club won no awards; just the undying affection of every teenager who ever watched it

3. THE GRADUATE (1967)

Watching Dustin Hoffman lame his way around films today, you'd never guess at the depth of his comic genius. Watch The Graduate - watch it many times - to truly appreciate his humor, and one of the most intelligent comedies of all time. To the uninitiated, the phenomenon of this film is much like watching a Shakespeare comedy: all the pretentious dorks laugh ostentatiously at all the parts that you just don't get; but as you grow and watch it again and again, you'll begin to uncover the enormous amounts of humor buried in the dead-straight acting. This film was one of the first instances of comedy occurring in the absence of laugh tracks or pratfalls. This movie trusts its audience to get it, really to get it. It doesn't cue your enjoyment; it expects you to find the treasure buried deep within its deadpan lines.

The story is an old favorite of Western Civilization: boring kid gets seduced by older woman, but chucks their dynamic relationship to marry her inane daughter. Okay, so it's not exactly a standard plot, but I'm sure you could tweak it to make it Greek or Freudian or something old-fashioned. In any event, Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson is a total babe, and she's the only spark of life amid a community of the living dead. This is the film where we get the immortal piece of advice telling us that the future is "plastics." The characters in this film are plastic to the core, which only highlights Mrs. Robinson's vigor and draws us to her.

Her seduction of Dustin is a great duet in which his naivete allows us to laugh at him and the film for hours. Many have claimed that this is The Film Of The Sixties, which is interesting since it is mercifully devoid of hippies, rayon, and puke colors. But it does capture the triumph of passion over sterility… oh, and it's still something we can point at and laugh, much like the sixties.

Notes:

• Nominated for 7 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actress, and Screenplay
  
  
• Won 1 Academy Award: Best Director
  
  
• Its soundtrack, replete with songs by Simon & Garfunkel, produced many hit songs (including "Mrs. Robinson"). The soundtrack eventually won a Grammy
  
  
• Placed #7 on the American Film Institute's "100 Greatest Movies" List

4. SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959)

Why is cross-dressing so funny? Why is it so amusing to see men in dresses speaking in over-the-top falsettos, wearing fake boobies? Who cares. It's funny. And if it's done well, you have Some Like It Hot.

Often called the best comedy ever (and the highest ranking comedy on the American Film Institute's "100 Greates Movies" list), Some Like It Hot is a story about two poor musicians (Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis) in the 1920s who accidentally witness the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Chased by gangsters trying to get rid of the witnesses, Lemmon and Curtis dress up as women and join an all-girl band on its way to Florida. The lead singer of the band is Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), and Curtis immediately falls for her. What ensue are lies, deceptions, more lies, and more deceptions, with Lemmon and Curtis vamping it up as women for virtually the entire movie.

What makes the movie good is not really its plot, but its exceptional dialog and one-liners. Every other sentence is a joke, and they keep building on each other. When Lemmon (as alter-ego Daphne) gets engaged to a lecherous old millionaire, Curtis can't understand it. He says "What are you going to do on your honeymoon?!" Lemmon thinks, and replies: "I'm leaning toward Niagra Falls…"

It's also famous for making Marilyn Monroe a star. Curtis once commented that she was such a pain to work with, that kissing her was like kissing Hitler. But watching the film, you can completely see why she became an icon. She's an amazing presence.

For 1959, this film was hugely subversive. There are so many gay subtexts to this film, that it's almost amazing to wonder how audiences back then didn't see it. But it just makes the film all the funnier now. And we have to say, it has the best last line of any comedy.

Notes:

• Nominated for 6 Academy Awards (including Best Actor for Lemmon and Screenplay)
  
  
• Won 1 Academy Award: Best Costume Design
  
  
• It was shot in black and white because Lemmon and Curtis' make-up had a greenish hue
  
  
• Placed #14 on the American Film Institute's "100 Greatest Movies" List

5. TOOTSIE (1982)

Cross-dressing has always been a popular theme in pop culture. Consider Monty Python or The Kids in the Hall, which constantly involved men dressing as women. Film is no exception, with successful films like Some Like It Hot and Mrs. Doubtfire creating comedy with cross-dressing themes. Tootsie, however, is often put into another category: a movie that's funny, but not because it has a man dressing up as a woman.

Let's take a step back and see what the movie's about: Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) is an out-of-work actor who needs money. But he's so hated in New York, that he finds it impossible to get a job. His solution: dress up as a woman, and create a whole new personality named Dorothy Michaels. He quickly gets a job on a General Hospital-esque soap opera as the Hospital Administrator, and things are just ducky. Unfortunately, he falls in love with a woman who plays a nurse on the show (Jessica Lange), and she thinks he's a woman. And we're not even 20 minutes into the movie. . .

Tootsie is known for several things, but is probably most famous for Dustin Hoffman's convincing portrayal of a woman. Dorothy is not a caricature or a joke; she's a legitimately real creation. No one would look at her and think it's a man in drag. Compare this to other films, where the man in drag always seems to make a hideously ugly woman and you think: any fool would know that's a man! (Exception: The Crying Game . . . oy!)

Michael encounters several levels of conflict. Is Dorothy a feminist icon, and if so, how can he get out of pretending to be her for his entire life without making a mockery of women? How can he get the nurse to love him when he knows that she'll never forgive him for fooling her? And what about the nurse's dad (Charles Durning), who has fallen in love with him? And what about Michael's current neurotic quasi-girlfriend (Teri Garr), who thinks that he's seeing another woman because he saw one go into his apartment (of course, it was Michael as Dorothy)? Whaddamess. . .

The other thing that makes Tootsie such a success is its screenplay. It doesn't play for slapstick, and it doesn't assume that everybody is a moron. It also contains funny scenes outside of the primary story (such as Dustin's argument with his agent about whether an actor portraying a tomato should walk or not).

So in a nutshell, Tootsie is not really about cross-dressing. That's just the vehicle for analysis. Tootsie is really about how people pretend to be something other than what they are, and how managing all of those facades just causes problems. This brings us back to our original statement: the cross-dressing is not what makes Tootsie work (although it is funny). It's the believability of Dorothy as her own character that makes it great.

Notes:

• Made almost $180 million
  
  
• Nominated for 10 Academy Awards (including Best Picture, Best Actor, and two Best Supporting Actress nominations)
  
  
• Won 1 Academy Award: Best Supporting Actress for Jessica Lange
  
  
• Won 3 Golden Globe Awards: Best Picture, Actor, and Supporting Actress
  
  
• Placed #62 on the American Film Institute's "100 Greatest Movies" List