AUGUST 9 — The comedies I grew up watching – as a kid in the 1980s and as a teenager in the 1990s – can feel like they come from another planet when compared to what is being sold as comedies right now.
There were no sacred cows back then, and people could make fun of anyone, even in the most tasteless and low-brow manner.
Try doing that in this era of political correctness, woke and cancel culture, and I’m sure some internet outrage will be coming your way.
I loved the movies by the ZAZ trio (which consisted of Jim Abrahams and brothers David and Jerry Zucker) like Airplane, The Naked Gun and Top Secret, all of which can be clearly classified as low-brow or dumb comedies, but are no less funny for being so.
The 90s saw the golden era of tasteless, provocative, low-brow comedies from the Farrelly brothers, who gave us gems like Dumb And Dumber, Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary, and which also saw the rise of Adam Sandler as a comedy star with films like Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore.
These are not films that most cinephiles would be proud to admit they loved, but I wouldn’t have them any other way.
If a movie is funny, then it is funny. It doesn’t matter whether the jokes are high-brow or low-brow.
All that matters is that you laugh yourself silly watching them.
It’s been a while since I last saw a good low-brow comedy, so it’s quite a delight to find myself encountering two of these within the space of just a week, one in the comforts of home, courtesy of Netflix, and one in the great communal experience of the cinema.
Happy Gilmore 2
Sequels, especially those that are made for Netflix, can be a tricky proposition.
Because there’s no pressure to recoup the budget from ticket sales, filmmakers can sometimes take things for granted and make things on auto-pilot.
I can definitely say the same for a lot of the previous Adam Sandler movies that were made for Netflix.
Sometimes it even feels like making the movie was just an excuse for him to get his family and friends to holiday at a particular exotic or foreign location, which can even be felt in the slapdash and lazy writing and casual performances.
But Happy Gilmore 2 is definitely not one of those movies. It’s a movie that relies on a lot of the plot points (and even jokes) that made us fans of the first movie back then, because a much older Happy Gilmore here needs to start from the bottom again after a tragedy involving his wife and golf has resulted in him swearing never to play golf again.
All that changes when he needs to come up with some serious money in order to realise his daughter’s dreams of becoming a dancer and pay for her to study at the prestigious Paris Opera Ballet School.
To do that, he needs to play golf again, and this is one of those feel-good comeback kid sports movies, but with plenty of toilet humour in between.
I had a great time watching this, the jokes mostly land just fine, the dizzying number of cameos will really make you feel dizzy, but in a good way, and it’s just such a fun, optimistic movie that I feel is something that we all need right now, especially considering the state of the world we’re in now.
The Naked Gun
Considering how much I loved the nonsensical humour in the original The Naked Gun, it’s quite scary to imagine how that would translate into a re-quel (a reboot cum sequel) in 2025, but the moment the movie opened with a bank heist in which the villain blasts open a safety deposit box to retrieve his target, an item labeled “P.L.O.T. Device”, I knew I was in safe comic hands.
Director Akiva Schaffer (who previously did Hot Rod and Popstar: Never Stop Stopping and plenty of The Lonely Island music videos) is quite simply the perfect candidate to revive this much beloved low-brow franchise, confidently handling the script’s non-stop barrage of jokes, both verbally and visually, that it was such great fun laughing out loud in the cinema together with other people.
Liam Neeson is perfect as Frank Drebin Jr. (in an inspired visual gag, almost everyone in the Police Squad here are descendants of characters from the original movie), bringing his tough guy persona from Taken to play things with such a poker face that one simply can’t help but giggle (or howl with laughter) at the things that come out of his mouth like: “Who’s going to arrest me anyway? Cops? Cops don’t arrest cops!”
Watching Liam Neeson being dead serious and dead stupid at the same time throughout the movie, with able support from Pamela Anderson, is the main thing that will keep you glued to your seat, and will probably keep you coming back for more if this one becomes a hit, which will likely produce at least a sequel.
A non-stop gag machine, not everything lands here, but there’s so much being thrown at the audience that you might not even have time to think about a failed joke that you’d already be laughing at the next one. Simply wonderful.
