They say there’s a new version of The Naked Gun. Not only that, one reads, but it’s Hollywood’s first big comedy in years. The article says streaming has taken away the box office for that kind of movie, hence nothing boffo has hit since the Obama days. (No wonder Saturday Night Live stopped turning out movie stars.) Another article says this new Naked Gun recycles a lot of jokes from the old one: “The movie gets stuck evoking gags rather than inventing new ones. You spend so much time anticipating the punch lines of the past that you forget to laugh.” I saw the first movie when it came out, and the only jokes I remember are Priscilla Presley’s stuffed beaver and Mikhail Gorbachev’s forehead. Leslie Nielsen headlocks Gorbachev, rubs his forehead with a handkerchief, and Gorbachev’s birthmark comes off. Nielsen (to camera): “I knew it.” The rest of the film is long gone. All right, there was O.J. Simpson, and his character’s name was Nordberg because Simpson’s black and that’s the joke. Kind of lame, I thought.
But four decades later and The Naked Gun’s now a repository for beloved memories. I didn’t know the Hollywood comedy had become an endangered species in theaters, and I wouldn’t have thought that Naked Gun was deemed powerful enough to brave the trend. Airplane!, yes—that was great. Naked Gun struck me as a placeholder for people who wanted their same old thrill one more time. I suppose the Indiana Jones series proves that “same old thrill” isn’t a contradiction in terms, but Naked Gun makes me believe that it is. Eventually history gets tired of astonishing you and trots out whatever it has on hand, so here’s the latest from that powerful but not always inventive duo, time and change: The Naked Gun is a classic. We’re settling.
Cinema Studies. Of all the genres—noir, revisionist Westerns, regular Westerns, musicals, submarines—goofy, boisterous, zany comedies from the 1980s strike me as the biggest dud. We have cheapo Animal House rip-offs, misbegotten vehicles for ex-stars of SCTV and Saturday Night Live, clumsy attempts at joke-spraying movie parodies in the spirit of Young Frankenstein and Airplane! I guess Revenge of the Nerds was good. Back to School had some funny bits from Rodney Dangerfield. Otherwise all is bleakness.
I say Caddyshack was no good. Ghostbusters was so-so. The Blues Brothers has its musical numbers and that Aretha Franklin cameo, but mainly it’s noise. The rest? Amazon Women on the Moon, Airplane! II, Spaceball, Armed and Dangerous, Up the Academy, Dr. Detroit, Spies Like Us. Watch these films and 90 minutes feels like prison time.
A clutch of talented guys spent the 1970s showing how funny they could be, and then the 1980s demonstrating that it was all a false alarm. Except for Mel Brooks, these people had grown up during the era of joints and peace marches, when the young people and their bold ideas were going to change the world. So their output carries an extra sense of diminuendo. Instead of the counterculture, we got Animal House. Then instead of Animal House, we got Caddyshack. Anarchy turned out to be white guys making faces and pretending to fart. That’s what became of your vaunted cultural upheaval, your New Left liberation of human potential. Plus, there was The Naked Gun, which is now a classic.