Hilarious comedy, template for many others

Rating: 8/10 (26 August 2005)

This brilliant comedy very much set the template for the later teen comedy epidemic of the 1980's. While "Animal House" may have been what set off the boom, "MASH" created the formula for the cadet/frat comedies like "Animal House", "Revenge of the Nerds", "Stripes", and "Police Academy". The essential elements of the formula are all here - a bunch of buddies hell-bent on having a good time and getting laid get into conflict with strict, arrogant but inept authority figures and their henchmen; the buddies play various pranks against the scheming henchmen and eventually triumph over them, getting the girls, showing up the henchmen's incompetence and demonstrating the buddies' hitherto unappreciated but substantial talents. Maybe "Sgt Bilko" and "Hogan's Heroes" once attempted to cover similar comedic ground, but "MASH" introduced the frat boy elements of erectile tissue, hazing, drinking, partying, sport and pranks.
For some reason this film is often described as an anti-war film. That might have been the intention of the director and the once-blacklisted writer, I'm not sure, but the film itself is nothing of the sort. The war never intrudes on MASH life except for the gory surgical scenes with unconscious soldiers. You never see any suffering from the war itself, and you are never introduced to the patients as individual people. Far from making war look like hell, it looks like a never-ending frat party, with only a few surgical operations and a couple of easily-pranked tight-asses interrupting the fun. Just because it is set in a war situation without having the usual war film heroics doesn't make it an anti-war film. Perhaps because of the film's year of release, it seems that the sort of humourless tight-asses that this film mocks insist on reading into this comedy a serious content that isn't there.
No, this film is very much a comedy, and a truly hilarious one whose belly laugh hilarity hasn't dated. As such, structural issues which are important for dramas like plot, characterisation, and continuity simply don't matter here, so it's churlish to complain about them.