Yes, I can spell. I was sitting (well, more writhing) through a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the city last night. It was a production ‘aimed’ at children - and might I add it failed to go off. ‘Aimed at children’ means they glossed over all the cleverness, virtually all of the good jokes, and all the best bits of dialogue and story and suchlike. Despite this, the play-within-the-play in the last scene was still funny. Hilarious, at points. Not as good as over versions I’ve seen, but the fact that this lame troupe STILL managed to get some good laughs out of it shows how great a piece of comedy it really is.
So then, I nominate that scene as the funniest ever, tied with the stateroom scene in The Marx Brothers’ classic A Night at the Opera. What’s the funniest scene there is, in your opinion? Could be book, movie, play, diorama, I don’t care. What makes you laugh the most?
The Simpsons… Episode where homer invents various different things…
The makeup gun. giggle
He points the thing at Marge and pulls the trigger it blasts her face with make up and blows her hair back at the same time. The way she looks and how she yelps “Homer you had it set for whore!” forced me to laugh so hard I almost missed the next part. Homer then says sorry (or something like that) changes the setting on the gun and then points it at Marge again she parrys the gun away and he fires on the wall. It blasts a makeup face on the wall that again made me laugh. I laughed so hard that for the next 15 minutes my wife and kids thought I was crazy.
I gota go with the simpsons where homer tries to build the barbecue… He lays the cement, then picks up the box of parts, which splits opern and falls in the cement. So he quickly picks up all the parts and dumps them on the wheelbarrow full of bricks… which then tips over and falls in the cement. So he tries to construct it before the cement dries. He picks up the instructions looks at them and says “English side ruined! Must use French instructions… ‘Le grille’? What the heck is ‘le grille’??”
Maybe the first time I saw the “Black Knight” sequence in The Holy Grail. Part of it was sheer disbelief that someone actually filmed a scene like that.
FAR too many to give good justice. A couple of quickies…Henny Youngman in Mel Brooks “Silent Movie” for just the setup. Gene Hack man as the Blind Man in “Young Frankenstein”. Lloyd Bridges in “Airplane”. Jeff Bridges nailing the brace against the wrong side of the door in “The Big Lebowski”. LOTS more.
Skin Deep, a mostly forgettable movie with John Ritter, has one unforgettable scene where he is about to make love to this hot woman and he is wearing a glow-in-the-dark condom. Hilarity ensues when the woman’s boyfriend shows up wearing a glowing condom of his own. The shot is entirely dark except for the two glowing, umm, members that bob up and down and chase each other around the room. I almost passed out from laughing so hard.
The scene in High Anxiety where Mel Brooks is examining a patient to verify that he indeed has a severe psychosis with symptoms that includes hallucinations of werewolves. Harvey Korman as the unsrupulous doctor produces plastic Halloween werewolf fangs and silently terrorizes the man from behind Brooks, snatching the fangs from his mouth and “acting natural” whenever Brooks turns to face him.
Just watched Buster Keaton’s ‘the Photographer’. There’s a scene with Buster and another (somewhat larger) guy in the same - very small - changeroom trying to change into bathing suits. I think it goes on for about five minutes, but every second is worth it. Their clothes keep falling off the hangers, they change places, duck out of view, bang each other on the head etc - and of course end up swapping bathing suits. Buster goes on to the pool wearing a suit that could easily fit two of him and the other guy gets one of those signs-to-explain-what’s-being-said from the warden: ‘What’s that? A bathing suit or a bib?’
Great physical comedy.
Apart from that, the first couple of chapters from ‘the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’, where Arthur Dent is unaware that his house is about to be demolished and goes around the house in his morning stupor looking out the windows and thinking ‘yellow’ at the sight of the bulldozers. I seldom laugh out loud at books but that one gets me every time.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, during the “Knights of the Round Table” dance sequence. The knights sing a line and then a few bars of music play. The camera cuts to a scene in the dungeon, where a prisoner is hanging from a wall, bound at his wrists. With the tips of his fingers, he claps along with the beat.
Austin Powers in Goldmember, Austin accidentally disconnects the power to a fountain. Unfortunately, the fountain involves a statue of a boy peeing into the water. To avoid being caught, Austin has to hide himslf behind the statue and force himself to pee into the water. Hilarity ensues.
The first episode of Eight Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter, a boy shows up to pick up John Ritter’s character’s daughter for a date. The boy says, “Nice to meet you, Mr. Hennessey.” Dad says, “Oh, please. Everybody calls me Paul. [eyeing boy suspiciously] Or, Sensei, because of my black belt.”
The first time I saw So I Married An Ax Murderer. Specifically, the scene with Mike Myers as the Scottish father, busting on the big-headed kid watching TV. I swear I almost passed out.
“Head!”
“It’s like an orange on a toothpick!”
“He’s goin’ ta cry himself ta sleep on his huge pilla!”
Another scene I love from High Anxiety is the one where Harvey Korman and Chloris Leachman - by the way, who on Earth would give a child this name - are plotting against Mel Brook’s character over lunch. The joke is entirely visual: the camera is beneath the table (which is glass), and every time someone puts down a plate or a cup, the camera moves out of the way, and the table keeps getting more and more crowded. The scene is played completely straight minus the camera movement and the incongruous snacking as they make their plans. And finally it ends with Chloris saying “Finish your strudel” about as evilly as you can and blocking the rest of the table with a big platter. Might be the only subtle joke Mel Brooks ever did.
Now that I think of it, the Springtime for Hitler scene, no matter how many times I see it, is uproarious. The dancing swastika gets me every time.
One if the early Simpsons where Homer Bart and Lisa convince themselves that there is a zombie in the house and Homer nearly shoots marges head off when she comes through the front door, " There may be a zombie or zombies in this house "
Holy Grail , John Cleese and his never ending run up to the castle gates and then the mayhem when he actually gets there.
Spaceballs, the whole bit where there is a mad chase through the space-ship and in the end after a spectacular stunt where the good guys dive through a rapidly closing door into a dead-end room, the bad guy turns to face them and find out he has actually captured their stunt-doubles.
A Fish Called Wanda: Palin, the animal activist, trying to kill the old lady witness, but killing her yippy dogs, one-by-one. His reactions are priceless.
The funniest thing EVER is from the Chatterbox radio show in Grand Theft Auto 3. The caller is some redneck who compares uh… “urban dishes”. He talks about the relative merits of eating animals like opossum and squirrel. The first time I heard it, I missed everything after this bit because I was laughing too hard.
Laslow (the host): Do you have anything else to say?
Stephen Banks had a special on HBO or Showtime or something like that back in the late 1980s called “The Stephen Banks Home Entertainment Center.” That is one of the funniest hours I have ever spent on this earth. I had a tape of it at one time, but I’ve lost it in the intervening years.
The whole thing takes place in Banks’ “apartment;” he’s left his mindless corporate job early one day. The boss calls, wanting a speech Banks was supposed to have written and which the boss is supposed to deliver that night. Banks can’t find the speech, so he has to write it in an hour. Being a highly imaginative corporate slacker, of course he does everything in the world except write the speech.
At one point, he’s playing a variety of Western-style tunes on a harmonica while enacting a little morality play on the top of his desk. A plastic cowboy moseys on “stage” and, to the accompaniment of “happy” harmonica music, Banks has the cowboy create a “ranch:” some plastic fences, a couple of cows, etc. But there’s trouble in Dodge – the cowboy is menaced by a plastic Indian. They have a “gunfight” (during which one of the cows “dies” when Banks turns it on its side, saying “Moo!”). The cowboy eventually shoots the Indian several times, drags him to the top of a cactus and slams him against the thorns, and basically degrades him in every way possible. The Indian dies. Banks plays sad music on the harmonica. Then silence reigns as he studies his little diorama intently.
And with a loud “FWAAAAUGH!” he brings a large plastic dinosaur suddenly from under the desk and slams the cowboy into next week.
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels: “Look, he’s so happy, he’s crying!” I missed the next 20 minutes, because I had to get some oxygen.
The Gondoliers (Gilbert & Sullivan): There is a scene that was cut 5 days prior to the premier, due to its raciness. It involves 2 men – acting as one husband – speaking to 3 women – acting as one wife (2/3 of which is married). The worst actors in the world cannot make this scene unfunny. “My dear Thomas, what is the use of one third of me be single, when I don’t know which third it is?”
