Comedy About Comedy

Rating: Null/10 (17 September 2003)

Spoilers herein.
This works, but it hurts.
The first rule of movie comedy is that you have to integrate the funniness of the players, the funniness of the skits and local situations, and the wrapper of the story. This last is where nearly all movie comedies fall down, and where this one succeeds.
We have a couple masters at being funny just being: they are allowed to create skits that are manic. This is great stuff that Brooks let his guys run with. Even within the skits, there are levels: Wilder as observer, Leo Bloom. (The James Joyce joke is intended, as was the Kafka.)
But the master touch was the story itself: a play about a play with all the action inbetween the two layers. Part of the layering is the deal about the writer of both the play and the film as Nazi. Brooks would never again be as clever, or as willing to personally be the butt of the joke.
But there's price behind this joke. The gag is supposed to be the same as in Chaplin's `The Dictator:' preening evil as ridiculous. Brooks wants to be seen as edgy and on topic both, but watch what he really does in the story, the stuff that is apart from the comic geniuses of Mostel and Wilder.
He pokes fun at gays. Incessantly. This sort of undermines the counternazism, doesn't it?
He has a mild but pervasive blue humor: the svedish secretary, the horny old birds.
He makes fun of Germans in a borrowed `Hogan's Heros' way, but not for their ideas or politics. What's funny about pretzels and beer?
The more you look at `Dictator' and `Producers' the better they both seem: Chaplin's sheer courage (which cost him his entire livelihood and homeland) and Brook's structure. But that structure has no courage, no edge, no advance. Just integration.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.