Patrick Stoner...
welcomes your questions about movies
and the people who make them.
Send your questions to pstoner@whyy.org.
Here's the current question and answer...
Q: Spoofs [like THE NAKED GUN and BRADY BUNCH series] have been popular in recent years. What makes a good spoof?
A: Seriousness ... and I mean that seriously!
This is true of all farces, but it is particularly true of spoofs. When you are doing over-the-top humor, the one quick way to kill the comedy is to "wink" at the audience, i.e., to let them see that you're just playing with the concept. This is often done by amateurs in plays and, sadly, by professionals who have got to establish their personal cool with the audience.
When someone performs a spoof perfectly, he or she will treat the character and the situation as if it is absolutely real. The "straighter" it's played, the funnier it is. The humor should come from the dichotomy between the image of reality and the situation's ludicrousness. If the actor doesn't treat the world around him as if it's real, then there's no tension between the normal and the absurd.
Take the two examples in your question. Leslie Nielsen took the same kind of characters he had played dramatically for over a quarter of a century and spoofed them. As Leonard Maltin said in his review of THE NAKED GUN, "... a deadpan, dead-perfect Nielsen is Lt. Frank Drebin, the stupidest law officer since Inspector Clouseau." (Cloueau is the character Peter Sellers played "seriously" in THE PINK PANTHER.)
Even though Nielsen had hundreds of truly serious acting credits in film and TV, he played Drebin without the slightest smug look or gesture. Instead, the farcical plot exploded with hilarity around him, and the spoof of all of those TV crime shows -- several of which starred Leslie Nielsen -- succeeded.
Ironically, that's also why the later editions of THE NAKED GUN series have not come up to the level of the original. Leslie became a cult hero, and the temptation to put him him in ever more ridiculous situations without remembering to keep his treatment of the character grounded in reality was too great. So, cheap slapstick laughs substituted for good farce from time to time. Finally, in the latest release, they began recycling earlier jokes.
More recently, the sequel to the successful BRADY BUNCH MOVIE opened. This is a very specific farce since it doesn't just spoof genres (as AIRPLANE did with disaster movies) or types of programs (as THE NAKED GUN did with cop shows). It takes an American TV icon and not only spoofs it, it adds the twist of placing the spoof of the cast in modern, nasty America. The potential for disaster here is obvious: There is so much that one can lampoon about the Bradys that you run the immediate risk of being pathetically obvious.
Instead, the actors approach the characters with as much conviction as the originals brought to the sitcom, while understanding the necessary adjustment in comic timing that makes it work. It is precisely BECAUSE the Bradys are played so straight that the outlandish conceit of such a crew surviving on our mean streets is so funny.
So, the next time you see a comic actor in a farce, judge them on the basis of their seriousness, ironic as that may seem.