Comedy is a hard thing to do. Gauging the shelf life of the laughs on-screen may be even harder.
Some films open like gangbusters, but are soon forgotten in the fray of constant product. Consider The Waterboy or Meet The Fockers, two films that have places on the Top 20 Highest-Grossing Comedies of All Time. Though they’ll forever be box office gold, who can recall the really funny scenes from either? Now consider Meet The Parents, a financial success from its opening weekend on and one that will also be remembered as one of the best comedies of its time. There are scenes most all can recall, i.e. the dinner table scene with the prayers and the cat pissing on the mom’s ashes. Films like this are few and far between.
Where most comedies live is somewhere else entirely. Somewhere void of initial success, where the range of quality is as wide as the Grand Canyon, stretching from ambitious failures like Funny People to lowest-common-denominator disasters like Bio-Dome.
But perhaps the rarest “somewhere” comedies can live is exactly where Herbert Ross‘ My Blue Heaven resides: a critically, commercially unsuccessful comedy that finds a second coming on cable television, only to be considered a “diamond in the rough” years later. Don’t forget to include Richard Donner’s Scrooged and Amy Heckerling’s Johnny Dangerously on that exclusive list as well.
My Blue Heaven concerns an uptight FBI agent (Rick Moranis) who must protect a key witness/flamboyant mobster (Steve Martin) while wooing a recent divorcee (Joan Cusack). At first glance, it’s silly and ridiculous and over-the-top. At second glance, it’s still all of those things, but all of those things done brilliantly.
And why is it brilliant? How is it brilliant?
Who knows?
Somehow, Martin’s performance here works better than most any other performance he’s ever given. Likewise, Moranis’ “ordinary man in an extraordinary situation” schtick can’t fail. Though he mostly plays straight man to Martin’s Vinnie Antonelli, when he’s got jokes, the jokes pop. Consider a scene in which he and a young Bill Irwin, his FBI partner, go undercover to bust a drug ring: even as the FBI Chief speaks to them about their progress, Irwin’s agent won’t step out of character, constantly calling Moranis’ character his undercover name Dickie. He says it one too many times when Moranis steps out off the bathroom and says simply: “If you call me Dickie one more time, I am going to kill you.” It’s an easy punchline to an easy joke, but a laugh that’s hard to forget.
For every memorable line from Moranis there are 10 from Martin. His mobster is the best kind of parody, one that takes on a life of its own. Think of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat for reference. What starts as a mockery of genre and convention becomes exactly what it’s mocking: a clever piece of style. Little touches, such as Vinnie’s constantly-moving hands while he talks or his obsession over well-cut suits, make the Italian stereotypes endearing, like something funny your grandfather always does during Christmas dinner.
As such, it’s all family-oriented and void of gross-out gags. In a word: wholesome. Every year My Blue Heaven inexplicably gets funnier and funnier, moving further and further up the “comedic diamonds in the rough” list. Perhaps it’s a comedy that was “before it’s time.” Or perhaps it’s just timeless.
Have you seen My Blue Heaven? What do you think?