Go Ahead. Make Me Laugh

By RICHARD CORLISS

Stay out of my way. Send the kids to Grandma's. I've just seen the latest comedies, and I'm in no mood to laugh.

Those who know me will testify that a good joke can launch me into giggle fits; a valentine can set me weeping; nearly any episode of The Simpsons can do both. So I am no emotional slug. When I enter a movie theater, I bring high spirits and modest needs. I merely say, as Clint Eastwood might, "Go ahead. Make me laugh."

America feels that way too. Comedy, as Hollywood has long known, is the most reliable movie genre. It can make a bundle but doesn't cost one. No one need spend $100 million on a comedy. But audiences will pay that much in just two months to see City Slickers, Billy Crystal's cowboy caper. When a comedy is a hit, everybody smiles.

And in Hollywood, everyone heads for the Xerox machine. Used to be that moguls would tell their minions, "Gimme the same, only different." Now they skip the different. But this doesn't work for comedy, which is based on the shock of wit. A joke is a story with a surprise ending; it should explode like a novelty-store cigar. It fizzles when the gags are sequeled and recycled. Why pay $7 for a summer rerun?

An air of desperation hangs over much of Hollywood comedy, and it may be due to the exhaustion of several formats. Last winter John Hughes' Home Alone became the all-time surprise comedy hit. Now three more Hughes movies have come and -- quickly, ignominiously -- gone. Career Opportunities, Only the Lonely and Dutch together have grossed $35 million, just one-eighth of Home Alone's take. Suddenly audiences are tired of Hughes' cute family strife. Streaks end. It happens.

Mel Brooks' winning streak lasted through the '70s. But people are avoiding Brooks' Life Stinks, a kind of Homeless Alone about a billionaire on the bum, as if it were trying to wipe a rag across their windshield. Brooks' old colleague Gene Wilder has fared no better with Another You, in which he plays a compulsive liar coupled in a complex scam with con man Richard Pryor. On its second weekend of release, this mediocre jape averaged a pathetic $262 per screen; that's about 50 people in each theater all weekend. With those numbers, a moviemaker can go broke, and an usher can get awfully lonely.

And a critic can get blue when considering other comedy styles and stylists:

The Saturday Night Live Wires. Saturday Night Live and SCTV unearthed a generation of gifted farceurs and mimics. The farceurs displayed their oversize personalities on TV, then did more of the same in Hollywood. John Candy, for instance, plays the jolly lug, coping with crisis by wearing it down. In his O.K. new movie Delirious -- the season's second daytime-drama parody, after Soapdish -- he is a soap-opera writer who is knocked silly and dreams that he is a prisoner in his own show. The premise is frail, but Candy gives it his usual shrug-it-off assurance. No big deal. No problem.

The SNL-SCTV mimics -- Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Martin Short -- did have a problem. On TV they hid like a subversive subtext inside their brilliant impersonations. But in movies an actor doesn't disappear; he displays himself. So Short has put his mimetic, improvisatory genius on hold and marketed one facet of his personality: the winsome whiner.

Short on a roll, skyrocketing jokes and impressions on David Letterman's show, is a wonder to behold. Short in his painful new movie, Pure Luck, is a shame and a waste, like a pianist in a straitjacket. In this search-for-a- missing-heiress comedy co-starring Danny Glover, Short plays the world's unluckiest man, and the picture is one long physical humiliation. Get creamed, register pain, get up. Repeat ad nauseam. Somehow Cary Grant survived an entire comedy career without having to walk into a door and squash his nose against it. But the elegance of Cary Grant has been replaced by the gooniness, pratfalls and infantilism of Jerry Lewis. What has Hollywood degenerated into, France or something?

The Dictatorship of Dumb. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure was perhaps the stupidest picture ever to have a sequel. Valley dudes Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted "Theodore" Logan (Keanu Reeves) lurched through time corralling the likes of Lincoln, Freud and Genghis Khan, all to pass a history test. The comedy was so comatose it could have been made by the kids it was about. The idea of a sequel was not promising; it was a threat.

The mild pleasure of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, snappily directed by Pete Hewitt, is that it leavens one's despair about the California school system with some low-octane inventiveness. Bill and Ted are killed by their evil twins. They go to hell, which is not what they expected: "Yeah, we got totally lied to by our album covers." They play chess -- well, Clue and Twister -- with Death (William Sadler), whom they address as "the Duke of Spook, the Doc of Shock, the Man with No Tan." Bill and Ted will never replace Hope and Crosby, but at least they are no longer the Twits with No Wits.

All That ZAZ. In 1982 the comedy writer-producer-director team of Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker devised a bright cop-show parody called Police Squad! Seven years later, they expanded the premise into a movie: the hit The Naked Gun. But doing a sequel to a remake of a TV series can make sense only to accountants. The scattershot style of the ZAZ zanies is reminiscent of Mad comic book at its mid-'50s apex. But, guys, Mad didn't do sequels! Especially one like The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear, which reprises jokes from the old show and boasts no fewer than three set pieces involving people stuck inside or under runaway vehicles.

Maybe the ZAZ boys -- or at least Abrahams, working with Naked Gun co- screenwriter Pat Proft -- needed to pillage a new genre. Hot Shots! begins as a parody of the daredevil fly-boy anthem Top Gun, with Charlie Sheen as a tough Navy pilot and Valeria Golino as his gorgeous psychiatrist. But its glancing anarchy cannot be confined to one target. It makes derisive strikes on Dances with Wolves, Gone With the Wind, Rocky, 9 1/2 Weeks, The Fabulous Baker Boys . . . if somebody made it, these guys make fun of it. Handsomely too: the film is as good-looking as its game cast. Not the least attraction of - this delightful lampoon is that it compels you to pay attention at every moment -- scanning the frame for, say, soldiers doing what looks like a number from A Chorus Line. More poignantly, Hot Shots! may remind you of the richness of film comedy. It is a heritage that, at this late sorry stage, deserves not just parody but revival. Until then . . . sigh . . .

Anyone for a night at the old movies? You make the popcorn; I'll bring my tapes of The Lady Eve and His Girl Friday. We'll have some good laughs and feel better.