For some reason, whenever anyone starts talking about the funniest wedding sequence in the movies, The Princess Bride is the first movie to be mentioned. Here, Peter Cook plays a priest and the height of the humor involved is that he has a speech impediment.
That’s it.
For me, at least, hilarity does not ensue.
For my money, far funnier was the sequence from The Ruling Class. In this one Aleister Sim as the priest who is pressured into performing a marriage for Peter O’Toole and a local prostitute. And because he knows he really shouldn’t be doing it he pretty much has a complete nervous breakdown at the altar. Sims acting is superb. Classic stuff.
I always – ALWAYS – laugh out loud at the first wedding in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Not at the profanity (although that’s a hoot) but at the utter inappropriateness of the rings. Especially the groom’s ring.
Also Charles’s later horror (2nd wedding) at being seated with a table full of ex-girlfriends.
“. . . and she told him to ‘saw it off’ . . .”
OK, I’ll stop now. But that first scene is my absolute favorite.
I don’t laugh at the speech impediment but at the bad guy trying to hurry him up.
What’s the movie where the Protestant couple asks the Rabbi to marry them (it must be done very quickly for some reason) “Hmm, let’s see, how do the Goyim do this? Oh, yes, Friends, marriage is…”
It’s a terrific, frantic scene which seems to come from another movie. It ends with the Rabbi completing the"…man and wife", Joe Pesci grabbing somebody’s urine-sample cup and Mel Gibson stamping on it while everybody raises their arms and shouts “mazel tov!”. Great stuff.
I hesitate to mention this, because I absolutely hated this movie, but Dr. T and the Women may be the only movie where the bride runs off with the maid of honor. In fact the entire wedding runs off and Dr. T is left in the middle of a swirling thunderstorm in his Father of the Bride tux. It was a pretty funny scene, I thought, but it might just have been in contrast to the awfulness of the rest of the movie.
I plead guilty to thinking instantly about the Princess Bride when reading this thread. I admit it isn’t the most sophisticated kind of comedy but I still think that Cooke’s cameo is really funny.
I can’t think of too many funny wedding scenes off-hand . I liked 4weddings and a funeral quite a lot and probably found some of the wedding scenes funny though I can’t remember much of them now.
OK, there’s no actual wedding sequence in it, just the events right before the wedding. Still, the minute-long segment of Sir Lancelot running up the hill cracks me up every time.
I had a film class in college, during which we watched a lot of movies. One starred Elliot Gould as a photographer who only took pictures of bird droppings. The movie (which might be “Little Murders,” I couldn’t tell from the IMDB description) was pretty bad. I think it billed itself as a comedy, but it was the kind where everyone just stared blankly at the screen and then looked at each other. (For some reason, I associate this response with “socially relevant” comedies of the late sixties and early seventies, but I’ll get on to my point.)
Towards the end, Gould is marrying a neurotic female, and Donald Sutherland shows up as some kind of hippy-dippy minister (think Oddball in “Kelly’s Heroes,” but working as a priest ). It may just be in contrast to the rest of the movie, but I remember this as the funniest wedding scene I’ve ever seen.
I had a film class in college, during which we watched a lot of movies. One starred Elliot Gould as a photographer who only took pictures of bird droppings. The movie (which might be “Little Murders,” I couldn’t tell from the IMDB description) was pretty bad. I think it billed itself as a comedy, but it was the kind where everyone just stared blankly at the screen and then looked at each other. (For some reason, I associate this response with “socially relevant” comedies of the late sixties and early seventies, but I’ll get on to my point.)
Towards the end, Gould is marrying a neurotic female, and Donald Sutherland shows up as some kind of hippy-dippy minister (think Oddball in “Kelly’s Heroes,” but working as a priest ). It may just be in contrast to the rest of the movie, but I remember this as the funniest wedding scene I’ve ever seen.
The sequence in Sixteen Candles was good. The groom is an oily bo-hunk (whatever that means) and the bride is high as a kite from taking too many Midol® (“her monthly bill came early”). I also like the babe from Poltergeist playing the church organist. Kinda surreal. At the end she says, “I need a drink.” A Protestant church organist in the Midwest saying she needs a drink is kinda funny in its own right, too. Guess you had to be there.
Oooh, also The Runaway Bride. An otherwise mediocre movie, but it had a funny sight gag in it.
Richard Gere’s character is a hot-shot New York journalist, and he’s marrying small-town-girl Julia Roberts in some small-town Protestant church. The bride’s half of the church is full of plain people in their Sunday best, eagerly watching the minister. The groom’s half of the church is full of slicked-up New York types in sunglasses, designer clothes, and talking on their cell phones.
For a totally different kind of humor, there’s the wedding in “The Lion in Winter.” John, Geoffrey, Richard, Alice, Henry, Phillip and Eleanor, all lined up. The Bishop, rousted out of bed at three in the morning, staring at them. Alice, “I won’t! You can’t make me!” The boys bickering over who gets the Aquitaine. Henry, “You’re the King of France! Do something!” And periodically they all stop squabbling to smile politely at the bishop and nod, and he nods and smiles back.
The wedding at the end of Birdcage had exactly the same joke, with the flamboyantly dressed gay family on one side and the primly dressed politician’s family on the other. The French original had much the same visual as well.
I’ve always liked the wedding in Diner, where the church is decorated in blue and white (Baltimore Colts colors}, the bridesmaids are wearing blue and white dresses, and the wedding march is the Colts’ fight song slowed down for the processional.
This probably doesn’t count, as the wedding in the movie had been cancelled, but in 1997’s IN AND OUT, I love the scene where Joan Cusack propositions Tom Selleck in the bar, and then they cut to a long shot of her storming out the door, in her bridal gown, screaming “Is EVERYBODY gay? Is this the TWILIGHT ZONE?!?”
By far the greatest wedding movie is Rene Clair’s hilarious silent masterpiece The Italian Straw Hat. Any number of terrific sequences, although the groom’s waking nightmare about all the wedding presents coming to life as he’s dancing at the reception is a highlight. Brilliant, and sadly little-known, film.
