Shirley, You Can't Be Serious
Warming Up
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More fun with the kids on the dog walk. Phoebe was recounting a joke/observation about how most jobs rely on things going badly for us:
Doctors want us to be sick
Dentists want us to not brush our teeth
Police officers want us to commit crime
Only thieves want us to prosper.
We then spent the rest of the dog walk trying to come up with other examples, some better than others, but a fun improv game.
Teachers want us to be stupid
Lawyers want us to get accused of crimes
Divorce lawyers hope our marriages will die
Therapists want us to be screwed up
Comedians want us to be feeling sad
Wheelchair manufacturers want us to become disabled (that one from Ernie - a little bit dark).
Journalists want terrible things to happen (some of these are accepted already).
The only positive one I would think of is that insurance companies want us to stay healthy and not get robbed. Which surely means they are the same as thieves.
It's an interesting point, of course and something that I've often thought about dentists in particular. They absolutely rely on you not taking care of your teeth properly and yet every time you go and see them they act all high and mighty about your failure to floss or brush every day. We should all teach those fuckers by actually bothering to take ten minutes a day to clean our teeth properly and then see if they're so cocky. That would show them.
Anyway, here's to the thieves and the insurance companies - the only people wishing us well.
This evening we watched Airplane! with the kids. They'd seen Wayne's World when I was away and had enjoyed it, so we thought they might be ready for some classic comedy (that is actually slightly older than their mum). Ernie was a bit bored, but when wondering if it was suitable for them we had mentioned that it had some bare breasts in it and he was very keen to see that bit for some reason.
The film is mainly suitable for kids, though the bit where the autopilot deflates is a bit over that line (though still funny if you don't fully understand it) and mostly stands up (though most of the film parody is again so ancient that kids could only enjoy it on a surreal level- even I don't really know much about "From Here To Eternity" but it doesn't really affect the joke.
The film is actually a bit slower and less jam-packed with endless jokes than I remembered and the classic lines are so classic that it's hard to know if they are still funny to a new audience (Phoebe didn't laugh at too many of them - surely she can't be serious). Most of it is pretty corny and I fully appreciated this time how much the success of the film rests on the actors, especially Leslie Nielsen. He plays it perfectly straight, which is why a line "I am serious and don't call me Shirley" is so funny, because the character (who is called Dr Rumack, which is a trivia question I would never have got in a million years in spite having seen this film 50 times and the bit with the naked lady about 500 times) is ever so slightly annoyed that he's been called Shirley. In later films Nielsen would ham things up, but in Airplane! and Police Squad (which is even better and close to being the greatest TV comedy of all time) he is straight down the line and it's absolute genius.
It took me back to teenage days (not just trying to pause the video) and enjoying this film with my friends. We used to say "What a pisser!" quite a lot and I remember how funny we found it when, during the air-stewardesses song and everyone was leaning in to listen, a head appeared from the ceiling of the plane. I laughed again, but enjoyed remembering how much my friends and I laughed at that bit, back in the early 80s.
Retro RHLSTP with Paul Chuckle is now up.
AND you can watch the full FREE, ad-free video on Youtube
Police Squad! was just genius IMHO and doesn't get enough mention, over shadowed by the films which didn't work as well. The "who shot twice" bit is peak word play.
Talking of classic comedies, I watched the Monty Python films with my sons recently and was delighted by how much they enjoyed them. I thought a lot of the jokes would go over their heads, but even the 9 year old was captivated. His favourite was the bit in Life of Brian where a seemingly endless trail of soldiers bustle into a tiny house; fail to find the ridiculously badly hidden rebels; bustle out again; come back because there was somewhere they forgot to search, but still didn’t find them 😂 I frequently quote from Holy grail (‘It’s only a flesh wound!’ …) and love that they get the references. It’s interesting that yours liked Wayne’s World: I have both films on DVD but assumed it’d be over their heads. Will add it to the list to share together.