This review was updated on September 21, 2024
In late ’70s America, silliness ruled. Vietnam was over, Nixon was gone, and those who could afford it just wanted to have a good time. Sure, there was widespread poverty, racial strife and a wider world teetering on the brink, but who cared about all that? Silly movies like Smokey and the Bandit and Grease topped the box office; silly records like ‘Disco Duck’, ‘Y.M.C.A.’ and ‘Rasputin’ rocked the charts, and silly comedies like Saturday Night Live and Monty Python’s Flying Circus were being widely quoted on college campuses up and down the country.
But in this age of silliness, no one was sillier or more popular than Steve Martin. Part lowbrow old-fashioned entertainer, part ironic, postmodern anti-comedian, Martin was already a platinum-selling recording artist and an arena-filling performer. The transition to cinema was inevitable; as was the fact that whatever he came out with, it would be spectacularly silly.
The result remains the funniest film of Martin’s career
What wasn’t set in stone was whether or not it’d be funny. Martin’s live act may have been hugely popular but it was also in many ways deeply strange, relying on physical humour, repeated catchphrases (‘excuuuuuuse me!’) and moments where the jokes fell entirely flat on purpose. Luckily, he found the perfect collaborator: Carl Reiner, a comedian turned director who was able to take Martin’s stream-of-consciousness comic style and, with the aid of co-writer Carl Gottlieb, hone it into something that just about held together as a movie.
The result remains the funniest film of Martin’s career: a rags-to-riches riot of visual gags (‘He hates cans!’), oddball wit (‘St Louis?’ ‘No, Navin Johnson!’) and, of course, outrageous silliness, from a dog called Shithead to a gangster called Iron Balls McGinty, from an oddly moving song about a Thermos flask to a diamond so big it’ll make you puke.
Find out where it lands on our list of the 100 funniest movies ever made.
What to watch next:
The Producers (1967); The Man With Two Brains (1983); Bowfinger (1999)