‘Hey! It’s Enrico Pallazzo!’: The Fall of Comedy | The American Spectator

“Hey! It’s Enrico Pallazzo!”

Quick! In less than three seconds, identify the 37-year-old comedy from which that movie line spawned. How about this line from a 38-year-old flick: “Those aren’t pillows!” Here’s an easy one that’s almost as old as me (50): “Bring out your dead!”

If you named the original Naked Gun; Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (PTA); and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, you’ve identified excellent — not just good — comedies.

Unsurprisingly, nobody will remember a shred of dialogue from the Naked Gun reboot. I swore off seeing it after the trailer dropped. Nothing against Liam Neeson, who spoofs his gruff-talking Taken character as bumbling Police Lt. Frank Drebin Jr., but seeing him eating chili-dogs, and then driving around and farting while desperately seeking a bathroom, declaring, “I’m gonna ruin another suit!”? No, thanks.

The film premiered earlier this month and has garnered positive Rotten Tomatoes scores. YouTube movie reviewers praised it as laugh-out-loud hilarious. Against my better judgment, I walked into the theater thinking, hoping, maybe I was wrong. (I wasn’t.) One line stood out not because of its wit, but its crudeness: Drebin says Pamela Anderson’s bottom “would make any toilet beg for the brown.” Worse, scenes depicting faux oral sex and bestiality may have garnered chuckles (humor’s as subjective as anything else), but represent the lowest form of lazy comedy.

Movie comedies aren’t dead; they’re dying due to terrible writing and directing.

David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker, the writers behind Airplane!, and the first two Naked Gun movies, would never have penned such dreck. The Zuckers had nothing to do with this new Naked Gun, and it shows. But writing alone doesn’t account for the original film’s longevity. Direction and camerawork helped considerably, like when Leslie Nielsen’s Frank Drebin unwittingly walks onto a baseball field to sing the National Anthem. The camera cuts to Nielsen’s terrified face in the foreground and the sprawling, sold-out upper deck in the background to emphasize the situation’s enormity. That shot lasts for a second, but the original Naked Gun subtly frames plenty of jokes that way.

Gone is John Hughes, who wrote and directed PTA, and authored Christmas Vacation and practically every solid comedy from the 1980s and early 1990s. His foreshadowing of PTA’s John Candy and Steve Martin’s doomed trek down the wrong way of an interstate highway, with a brief shot of two distant, oncoming semis blaring their horns, elicits laughter without a spoken word.

Objective critics who separate art from reprobate recognize Woody Allen as a comedic genius. Allen’s character Milo in 1973’s Sleeper awakes from two centuries of cryogenic hibernation, and says, “My doctor said I’d be up and on my feet in five days. He was off by 200 years!” (That matches up to “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the war room,” from Dr. Strangelove. But that’s me.)  Milo masquerades as a robot in a socialite’s home, leading to one of the funniest scenarios in Allen’s oeuvre. He continues to make films, but you’ve likely never heard of them because he’s been canceled.

Perhaps that’s why comedies are less memorable. Plenty of people opine that Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles couldn’t be made today because of its deliberate racism (written to mock it — a fact lost on many) that would trigger the BlueSky/X hordes.

The Daily Wire attempted risqué comedy with Lady Ballers, a spoof on men competing in women’s sports and, while not strictly a comedy, Am I Racist?, last year’s top-grossing documentary, which offer hilarious moments. Mainstream critics responded predictably. But if off-the-charts Rotten Tomatoes audience scores are any indication, regular moviegoers who understand real life isn’t social media crave these movies.

Indecent, cringe-inducing comedies can stand the test of time. Borat slots into that category, as does the original Dumb and Dumber. Superior writing and directing can go unnoticed without superb acting. You might not know George Gallo and Martin Brest. Still, they wrote and directed, respectively, the action-comedy Midnight Run, the success of which derives from them and the performances of Robert De Niro and the late Charles Grodin.

Name any comedy since 2010 (The Hangover was 2009; The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Anchorman were 2004/2005, respectively) that comes close to being remembered for generations. Happy Gilmore 2? Any recent Judd Apatow production? Please.

This is Spinal Tap remains popular today because the spoof documentary of an aging British rock band features ad-libbed, hilarious acting and musical performances by Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer. In a few weeks, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues hits the silver screen to chronicle the band’s final performance.

The trailer had me laughing. I’ll be in the seats, hoping they can recapture some of the original film’s brilliance. And if not, Spaceballs 2 is a few years away.

Unlike the first one, I won’t hold my breath that the Schwartz will be with it.

READ MORE from Matt Manochio:

What Can We Expect from a Mamdani Administration?

Karine Jean-Pierre: A Day With the President