52 Essentials: No. 5, The Naked Gun: From The Files Of Police Squad! (1988)
Welcome to Maps & Legends, a project by two new parents looking forward to sharing our favorite art and culture with our new edition. Each week in this space, we'll pick a personal favorite of ours (or at least a favorite of one of us) and write about what it means to us and why we're excited to pass it down.
The past two entries in this series have been pretty heavy, which maybe isn't surprising given what's happening in the country these days. Still, I figured this series could use a little levity, so this week I'm talking about a comedy, maybe one of the greatest comedies of my childhood: The Naked Gun: From The Files Of Police Squad! (available on Amazon). In particular, I've been thinking of the time I saw that movie with my dad in the theater and I heard him laugh maybe harder than I had ever heard laugh before (maybe even since).
I'm not sure what's harder to get my head around--that I was only ten years old at the time or that my dad was only forty ... just a couple of years older than I am now. That's a thirty-year gap between us, which can be pretty insurmountable when it comes to comedy. Maybe you could say that most films don't age well, but comedies in particular seem to have a hard time translating beyond their time and place. Hollywood understands well enough that comedies don’t “travel well" across national borders from a box office point of view, and I'd say the same holds true across generations as well.
Taking a quick look at the comedies that would've come out around the time my dad was ten (that is, 1958-1959), only two sound remotely familiar--the certified classic Some Like It Hot and The Shaggy Dog (which I may be confusing in my memory with the expression "a Shaggy Dog story"). Of those two, I've seen the former, and it stood up well. But then, it's also considered one of the greatest films of all time by many. I have never heard of any of the rest even in passing, and I have zero interest in seeing any of them based on the plot summaries. So I can't really expect that Max will have any interest in checking out the comedies of my youth, or--for that matter--that I'll likely have any interest in watching whatever Max will consider funny when he's ten. (Probably some rapid-cut absurdity that will make MTV look deliberately paced and Tim and Eric look coherent in comparison, if current trends are any indication.)
But then, sometimes comedy can transcend generational boundaries. Sometimes things are just that funny. Things like an inept, blowhard detective knocking out a opera singer in order to ineptly perform the National Anthem at a baseball game, only to then knock out an umpire in order to ineptly call the game.
My dad has a strong gregarious side. He loves a good party and laughs heartily at a good joke. He's also a chuckler, mostly over political shenanigans from a generally "conservative" point of view. He definitely has a stoic side too, though, and it's not easy to catch him losing control. Watching that scene together was one of the few times that I did.
At the time, I can't say I thought all that much about it. My ten-year-old brain knew Naked Gun was funny as balls, and seeing as I was sitting next to my dad, I was mostly relieved that the humor moved away from sex jokes for at least a bit. But, like Some Like It Hot, I think Naked Gun may just be one of the all-time greats and can withstand a little dissection to get at what was really going on in the theater that day.
On the one hand, the entire movie is chockablock full of physical pratfalls and visual gags--the kind of humor that's as shallow as it is wide when it comes to mass appeal.
But on the other hand, it also has a deep side that becomes pretty clear when you spot the direct callbacks, like this scene pulled straight from a Dirty Harry movie:
It's clear that Frank Drebin's ineptitude as a detective wasn't just goofy for its own sake. It was a direct and pointed commentary on the shoot-first-ask-questions-later "action cop" model popularized in the crime-riddled late-1970s and jacked up to absurdity and self-parody by the mid-1980s. That hyper-authoritarianism of the Reagan Era could be seen as a direct and natural reaction to the excess and (at least in some respects) self-destructiveness of the anti-establishment movements of the 1960s and 70s. What's really amazing about this cultural flip-flop, though, is that it was the very same Baby Boomers leading the charge in both directions.
Maybe the contradictory nature of the Baby Boomer generation isn't so surprising. On the one hand, they were born out of the Depression and World War II, two existential threats to America that required unprecedented government intervention in the domestic and foreign spheres to overcome. There may be no other generation in the country's history that has owed its existence so directly and overwhelmingly to Big Government. They were brought into this world with promises of upward mobility and an ever-brighter future, only to become fodder in a seemingly endless series of overseas quagmires while their leaders were either assassinated or impeached.
My parents and the Baby Boomers in general ended up with a pretty odd mix of sentiment and suspicion of the establishment. What other generation could elect a Hollywood actor for the highest office in the country, a Strong Man authoritarian who simply forgot that he'd never actually served in the armed forces (outside of a sound stage, that is), and who assumed leadership of the government by infamously declaring that "government is the problem"?
Who else, that is, but a generation that revered public service as much as they were (and are) repulsed by public servants ... or is it the other way around?
It's an incongruity to be sure. But then, returning to Naked Gun, humor is all about incongruities. Or so one theory of humor goes. "The sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing", in the words of Immanuel Kant. It's funny because it's unexpected. On the other hand, there's also the famous adage, "It's funny because it's true." I'd say both apply to Frank Drebin's short but memorable career as an umpire.
Another thing about my dad--he loves baseball. It's something I didn't really appreciate as a kid because the sport never spoke to me on a personal level, let alone sitting around watching other people play the game. And while I laughed throughout the entire movie the first time I saw it, I had nothing on my dad's unbridled hysterics over the umpire scene.
Looking back now, I think I get it. Loving the ideal of the game at the same time that you constantly question the integrity of those who are charged with maintaining it. It's the perspective of a generation raised to revere institutions that ended up failing them time and again, even to the point of sending them to their deaths for a lost (and arguably pointless) cause. Frank Drebin's bumbling outing as an umpire, making a mockery of the game he was responsible for calling, might as well have been every police officer, every politician, every symbol of authority who--despite their best intentions--had no idea what she or he was doing. Who in fact threatened to destroy the very thing they were charged with upholding and protecting.
It's funny because people in authority aren't supposed to act so incompetently. And it's funny because it's true that they so often do.
Or maybe it's funny because it's just silly. So very, very silly.
In any event, I don't think I ever connected to my dad like I did when we laughed together. Comedy is hard to translate. When you can find something that makes you laugh with someone else--a deep, uncontrollable, sincere laughter--you hold onto it. We have "inside jokes" with each other. Not "inside observations", or "inside conclusions." Laughter is it's own language, universal and perhaps ultimately impervious to translation. Whatever was going on in his mind below the surface, or in my mine for that matter, we were laughing together. I hope I'll laugh like that with Max some day. Those are moments that I'll hold onto tight.