Parody rules the night on TCM as Murder by Death is followed by The Cheap Detective, both starring Peter Falk. Murder by Death is a parody of the Agatha Christie style mystery in which a group of detectives, including a couple of Agatha Christie knockoffs of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, are called together to solve the mystery of their own murders, as each succumbs to individual traps, while The Cheap Detective goes for the noir target instead and both were penned by famed playwright Neil Simon. But do they work? Not just these two, but genre parodies in general?
Parodies are a bit of a Catch-22. They’re often not very funny on their own if you don’t get the jokes. To get the jokes, you need to know the genre. If you know the genre, the jokes come off as too broad and poorly representative of the genre. So, to get the jokes, you need to know the genre. But if you know the genre, you probably won’t think the jokes are very clever. To solve this conundrum, most writers, notably Neil Simon, Mel Brooks, and the Abrahams/Zucker team, go for the broadest possible humor and the biggest, easiest to hit targets. Throw in a few obscure references so the genre fans can feel appreciated but make the rest funny to the general public. Still, another problem persists. The humor can’t go off in a direction of the writer’s choosing, that is to say, it can’t evolve on its own, it has to stay within the confines of the parody. For instance, in a classic comedy like It Happened One Night, the movie starts off with more outright setups and punchlines (i.e. Clark Gable confidently contends he’s the world’s greatest hitchhiker, Claudette Colbert shows him up) but later, it evolves into a more solid relationship story in which the Gable character clearly falls for Colbert’s character and the final quarter of the movie contains little outright setup/punchline comedy while the audience hopes these two finally get together. With a parody, it’s different. Young Frankenstein, as good a parody of Universal horror as you’ll ever find (and, no, there aren’t many in contention, I realize that), must nevertheless restrict itself to a very limited plot. Mainly, it has to mimic the plot of Frankenstein movies, specifically in this case The Son of Frankenstein, and to that end, while it may make jokes within the story structure that are of its own making, the structure itself is not.
Speaking of Universal horror, Abbott and Costello did a great job of parodying it, too, in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, although their work wasn’t as deliberate as Gene Wilder’s and Mel Brooks’ work with Young Frankenstein. With Abbott and Costello, the Universal horror characters (Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, and the Wolf Man) were simply a way to get Abbott and Costello to perform as Abbott and Costello normally would, only this time with the horror characters as the straight men. Maybe that’s why Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein works as well as it does, because the humor isn’t based on the subject, it’s based on the actors’ personas. Using the right actors in a parody is often a good bridging method between the hard core genre fans and the general fans, since the genre parody itself isn’t sold as hard.
Take The Cheap Detective. I’ll be honest, I don’t think it’s very good but it does have the right actor in the role, Peter Falk, and because of that, I like the movie, even though I don’t think it’s done very well. Peter Falk makes it work because the movie isn’t just playing off of the parody of old noirs, it’s playing off of Peter Falk as Columbo, too. In another noir parody, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, Steve Martin has no noir persona to play off of so, like Abbott and Costello or Gene Wilder, he has the option of playing himself and making that a part of the joke (“It’s the jerk as a detective!”) or playing the role straight and hoping the parody works on its own. He and co-writer/director Carl Reiner choose to have Martin play it straight, as a noir detective and, for me at least, the parody isn’t strong enough to make that work. Steve Martin as the clueless goofball interacting with deadly serious noir characters might have worked better but we’ll never know. And talk about confining: The movie has to make its plot work based on the insertion of actual scenes from old noir movies matched visually, with varying degrees of success, to Steve Martin in the newly filmed reactions. I’ve always wanted Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid to work but it never does. I watched it again a couple of years ago and it still didn’t feel like it ever gets its groove.
Parodies are a tough thing to pull off. If you make your target too narrow, you restrict yourself too much. If you make your target too broad, you lose the genre audience you’re trying to entertain. Two good examples of both of those from the same director are High Anxiety and Spaceballs from Mel Brooks. In my opinion (obviously, it’s my blog post but I always like writing that anyway), neither works at all. High Anxiety is taking a single director’s work (Alfred Hitchcock) and trying its damnedest to stay within those confines while having a lead actor, Brooks himself (he and Wilder had had their falling out by this point and Brooks took over the lead rather than cast someone else), not up to the task. The manic panic (now I’m rhyming) the character engages in for many of the scenes (the bird attack, the crazy nightmares) are perfectly suited for Wilder and not Brooks and it shows. Especially the scene where Brooks repeatedly asks for the newspaper from bell boy (future director Barry Levinson). It’s a clear reversal of the Gene Wilder shtick of being asked for something repeatedly (he does it in Young Frankenstein and Silver Streak, where he asked if he needs anything to drink before bed or anything more to buy before getting on the train, with both scenes climaxing with Wilder shouting, “Nothing!”) only in this case, it would be Wilder doing the pestering. With Brooks, the joke fell flat (and the follow up Psycho joke falls even flatter). The subject is too specific and the actor mismatched. In Spaceballs, the target, the Star Wars saga, had a rabid audience that would not only have gotten every possible in-joke and minutely detailed reference but would have rewarded the film with multiple viewings. But this time, Brooks went broad, as broad as possible, to the point that the movie doesn’t feel like a parody of Star Wars at all. It feels like a Mel Brooks movie with wacky characters vaguely resembling those from Star Wars. As such, Star Wars fans didn’t find much funny about it (unlike Robot Chicken which revels in precisely detailed in-jokes about minor Star Wars characters to the delight of fans) and Mel Brooks fans probably wondered why he was bothering with this setup at all.
I’ve barely scraped the surface of parodies at this point so I’ll let the discussion continue in the comments. I will add that, as a general rule, parodies in classic Hollywood tended to revolve around the actors’ personas in unique genre circumstances (Abbott and Costello, The Marx Brothers, Will Rogers, etc) while later parodies tended to go for a bombardment of specifically confined jokes based on the subject being parodied (Airplane, The Naked Gun, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, etc). As the popularity, or memory, of a given actor’s persona fades, the ones based on that suffer more than the ones going for the all-out genre assault. Too bad because, in the long run, I think I prefer my parody watered down, where I can watch Abbott and Costello being themselves reacting to something rather than watch generic characters make endless clever references. Except that the latter of those often tend to be a lot sharper. It’s a problem, but not a serious one. In the end, we can all probably just laugh it off.