Welcome to April Fools Month: Comic mysteries.
Here’s the thing about mixing mystery and comedy: you’re trying to mesh a serious threat to humanity, real tragedy, with laughter. It can certainly be done, but usually you have to sacrifice either the light-hearted part of comedy (see Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang) or the tragic part of murder (see Trenchcoat), and either choice kneecaps that part of the genre. So while we’ll be sticking to our six main points, we’re also going to be looking at the choices the writers made as to what to sacrifice. Mel Brooks let go of tragedy without a backward glance in High Anxiety (the next two aren’t really deep either, but then they didn’t want to be), but there’s some stuff going on in the last two movies that will hold up under a closer look. Mostly we’ll be looking at how these movies did or did not make death a laughing matter in order to steal what works for our own books. Just kidding. Kinda.
Our schedule for posting podcasts:
(Ignore what we said in the podcast about doing Hot Fuzz first; this is the schedule.)
April 2: 1977 HIGH ANXIETY (streaming on Amazon)
April 9: 1982 DEAD MEN DON’T WEAR PLAID (streaming on Amazon)
April 15: 1985 CLUE (streaming on Amazon)
April 22: 1998 THE BIG LEBOWSKI (streaming on Amazon and Netflix)
April 29: 2007 HOT FUZZ (streaming on Amazon) Warning: Lots of gore in this one
2 responses to “Comic Mysteries”
I loved all these when I first saw them (except Dead Men.. which I’ve never seen). Of all of them, Clue was one of THOSE films – it was the default thing to watch when there was nothing else on. The previous year I had a housemate addicted to Dirty Dancing, so it was a definite improvement from that.
I loved Hot Fuzz, it’s one of my favorite movies. My friends and I laughed so hard at it. Those guys are so clever. It will be interesting to see how it holds up to scrutiny.