The Gag that Ate Hollywood

I am pleased to report that my book has an official title. My publisher justifiably rejected the snarky titles that I, myself, suggested. I never really expected them to call the book Lies that Buster Keaton Told Me. In the end, we settled on the title The Funny Parts: A History of Film Comedy Routines and Gags. The book largely focuses on gags and routines that were introduced on stage in the Commedia dell'arte, the circus, British pantomime and vaudeville and developed to their fullest in silent films. I intend at times to make use of my blog to go off the printed page and expand the discussion into other areas. This is one way to make use of material that never made it into the book.

I became inundated with gags during my research. Some gags I liked better than others. Some I didn't like at all. But I had to catalog the gags and, even if a gag failed to make me laugh, I could at least approach it with a degree of a clinical interest. One gag was an exception. It was the one gag that went as far as rousing my ire. Look carefully at this scene from National Lampoon's Vacation (1983) and you will catch the introduction of the most overused gag of modern times.

Yes, I am speaking of the accidental deployment of the airbag (although the airbag in this faltering first effort looked more like a garbage bag). The gag was expanded upon in The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988).

Presumably, no time's a bad time for an airbag gag. This one occurs only moments after a dramatic death scene in Beverly Hills Cop III (1994).

Jim Carrey was no funnier than Murphy when, later that same year, he performed the identical gag in Dumb & Dumber (1994).

This is an impersonal gag that does not allow a comedian to distinguish himself in a significant way. It is for this reason that a movie fan expecting characterization or novelty from a comedian can quickly come to find the repeated use of this gag tiresome.

Here are a few other films in which this gag appeared:

All Dogs Go to Heaven 2 (1996)
Good Burger (1997)
Taxi 2 (2000)
Exit Wounds (2001)
Freaky Friday (2003)
Sleepover (2004)
Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)
Clerks II (2006)
Pineapple Express (2008)
The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009)

Here is the Freaky Friday version of the gag:

The airbag gag was an offshoot of a time-honored genre of inflatables humor. Overinflated balloons and tires were the cause of comic troubles at first. Later, inflatable rafts became a device for comedy. These images are from an episode of the Dick Van Dyke Show ("The Curious Thing About Women," 1962).


Woody Allen was memorably silly trapped inside an inflatable suit in Sleeper (1973).

Writers are wrong to think that, by adding a prurient twist to this overused gag, they can suddenly make it fresh and edgy. Take, for example, this scene from Scary Movie 2 (2001).

Or this scene from Family Guy:

The Simpsons and Family Guy have done a number of airbag gags.

I don't even know what to make of this American Dad clip.

No one is ashamed to recycle this gag. Within just the last year, the gag was featured prominently in the trailers for Date Night (2010), Furry Vengeance (2010) and Take Me Home Tonight (2011).

It also turned up in a recent commercial for the sitcom Traffic Light.

I feel compelled to do something to finally put an end to this. Perhaps, a strongly worded letter to studio executives will make them stop. I can get them to sign a pledge, an armistice, or something. But who am I kidding? This gag has taken on a power all its own. It has grown into this massive, snarling beast that cannot be stopped. No one can stop it - not Sumner Redstone, not Judd Apatow, not Ben Stiller, not the entire Wayans family. It is times like these that I am glad that I keep a laminated copy of the Serenity Prayer in my wallet. I need to clutch that card in my trembling hands and recite the prayer again and again as the unholy beast bangs against my door demanding to get in. I also need to delete the Lovecraft books on my Kindle.

Hand-Me-Down Cinema

This article has been updated.  Click here.

This YouTube compilation assembled by barthesian shows that a powerful film scene can get deep inside the collective consciousness and come to be regenerated in a myriad of ways.

I have gotten together a few additional scenes.

Of course, advertisers also borrow from classic movies.

The idea of a baby carriage becoming imperiled during a mob riot was played for laughs in early slapstick comedies. An early example can be found in The Curtain Pole (1909), which was produced by D. W. Griffith for American Mutoscope & Biograph. The clips presented in these compilations make it clear that the comedians have, in the end, reclaimed their old gag.

Gag Me!

I felt a great sense of relief to meet the February 1st deadline on my new book. It was an enjoyable experience exploring the rich heritage of comedy and tracing the history of gags and routines, but it was not generally the easiest task and it often took time away from other vital activities. I can say, with regret, that I gained weight by anchoring myself to my computer instead of going on my usual morning bike rides.

I come away from the experience realizing that classic comedy never dies. This point can be proven by a simple visit to the multiplex. I offer two examples.

In the manner of W.C. Fields, Robert Downey Jr. resorts to violence to deal with an annoying child in Due Date (2010).

In Gulliver's Travels (2010), Jack Black reprises a routine from Abbott and Costello's Pardon My Sarong (1942).

I would offer further examples if not for my promise to go out on a bike ride.

The Killing (2007), a 20-hour Danish crime drama, is a cross between CSI and Groundhog Day. Detective Sarah Lund (Sofie Gråbøl) expects this to be her last day with the Copenhagen Police department as she is set to move to Sweden with her fiancé, but a 19-year-old girl is found raped and brutally murdered and her superior officer asks her to stay on to work the case. She is unwilling to change her plans until she finds a clue that she feels compelled to pursue. She agrees to stay an extra day to see where the clue leads, but one clue leads to another and the dedicated detective soon finds herself absorbed by an exhausting series of clues and suspects. Never in the history of crime dramas have more suspects piled up during the course of a single investigation. Lund, hopelessly trapped in this seemingly endless murder investigation, cannot bring this intended last day of work to a close. Along the way, characters are destroyed by breakups, breakdowns, bump offs, betrayals and cover-ups.

For this American viewer, the most engrossing aspect of the series is its exotic locale. The city of Copenhagen is depicted as an ominously dark and cold place. So little sunlight gets through that it becomes hard to tell if it is night or day. This allows viewers to identify with Lund, who becomes so obsessed with the case that she stops sleeping and loses track of time. Lund's obsession causes her to lose her fiancé, who breaks off their engagement, and her teenage son, who goes to live with his father. She looks increasingly drawn and wild-eyed and her sanity is eventually called into question. The series in this way resembles the 1997 Norwegian thriller Insomnia. Clearly, life is not sunshine and flowers for these Nordic murder investigators.

I am not one of those arm-chair detectives who can easily pick out the murderer in a murder mystery and yet I knew who the girl's murderer was from the very first episode. The murderer is the most obvious suspect with the most obvious motive and, in the end, all of the complications that the story presents are nothing more than false leads, blind alleys and red herrings. But the viewer has no way to know that for sure until the last hour. In the meantime, the confounding parade of suspects can serve to make the viewer feel as paranoid and disoriented as Lund. The series shares a dramatic device of House - everyone has to lie to hide dark secrets. It becomes the job of the detectives to jackhammer past the lies to arrive at a resolution. In the end, the drama remains addictive even as feints prolong the action and reoccurring formula tricks move the story into occasional self-parody.

One dramatic device that became laughable in its overuse was the-meeting-broken-up-by-a-cell-phone-call. Throughout the series, facts are introduced, conflicts arise and twists are sprung by way of coldly formal meetings that have characters sitting across from one another with lips tightened, eyes narrowed and hands folded. The series introduces these meetings, one after another, as suspects are interrogated, witnesses are questioned, victims are notified, experts are consulted, bosses are briefed, and colleagues strategize. Even a conversation between a husband and wife assumes the formality of a meeting - one spouse tells the other that he or she wants to "sit down and talk" and the couple then sit across a table from one another to discuss the topic at hand. But then a cell phone suddenly goes off, shocking news is delivered, and characters rush out of the room. No one seems to be aware of simple cell phone etiquette or the fact that a cell phone has an "off" switch.

The story also unfolds from the perspective of the victim's parents, who struggle to cope with the tragedy, and a local politician, who has been linked to the murder. Bjarne Henriksen and Ann Eleonora Jørgensen, as the grieving parents, stand out among a compelling cast of veteran Danish actors.

AMC will debut an American remake of The Killing in April. This version will only be half as long as the original, which means that many characters and subplots will be missing. The new series was shot Vancouver, British Columbia, which is meant to serve as a stand in for Seattle, Washington. It remains to be seen if the Vancouver/faux-Seattle setting can offer the same sort of cold and dark atmosphere as Copenhagen.

A Sampling of Comedy Films from 1908

My research on comedy routines had me poring through 1908 to 1921 editions of Moving Picture World to glean plot details from the magazine's "Stories of the Films" and "Comments on the Films" sections. It was fascinating to see the way that the trends in comedy films changed from year to year. Pivotal changes were clearly evident in the 1908 releases.

A Pathé Frères comedy Une Belle-mere emballee (released in America as Runaway Mother-in-Law) is a slapstick style mother-in-law joke. The film opens with a mother-in-law barking orders at her family as they move into a new home. At one point, the woman pauses to take a rest on a two-wheeled cart loaded with family possessions. The woman accidentally slips the cart's brake loose and proceeds to ride the cart at rapid speed down a steep incline in the street.

A trend in prank comedies produced a Vitagraph comedy called Buried Alive. A young man, bored with the sun and sand at Coney Island, has his friends hide him under a mound of sand so that he can play pranks on the other sunbathers. When a baby is placed on the mound, he heaves his stomach to make the baby bounce up and down. When sweethearts sit on the mound to kiss, he pops out of the sand and stares blankly at them until they have become thoroughly unnerved.

An unlikely hero comes to the fore in the Lux comedy The Bewitched Tricycle. A thief looks to make a getaway by stealing a tricycle delivery cart, but he finds that he is unable to turn the handlebars to steer. The cart takes the thief on a wild ride through busy streets and finally delivers him into a lake, where he is apprehended by the police.

A number of other fantasy comedies on the schedule made use of the novel effects offered by the film medium. In Wonderful Fertilizer, fertilizer gets into a little girl's drink and causes her to grow to the size of a giant. These imaginative and outright silly films are the forerunners to many later films. The Bewitched Tricycle and Wonderful Fertilizer can be linked, respectively, to The Love Bug (1968) and Honey I Blew Up the Kid (1992).

The general release schedule for 1908 shows that effects-driven comedies, the sole objective of which was to present impossible spectacle, were on their way to being replaced by slapstick comedies. The Bewitched Tricycle is interesting in that it attempted to combine the two forms - it had the wild action of Runaway Mother-in-Law and the magical action of Wonderful Fertilizer. But the magic was to contribute more subtly to the comedy in the coming years.

Smoking in the Laundry

The Danish Film Institute preserved this excerpt from the Ham and Bud comedy The Winning Wash (1915). More than half of the footage is missing, but the plot is simple enough that it doesn't matter much. The tramps, as crude and violent as ever, are astoundingly able to acquire work at a Chinese laundry and are delighted to find a roll of money in a customer's pants. A similar plot was used in the Three Stooges' Sing a Song of Six Pants (1947). The highlights of Hamilton's comic improvisation occur after the tramp burns his backside on an iron and later when he shares a smoke with a dope fiend.

Sleepy Time

Inception (2010) is regarded as revolutionary, state-of-the-art cinema and yet strong parallels can be found between this film and another film made more than seventy-five years ago. Peter Ibbetson (1935), a sentimental fantasy directed by Henry Hathaway, features Gary Cooper and Ann Harding as ill-fated lovers who find themselves driven apart when Cooper is sent to prison for murder. The couple comes to rely on a telekinetic link to carry on their passionate romance inside a dazzling dream world. Cooper, who finds that he can control their new surroundings, builds Harding a castle made of clouds and stardust. The world crumbles when Cooper loses his faith in the dream, but he is able to recover his faith and rebuild everything as it was before. The lovers grow old together and Harding, dying in Cooper's arms, tells Cooper that they will continue to be together in death. The couple's ideals - "death-cannot-separate-us" and "we-must-be-together-forever" - are no different than the morbidly obsessive romantic notions that are central to the plot of Inception.