10 Best Conservative Movies

National Review, which did such a wonderful job identifying hidden conservative messages in rock songs a few years ago, has now come up with a list of the Best Conservative Movies. Although their list for the most part sticks to derrièrist principles by not including too many difficult movies, for some reason they named The Lives of Others, a boring foreign film I've never heard of, as their number one movie and even included a tedious talky independent film like Metropolitan. They did include The Dark Knight, however, which should head off angry emails from fans and derrièrist critics who think it was the greatest movie ever made. Of course, I would have included The Dark Knight on my list, too, as well as such conservative classics as Brazil and Red Dawn, but there are so many great conservative movies, I decided not to duplicate anything that appeared on their list. And while their list only included films of the last 25 years (probably because the editors of National Review haven't seen any movies older than that), I also included a few older movies; but don't worry, none of them are in black and white (except for one, but give it a chance; it gets better).

Neither of our lists is definitive. I'm sure you can think of a lot of other great conservative movies. Feel free to mention them in the comments. Some of the other great conservative movies I might have included that didn't quite make the cut include The Grapes of Wrath, Birth of a Nation, Norma Rae, Easy Rider, Slumdog Millionaire, and Showgirls, just to name a few. But these lists are not meant to identify every great conservative movie. The real purpose of these lists is to show that conservatives are actually normal people, who love movies and rock music and video games, who talk a lot about hot women and what we would like to do to them if we were able to get any of them in bed and who use a lot of baseball and basketball metaphors just like regular guys. Hopefully, lists like this, and sites like Big Hollywood, will help change the unfair image of conservatives in the media so that one day we'll be able to say, "You like me! You like me!"

1. Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)
Dan Quayle's favorite movie, featuring the film debut of former Nixon aide Ben Stein (who discusses the Smoot-Hawley tariffs and the Laffer Curve in one of the film's most moving scenes), Ferris Bueller's Day Off is perhaps the greatest conservative film ever to come out of Hollywood. Matthew Broderick plays Ferris Bueller, who decides he has had enough of liberal indoctrination and skips school on the day of a test about European socialism in protest. "I'm not European," he says. "I don't plan on being European. So who gives a crap if they're socialists? They could be fascist anarchists, it still doesn't change the fact that I don't own a car. Not that I condone fascism." Although liberal Hollywood often tries to caricature conservatives as dorks or villains, someone like Ferris Bueller is who conservatives actually see when we look in the mirror. Someone who is handsome and adored by all the "sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, waistoids, dweebies, dickheads." Someone who is really, really cool. And, sure, we might total your father's Ferrrari or invade your country without enough troops or trigger a temporary economic meltdown, but we're actually really lovable, the kind of guy you want to have a beer with. And really, really cool.

2. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)
Why aren't there more films for children that celebrate free-market capitalism? Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a Horatio Alger story about Charlie Bucket, a poor kid who learns that in the free-enterprise system everybody has a randomly equal chance to find a golden ticket (though some special people, like Veruca Salt, have more randomly equal chances than others because a level playing field would be socialism). After finding a golden ticket in his chocolate bar, Charlie meets Willy Wonka, an entrepreneur who has built his candy empire through constant innovation, corporate espionage and cheap labor. Wonka takes Charlie and some other lucky kids on a tour of his factory and gives them a quick lesson in basic economics. His factory is a consumerist paradise, where everything is consumable, although as one unfortunate child learns, consuming beyond your means can get you sucked up into a giant tube. In a free market economy, the kids learn, some will succeed and others will end up as giant blueberries. "Don't forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted," Wonka instructs Charlie, imparting the film's most important moral lesson. "He lived happily ever after."

3. Home Alone (1990)
Like some of the other films on this list, Home Alone works on several levels. On the one hand it's a family-friendly comedy about an adorable little boy, played by Macaulay Culkin (before he grew up and got weird), fighting off home invaders. But on a deeper level it is a parable about what would happen if we didn't have a Second Amendment. Luckily, Culkin is able to fend off the incompetent criminals who try to break into his home by using ingenious homemade weaponry, but not every little boy in America is as clever as Culkin's screenwriter, John Hughes. If you went on vacation and accidentally left your child at home, wouldn't you feel a lot better if you knew there was a loaded gun in the house that your child could easily access? I know I would. Unfortunately, gun control extremists want to take away our Second Amendment rights by passing all kinds of laws mandating child safety locks and banning assault weapons, rendering our nation's pre-adolescents defenseless. I think the NRA should remake this movie but this time give the little boy a gun. It would be a very short film.

4. Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Although a number of liberal critics with their minds in the gutter slandered it as a "gay cowboy movie," Brokeback Mountain is actually a wonderful paen to the virtues of American masculinity. Ranch hand Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Rodeo cowboy Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) are no metrosexuals. They are men's men who love nothing better than engaging in such manly pursuits as camping and fishing and rounding up sheep in the great outdoors. Although both are married and have kids, is it so surprising that they feel more comfortable in the company of other men, resisting the feminizing influences that have polluted our culture since the women's movement? Unfortunately, liberals aren't able to accept that two men can be really good friends without adolescently snickering and insinuating behind their backs that they are gay. They certainly don't act gay. If going fishing with your buddy makes you gay, then a lot of men in America must be gay.

5. Weekend at Bernie's (1989)
Although some might dismiss Weekend at Bernie's as a wacky comedy about young insurance executives who drag the corpse of their wealthy boss around and pretend he is alive, it is actually a penetrating allegory about the evils of the death tax (which liberals euphemistically refer to as the "estate tax"). Is there really that much difference between defiling the dead by taxing their wealth after they die and propping up someone's dead body, putting sunglasses on him and dragging him around the beach pretending he's drunk? Can't liberal vultures just let deceased millionaires pass their estates on to their pampered progeny without government tax collectors extracting their pound of putrefying flesh? Although Weekend at Bernie's is certainly a delightful comedy on one level, it just makes me so mad sometimes when I think of the policy implications that I want to yell at the screen, "Leave Bernie's heirs' trust funds and tax shelters alone!"

6. Wizard of Oz (1939)
Long before homosexuals waved rainbow flags and Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition fomented racial hatred, Dorothy (played by Judy Garland, who later devolved into a pill-popping gay icon) took a nightmarish, drug-fueled trip over the rainbow to a hellish, multicultural dystopia called Oz. Throughout the Wizard of Oz Dorothy is desperate to flee the perversions of Munchkinland, Afghanistan-like poppy fields and urban ghettos of the Emerald City and return home to safe Republican Kansas, where morality is clearly delineated in black and white. At the end of the film when a big government wizard fails to get her back home, she discovers that all she has to do is pull herself up by her own ruby slipper straps. At a time when the great imperial Obama tells us that we need government to help us solve our problems, we should remember what Glinda the Good Witch of the North, tells Dorothy -- that she doesn't need government handouts to help her when she can just get what she needs by clicking her very own pair of ruby slippers and wishing really hard.

7. Starship Troopers (1997)
One of the problems with a lot of liberal Hollywood war movies since Vietnam is that they get all caught up with trying to see the enemy as human beings and depicting war as morally questionable. But Starship Troopers brilliantly spares us all the distracting moralism by stripping war down to its essential elements. It accomplishes this by reducing the enemy to nasty alien insects who look really cool when they blow up so that we can see war in its purest form as the glorious adventure it actually is. Although President Bush accomplished some of the same goals by banning photography of flag-draped coffins and limiting the press's coverage in the battlefield, the war in Iraq would probably have been even more popular if he had been able to convince the American people that the Iraqis were actually giant bugs. Maybe with all the CGI technology we have now a future President waging a future war will be able to do just that.

8. Patch Adams (1998)
It's too bad advocates of socialized medicine don't subscribe to Reader's Digest, which for years has taught us that "Laughter is the Best Medicine." Based on a real-life doctor, Patch Adams, starring Robin Williams in one of his most delightful roles (Williams is so much better in films where he has a director who restrains him), is about a doctor who did have a subscription to Reader's Digest, and realized that all the cheap pharmaceuticals illegally imported from Canada in the world are no match for comedy hijinks. Unfortunately, government bureaucrats try to shut down his comedy clinic just because he is practicing medicine without a license. Although Patch Adams eventually wins his case, imagine if we had socialized medicine and a lot of humorless bureaucrats were given the power to require doctors to have medical degrees and ban them from wearing big red noses and funny glasses or replacing bed pans with whoopee cushions. That's not the kind of America I want. So the next time some liberal complains about the 45 million Americans who are uninsured, spray him with water from the flower in your lapel and send him to see this movie.

9. Planet of the Apes (1968)
Planet of the Apes is based on an intriguing premise: What if evolution were true instead of just an unlikely theory? In this film apes have "evolved" to the point where they talk, wear clothes and walk upright. Evolutionists would have you believe that monkeys are our uncles so if you evolved them a little, then it would stand to reason that they would be just like us. And the apes on this planet sure seem human at first but as the film unfolds we see that there is nothing very human about these animals at all. No matter how you dress them up or how many words of English you teach them in the end they're still just "damned dirty apes," as Charlton Heston discovers. I don't think I've ever seen a better refutation of Darwin's theories.

10. Jaws (1975)
The next time your annoying animal rights activist friend cries and moans about bunnies and puppies and kitties being tortured and murdered in medical labs, pop Jaws in the DVD player and show him what animals are really like. Animals are not really cute and loveable little creatures, living together in harmony in the forest, as animal rights activists would have you believe. Many of them are vicious, amoral killing machines like the shark in Jaws, who would like nothing better than to bite PETA members in half given the chance. Jaws dares to tell the truth about animals. That's why we call them animals. By the end of the film your fauna-hugging friend will be cheering as loudly as you are when the nasty shark is finally blown to smithereens. Then you can take them out for nice hot bowl of shark-fin soup.

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The Triumph of Derrièrism

Last year I identified an important new school of film criticism, which I called “derrièrism,” since all schools of film criticism are supposed to have French names. Derrièrists are inspired by Jack Warner (though some say it was Harry Cohn), who once said that he judged movies by whether his ass shifted in the seat while he was watching them. Like Warner (or Cohn), a derrièrist film critic judges movies by his ass. As I wrote last year: "Derrièrists are tired of liberal elites telling us what is good for us. They are tired of movies that are depressing and pretentious and difficult." At the time Variety magazine hailed derrièrism as “provocative” theory and said my piece “represents to some degree the thinking of the younger male online film community that recently voted for their Top 100 films,” whose virtues I extolled in my piece. While derrièrism was once an esoteric school of film criticism championed by a few forward-thinking critics, this year it has triumphed. Not only has Andrew Breitbart, the conservative Hollywood critic behind Breitbart.com, announced that he will start a new website, Big Hollywood, which promises to be a hotbed of derrièrist film criticism, such respected film critics as Roger Ebert and the critics at Cahiers du Cinema have jumped on the derrièrist bandwagon.

Breitbart’s site will feature film reviews and criticism from some of this country’s leading derrièrist film critics, people like House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner, Minority Whip Rep. Eric Cantor, Reps. Thaddeus McCotter, Mary Bono Mack and Connie Mack, former presidential candidate Fred Thompson, MSNBC correspondent Tucker Carlson and conservative commentators Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and others. According to The Hill, “If Boehner, for instance, sees a movie, ‘I’d like for him … to do a movie review,’ Breitbart says. ‘Not everything is going to be a political dissertation,’ he says. In that vein, Cantor spokesman Rob Collins says he could see his boss writing a post on the television shows his three teenage children watch and how those programs affect them.” Breitbart wants to bring back the kind of crowd-pleasing movies Hollywood used to make, which encouraged people to pay their credit card bills on time. “The movies used to reinforce good behavior — that you should pay back your loans,” he says, apparently thinking of such films as The Grapes of Wrath, It's a Wonderful Life and Salt of the Earth. Because Breitbart's site will not pay its writers that should encourage good behavior like thrift.

Breitbart also wants Big Hollywood to change the image of conservatives in Hollywood, where they are cruelly oppressed. “We’re not bigoted, homophobic, racist, sexist monsters,” says the new blog’s editor-in-chief, John Nolte, the proprietor of Dirty Harry's Place. Nolte, who says that gay marriage “has nothing to with ‘rights’ and everything to do with hate, the tearing down of tradition, and seeking yet another excuse to attack conservatives and religion,” and who wrote after J.K. Rowling outted Dumbledore, “English and Gay is like Japan and China: you can’t really tell the difference,” is known for his trenchant film criticism. Although he has never seen such minor, really old movies as City Lights and The Passion of Joan of Arc, that hasn’t stopped him from weighing in on such important questions of film scholarship as whether Deuce Bigelow or The Searchers is the best film ever made.

While Big Hollywood should be a welcome relief from critics who think they know a lot about movies just because they have seen a lot of them, even some of the most respected film critics in the world have succumbed to derrièrism and are pulling film criticism out of their asses. Roger Ebert has seen his influence wane since he left At the Movies and was replaced by hipper, younger derrièrist critic Ben Lyons, who called I Am Legend “one of the greatest movies ever made” and named Superbad, which he just happened to have an acting role in, one of the ten best movies of last year. Then in October of this year Ebert joined the ranks of derrièrist critics with a big splash. He wrote a savage one-star review of the gay film Tru Loved after sitting through only eight minutes of it. It was only at the end of the review that he revealed he hadn’t watched the whole thing or even very much of it, so if readers got bored and decided they didn’t want to sit through Ebert’s entire review, they wouldn’t know how much of the movie he hadn't seen. Although Ebert’s editor wanted him to disclose this fact at the beginning of the review, Ebert argued that it would ruin his carefully constructed artistic prose if he did that. “I thought that would have made the review anticlimactic,” he said.

Ebert was slammed by some critics such as Margaret Nowak, who gave a derrièrist critique of Ebert’s derrièrist review: “After learning that Roger Ebert defends writing a full-column review based on an 8-minute scrap of film, I don't feel so bad about not reading movie reviews. I give a cursory glance to the score rating the movie received, and move on.” Ebert, however, was not amused: “I find it charming that Margaret Nowak was able to arrive at her scorched-earth opinion of me without reading either the review in question OR my linked blog entry that was posted simultaneously with the review on the same page.” He called her review of his review a “cheap shot.” If Nowak had just spent eight minutes reading the beginning of Ebert's review, she might have seen the error of her ways.

Unfortunately, under pressure from anti-derrièrists, Ebert eventually apologized for the review, watched the movie and wrote a new review. Derrièrist Ann Althouse was disappointed by Ebert’s capitulation to the anti-derrièrist mob, writing, “Walking out is an important form of judgment.” Althouse is one of the leading proponents of the idea that you don’t have to see or read something or really know much about it at all to criticize it, which has given hope to other aspiring critics who, like her, have the attention span of a two-year-old.

Unlike Ebert, Cahiers du Cinema had the courage of its convictions and defended its list of the 100 greatest movies of all time. Abandoning its support of the tired old theory of auteurism, the critics at Cahiers put together a list steeped in derrièrism, which included not a single boring Tarkovsky film or any British movies at all, relegating such tedious efforts as Brief Encounter, Lawrence of Arabia, The Third Man, and The Red Shoes to Le ashbin de l'histoire.

But it wasn’t just snooty French critics who embraced derrièrism. Entertainment Weekly published a list of 100 “classics” of the last 25 years that included only six excrutiatingly dull foreign movies. By redefining the word classic, EW was telling us that we don’t have to bother watching dreary old movies when we can watch such new and improved “classics” as The Breakfast Club, Naked Gun, The 40 Year-Old Virgin and Ghostbusters instead. Meanwhile, Premiere.com, which started out as the website for a print magazine whose articles no one ever finished, this year introduced a new and improved template for film reviews made up of what bitter former Premiere writer Glenn Kenny calls “thematic modules.” But even Kenny could not resist the derrièrist onslaught and gave this ground-breaking approach to reviewing a shot, applying it to one of the most boring films ever made, Au Hasard Balthazar:

"The Pitch: A donkey in provincial France gets passed from owner to owner until it, like, dies.
What It Really Is: Apparently, a "meditation" on life, suffering, and grace, and that kind of stuff….
Can We Be Serious For A Moment?: Seriously? What this movie really needed was for Andy Samberg as Mark Wahlberg to show up and have a nice little chat with Balthazar."

Kenny has a long way to go before he reaches the scholarly heights of one of the deans of derrièrist film critics, John Podhoretz. Podhoretz didn’t bother to see Stop-Loss, yet another anti-war-in-Iraq movie, before he reviewed it because what would be the point? “It is high time to cease the armchair analysis of those who refuse to attend war-in-Iraq movies and ask them directly to explain their behavior,” writes Podhoretz, who then moves from the armchair to the divan to begin his analysis by interviewing himself. “I'm about to turn 47. I have seen thousands of movies in my time. Life is too short to spend even two hours in a theater watching Stop-Loss. Its virtues are, I expect, that it is very well made, with vivid scenes of terrifying battles in the streets of Karbala or Falluja--and touching moments of reconciliation. There's probably a well-done scene in or just outside a Wal-Mart. Its failings are that it tells a schematic story that stacks the deck.” Podhoretz was able to figure all this out from “three trailers and a few minutes watching Showbiz Tonight.” Podhoretz also wrote an entire column extolling the virtues of watching movies on an iPod: “Say you're watching a bad or boring movie on a subway train, a movie you nonetheless want to get to the end of. A distraction or two is not a bad thing; the movie turns into a radio show for a moment as you survey the other passengers. And if a homeless guy comes through asking you to help him in the name of Jesus, you can turn right back to the iPod, confident he will pass you by.” Isn’t that what movies are for anyway, to distract you from homeless people?

Sadly, one of the great proponents of derrièrism, Libertas, went defunct this year, but not before its founder Jason Apuzzo denounced the film WALL-E, which attacked everything derrièrism stands for. “Conservatives are understandably up in arms about what is apparently depicted in this film,” wrote Apuzzo before he had actually seen it. In the film humanity is depicted as a bunch of dim-witted, materialistic couch potatoes, which derrièrist film critics saw as a personal attack on their lifestyles.

Patrick Goldstein said the film slandered “the American way of life.” “If Michael Moore, or Oliver Stone, or, God forbid, some effete French director, had crafted a feature film that was a thinly disguised political broadside portraying Americans as recumbent tubbos who moved around on sliding barcaloungers with built-in video screens and soft drinks always at the ready, don’t you think there’d be some sort of notice taken?” wrote Bill Wyman, who is no film theorist. “I’m no film theorist, but I think what director Andrew Stanton is trying to tell us is that we humans eat so much and limit our movements to such a degree that we will soon become immobile whales unable to focus past the video screens permanently affixed in front of our field of vision.” Shannen Coffin lamented, “From the first moment of the film, my kids were bombarded with leftist propaganda about the evils of mankind.” And a reader of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism blog helpfully pointed out the film’s fascistic elements, such as the use of the color red, which was one of the colors on the Nazi flag and should never be used in a film unless accompanied by the colors white and blue.

Next year promises to be even better for derrièrism as many critics realize, like John Miller, that you don’t actually have to sit through all four hours of Ché to attack it. And who really wants to see crazy left-wing actor Sean Penn kiss a guy in Milk no matter how good his performance is supposed to be? I’m sure most critics would rather watch over and over again the oiled-up, musclebound actors of 2006's 300, a “classic” that brought back the “lost art of cinematic masculinity,” according to John Nolte, and wasn’t the least bit homoerotic no matter what left-wingers say. Why doesn’t Hollywood make classic movies like 300 anymore?

Crossposted at Newcritics

Update: The left-wing New York Times weighs in. And Roger Ebert replies: "The acid test of the ancient distributor's definition of a great picture--'a tukkus on every seat.'" Meanwhile, Josh Taylor writes "Note To Awards Givers: Ignore The Dark Knight At Your Own Peril," which may come to be known as one of the great manifestos of derrièrism: "Film critics can no longer afford to champion pet films which no one has ever seen, at the expense of what even they have to know is probably the better film. Here’s why: They’re all about to be out of a job....For print critics, a vote against The Dark Knight is a vote for your own irrelevancy. It’s a vote for the unemployment line."

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My Favorite Comedy, Explained

The folks at the wonderful site Newcritics are holding a Comedy Blogathon from November 6-11 and they have asked me and other bloggers to answer the question, "What is the purest comedic moment you have ever experienced?" (And they are also calling for entries from anyone and everyone who wants to participate. Answer the question on your blog and send your links to M.A. Peel at josquin21@aol.com.) Because Jon Swift is a nominee for Funniest Blog in the 2007 Weblog Awards, I often get asked, "What's funny?"

Of course, nothing makes comedy funnier than to explain it. I often find that I don't get a lot of jokes until someone explains why they are funny, and sometimes not even then. According to scientists, this is the world's funniest joke. I still don't know why it's funny, but when I find out, I will probably laugh for a very long time.

The study of laughter is called Gelotology, after the Greek word for JELLO, nature's funniest food. Aristotle believed that only humans laugh, but scientists have discovered that other primates, rats, dogs and, of course, hyenas also emit sounds that might be called laughter. Although cats do not laugh out loud, many scientists believe that they are quietly snickering at us on the inside, though this has not been proven definitively. At one time physicians believed that laughter could be therapeutic. Reader's Digest even had a column once called "Laughter Is the Best Medicine," but most reputable scientists abandoned this theory after the movie Patch Adams actually made many people sicker. In fact, a number of people have reportedly died laughing, including Pecos Bill, King Nadabayin of Burma, Damnoen Saen-um, a Thai ice cream truck driver, and Alex Mitchell of King's Lynn in Norfolk, England, whose last laugh was triggered by a Scotsman fighting a black pudding with his bagpipe. Comedy is a serious business and could be dangerous if not handled carefully.

In order to scientifically analyze just how comedy works I'm going to dissect one of Woody Allen's funniest films, which is probably my purest comedy moment. Unlike many critics, I prefer Allen's older, funnier movies and I don't think he has ever topped his 1978 comedy Interiors. Interiors, which is about the madcap antics of three artistic daughters (Diane Keaton, Mary Beth Hurt, Kristin Griffith) dealing with the disintegration the marriage of their parents (Geraldine Page, E.G. Marshall), was influenced by the films of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni. Bergman and Antonioni were often considered to be the pranksters of European art cinema until their recent deaths within a day of each other, which may have been their final practical joke.

A lot of Interiors' humor comes from the cinematography, which can make or break a comedy. Interiors takes place for the most part in darkly lit interiors (a visual pun, get it?) and uses a lot of black and white, which are probably the funniest colors. That is why black-and-white comedies are usually funnier than color movies. The movie also uses a lot of red, which is the third funniest color. The least funny color, of course, is blue, which is why getting the blues means being really sad. Green is also a not very funny color (which explains the name of the completely humorless Green Party), while orange is usually good for a giggle or two. There is quite a bit of controversy about yellow, however. Is yellow funny? That is a question that has haunted jokesters for centuries. I think yellow can be funny if used sparingly. A dollop of mustard skillfully applied, for example, can be quite comical.

Another thing that makes Interiors such a rib tickler is that the characters hardly ever laugh. A joke is usually funnier if the person telling the joke keeps a straight face, which is why Harvey Korman and Tim Conway on The Carol Burnett Show were so excruciating to watch, as you can see for yourself in these very unfunny clips. The actors in Interiors play it straight all the way through, which just makes the comedy build and build. If you watched Interiors with a laugh track it would be a completely different film. Allen must have done multiple takes of some scenes so that the actors did not crack up in the middle of a scene and break character. I would love to see a blooper reel of Interiors to see if I'm right.

There is one scene where the characters laugh at a joke that has just been told, but we don't hear the joke, which is yet another example of Allen's genius. Although it may sound counterintuitive to a layman, many experienced comedians will tell you that actually telling a joke can sometimes ruin the joke. I can't tell you how many times I have seen young comedians who didn't understand this simple rule and insisted on telling a joke when they would have been much better off not telling the joke at all. Not telling the joke forces the audience to imagine what the joke might be, and nine times out of ten the joke they imagine is much funnier than any joke the comedian could have told.

Although Interiors is usually known for its slapstick and physical comedy, the wit of Allen's dialogue should not be underestimated. Allen is an expert at comedic wordplay and there is no shortage of it in Interiors. One line that always slays me is when Mary Beth Hurt's character says, "At the center of a sick psyche is a sick spirit." What makes this line so funny? It's obvious to anyone who knows anything about comedy. Give up? It's the alliteration of the "S" sound. S is probably the funniest letter in English, followed by the K sound, which also appears in this line, compounding the hilarity. (In Cyrillic Zhe (Ж) is the funniest letter and in the Xhosa click language it's the "ngq" sound, although some experts make a convincing argument that the glottal fricative "hh" is even funnier. It may just be a matter of taste.)

The number three appears a lot in Interiors and this is no accident. As any funnyman will tell you, three is the sacred number of comedy. There are always three people walking into a bar, not two and not four. The number 276 is also pretty funny but it's hard to work into a joke so it is rarely used. A joke in which 276 people walk into a bar would certainly be funny, but it would take a very long time to tell. Some mathematicians claim that the imaginary number 3i is also very funny but no one has yet been able to work it into a joke, as far as I know, although some students at MIT reportedly have tried.

In a recent episode PBS's American Masters about Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, Schulz said that what makes people laugh is suffering. I think Woody Allen would agree and what he once said about life could also be said about his film Interiors, that it is "full of misery, loneliness, and suffering -- and it's all over much too soon."

I have to admit that the first time I saw Interiors I did not get a lot of the jokes. I remember my initial reaction to the film was, "Is this supposed to be funny?" It was only after seeing the film a number of times that I began to realize just how funny it was. Often it is the case that if a comedy is not funny the first time you see it, it becomes funny after you watch it again and again and again. This film taught me everything I know about comedy and made me realize that if your first reaction to a joke is "Huh?" that often means that it is a very good joke indeed. In fact, the world's oldest joke is a Jewish joke found in a clay jar and written on ancient papyrus not far from where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Scholars are still studying this joke and not one of them has laughed yet. It may turn out to be the best joke of all.

Crossposted at Newcritics. Illustration by Blue Girl.



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