Unfunniest Movie of ALL TIME

Probably the funniest movie ever, just ahead of Borat and Me, Myself and Irene (the original cut, not the more PC version on DVD). But I can see how people born around the time it was made would miss much of the humor.

A lot of the gags are riffs on the culture of that time. Humor generally requires familiarity with a culture -- tragedy, tho, is said to be more universal. And perhaps sentiment. _Best Years of Our Lives_ may still resonate well with people of all ages.

When Dom and Marty begin to fiddle with the monitor in the patient's room in the hospital, it suddenly turns into a game of Pong. They play furiously, and the patient twitches accordingly.

Pong was the new video game then. But who remembers Pong?

Do children still have alphabet blocks?

Is everyone as aware that a leading movie star, Paul Newman, was also a serious race driver?

Is Henny Youngman's face instantly familiar?

One of the amazing things Brooks does in this movie is telegraph some jokes. This inverts a common rule of comedy. You're supposed to take 'em by surprise.

But from the second encounter Dom has with the Coke machine, you know exactly what's going to happen. And you're sort of trapped there, mingling incredulity with a kind of helplessness, "Brooks isn't _really_ going to do that, is he?" And of course he does. And it builds an even bigger laugh.

Same with the giant fly. The camera cuts to the exterminator truck with the enormous mockup of a fly on its roof. It cuts to Henny Youngman arriving at an outdoor cafe. It cuts to the furious car chase, the limo pursuing the heroes. It cuts to the truck. Then to Youngman sitting at a table. Back to the chase. To the truck. To Youngman speaking to the waiter. To the chase. To the truck. To Youngman receiving a bowl of soup. To the chase... And for what seems an eternity, you know exactly what Brooks is going to do, you marvel at his chutzpah, and the laugh builds. It's almost like a magician showing you exactly how he's going to do the trick, and astonishing you anyway.

That said, any comedy suffers the second time around because you already know the jokes. You can appreciate it for its technique, but that first laugh, extracted by surprise, is already extracted.

But it still has me chortling over it, well after seeing it. A few good comedies can do that, if the gag is good enough. Borat, Tropic Thunder too, I think.

Some are funnier in retrospect. The scene of the actors in medieval armor struggling in the studio canteen was funnier in idea than as it played. The same gag in _Married to the Mob_ somehow worked better. Yet both are very funny.

One problem is that Brooks himself isn't as interesting an actor as he is a director. He did well in _High Anxiety_, but I think Madeline Kahn elevated him, and carried him. He's fine in vignettes, but here he's at the center of the movie. It being silent, it doesn't call on him as much. Doing his famous two-hander with Carl Reiner, the 2000-Year-Old Man series, Brooks of course was brilliant. He was brilliant in all the things he did with Reiner. But at the center of a feature film like _Young Frankenstein_, I think Gene Wilder does even better.