I watched Catch-22 the other day. At the beginning, Alan Arkin’s character, Yossarian, a bombardier, takes off in his plane (flown by Art Garfunkel!) along with all the other planes going on a bombing mission.
Then, the Colonel walks down from the observation tower, and is greeted by Milo, (played by a young Jon Voight.) The two of them take a long stroll down the runway, and Milo explains his extremely convoluted plan to trade military supplies to the Italians in exchange for better food. They get into a jeep, and drive away, with Milo still talking the whole time. They stop the jeep at another part of the base, get out, start walking again, still with Milo talking about the trading plans. The whole scene goes on for many minutes. You’re wondering, “what has this got to do with anything?” Milo explains how he is going to trade silk for oranges. He opens a big box and starts pulling a bunch of silk out of it. Finally, the Colonel asks, “where on earth did you get this silk?”
Then, cut to Yossarian in the bomber plane, saying, “where’s my parachute?”
I loved this transition because it was such a great set up to the punch line. Can you think of other movies that use a scene to set up a joke like this?
Somebody’s going to have to help me with details and it may be just the condition I was in when I saw it, but the entire Don Johnson movie A Boy and His Dog (1975) struck me as one long joke or else a twist on a pun-like interpretation of a joke.
That’s a long time ago and I don’t remember even what the joke was, but it’s what I thought of when I read the title.
So many of those Airplane and Hot Shots types of movies rely on visual puns and sight gags that it’s hard to watch them without getting your head all twisted around. You start looking for jokes in everyday things after that.
There are certainly jokes in between, but this one in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels stands as a classic.
Freddie and Lawrence are trying to scam Janet out of something like $20,000. They are competing for the scam. Freddie poses as a paraplegic, and claims that only a certain German doctor can cure him. The doctor charges exactly $20,000, which he doesn’t have. Janet is going to give the money to him.
Except Lawrence poses as the doctor, and will accept the fee directly. But first, he has to make sure that Freddie truly has no feeling in his legs (which, of course, he does). He tickles Freddie, then whips him, harder and harder. Of course Freddie has to fake not feeling a thing. Lawrence then decides to accept him as a patient.
Janet says “Oh look, doctor, he’s so happy he’s crying!” The look on Freddie’s (Steve Martin’s) face sells the punchline.
Personally, I still get a big kick out of the fact that C-3PO tells Luke in IV that he’s not very much of a storyteller, but in VI, who’s the one who winds up re-telling the story so far to an audience of rapt Ewoks, complete with sound effects? Goldie.
And here I thought you were going to be talking about the big punchline at the end (as the plane is taking off). We love watching the expression on Lawrence’s face (especially in opposition to Freddie’s).
Well the boy and his dog, who can talk to each other telepathically, encounter a strage society and ultimately escape with a pretty young woman. But near the end the dog is sick and needs food to survive, so they kill and eat the woman. (off screen, the pansies)
Thanks for the help. I even went to IMDB to see if the comments would refresh my memory of what I was thinking about. Unfortunately the long gap between whenever I saw it and today has blurred the point. And maybe the “joke” I thought of at the time has faded in popularity since then.
Something about this whole topic makes me think of how some comics will set up early in their bit some particularly lame punchline or catchphrase and then finish the bit with a reference back to that. By that time it becomes funny enough to get applause as they leave.
It’s like that joke/story about the brick and the airplane…
In Death Proof there is a long long long scene where Kurt Russell asks a girl for a lap dance only to have the scene of the actual dance cut from the film replaced with a ‘scene missing’ title.
You could argue that the entire movie is a setup to a punchline.
I don’t recall the exact wording, or even the subject, but it was along the line of “She was really a girl of good taste.”
However, the final line in the original story was much better.
“She asked me once if I know what love was. Sure I do. A boy loves his dog.”
On a happier note, I always liked the joke in Don Juan Decarlo where Johnny Depp is shown in an early scene seducing this woman in a restaurant and taking her to his room for an extremely romantic night. The woman is never shown again – except in one scene later in the movie, where in a brief shot, she’s seated in the same restaurant, looking around longingly.
Well, it’s not exactly a joke, but the whole movie essentially sets you up for the final shot.
John Sayles’ movie Brother From Another Planet has Joe Morton as a mute, escaped slave from another planet. He’s pursued by a couple of slave-hunters (one of them played by Sayles!) who are white. At the end of the movie
[spoiler] Mrton’s character escapes, helped by some Earth folks and some who are evidently escaped alien slaves themselves. The final shot shows him going away in a New York Subway.
He’s literally getting away on an Underground Railroad![/spoiler]]
Not a movie, but a recent Family Guy spent several minutes on an otherwise pointless Stewie has sunburn subplot, just to use the joke that someone walks in and catches Brian squirting lotion on him, and from the rear it looks of course like he’s spooging on him.
In one of the Austin Powers movies they introduce a character named “Mr. Roboto” just so 20 minutes later they can thank him in Japanese (Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto).
We love watching the expression on Lawrence’s face (especially in opposition to Freddie’s).