That Was No Lady...

I usually like to throw curveballs here at the Comedy Palace. I try not to cite the most obvious examples or post the most famous clips. But there are times when there's no way around it; I'm not going to talk about Abbott and Costello and not highlight "Who's on First." Similarly, in considering the greatest cross-dressing comedies, my conclusion is that the first two you think of actually are the two greatest -- by miles.

Among show people, there has always been a strange and misguided assumption that men dressing up as women is just the funniest thing in the world. It begins at least as far back as Shakespeare -- who wrote all those awful comedies where women played by men pretend to be men pretending to be women -- and continues to this day, in downtown Manhattan, where theatres and cabarets are still trotting out the same old "gender bending" drag shows that ceased to be amusing forty years ago. Cross-dressing has become such a familiar crutch for hack entertainers that it's easy to forget how funny and insightful it can actually be, in the right hands and under the right circumstances.

Cross-dressing comedy gold begins, of course, with Some Like it Hot, Billy Wilder's 1959 masterpiece. It's been widely hailed (including by the American Film Institute) as the best film comedy of all time. In my view, it's not quite that, but it does have a number of things going for it. The screenplay, by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond (no relation), crackles with great and funny dialogue, and everyone in the remarkable cast (Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Marilyn Monroe, George Raft, Pat O'Brien, Joe E. Brown) is at the top of his or her game.

The comedic centerpiece of the film is Jack Lemmon's portrayal of Jerry/Daphne. Just as Lemmon throws himself into the role of Jerry, Jerry becomes Daphne with hilarious abandon. The great thing about the Daphne character is the indignant conviction Lemmon brings to her. As the ruse progresses, he ceases to be a man impersonating a woman, and begins responding to events not as Jerry but as Daphne.



Jerry's increasing comfort in Daphne's skin carries the film to its delectable conclusion -- and to possibly the best last line in the history of American cinema:



Some Like it Hot successfully defended its status as the cinema's greatest cross-dressing comedy until 1982. Sydney Pollack's Tootsie (screenplay by Larry Gelbart, Murray Schisgal, Barry Levinson, and Elaine May) operates on a similar premise: Down-on-his-luck actor Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) becomes Dorothy Michaels because he needs the work (though he's not evading villains, like Lemmon and Curtis in Some Like it Hot).



What makes Tootsie a greater comedy than Some Like it Hot is that it takes the cross-dressing bit beyond laughter, and uses it to make worthwhile points about gender in society. The characters in Some Like it Hot aren't there to learn anything; it's simply an expertly-crafted, beautifully performed comic caper. In Tootsie, Michael Dorsey's pragmatic decision to don a dress and make-up becomes an unintentional social experiment along the lines of Black Like Me. Once he sees, firsthand, how women are treated by men -- including him -- he grows. None of this social comment would be effective, though, if Tootsie were not also one of the funniest films of all time.



And that's pretty much it. There have been other cross-dressing comedies of note, but they have ranged from admirable misfires (La Cage Aux Folles, Mrs. Doubtfire, and at least two film versions of Charley's Aunt) to pallid camp (The Adventures of Priscilla, To Wong Foo, and certain efforts from Ed Wood and John Waters). Then there are a few films in which women pretend to be men (Yentl, Victor/Victoria, and Just One of the Guys, none of which, in my opinion, qualifies as a great comedy).

It's not exactly a cross-dressing comedy, but Carl Reiner's All of Me (1984) deserves acknowledgment in this discussion. Steve Martin's landmark performance -- as a man who has a woman (Lily Tomlin) occupying half his body -- does belong in the pantheon with Lemmon in Some Like it Hot and Hoffman and Tootsie. As gender commentary, All of Me is not as sharp as Tootsie, but it is one of the exceptional comedies of the Eighties, and a gem in the consistently remarkable careers of Reiner, Martin, and Tomlin.

I will also award one Honorable Mention to The Birdcage (1996), which is almost a great comedy. It's an American remake of La Cage Aux Folles, and it improves upon the original in nearly every way. It benefits from the collaborative fireworks between Mike Nichols and Elaine May (who provided the solid direction and the sparkling screenplay, respectively). It also features Nathan Lane, unquestionably one of the best stage performers of our time, in his only great film performance to date. There's also fine supporting work by Robin Williams, Hank Azaria, Dianne Wiest, and Gene Hackman.

The problem with The Birdcage -- as with the original La Cage -- is that the treatment of Lane's character, Albert (or Albin in the original) is just too cruel. His lover and his lover's son think very little of asking Albert to either disappear or submerge his identity in the presence of the prospective in-laws. It sounds like a reasonable comic premise, but when you watch the film, it's just too much. I don't know why Nichols and May couldn't find a little more nuance here, but for whatever reason, the characters become difficult to sympathize with after we see the way they treat Albert.

Some have criticized The Birdcage for its depiction of Albert and Armand (Williams) as an apparently sexless gay couple, but to me this is preposterous. Yes, Albert and Armand come across more as fey roommates than ardent lovers, but we've seen heterosexual couples depicted this way for centuries and it doesn't seem to have bothered anyone. And would you enjoy The Birdcage more if it featured a nice long take of Nathan Lane and Robin Williams sucking face? For what it's worth, GLAAD had no problem with the film, praising it for "going beyond the stereotypes to see [Albert's] depth and humility," and noting that the film "celebrates differences and points out the outrageousness of hiding those differences."

The Birdcage also has a hilarious last line, worthy of the last line in Some Like it Hot. It comes at the end of this, the climactic sequence, in which the conservative Senator Keeley (Hackman) avoids the paparazzi by sneaking out of Armand's drag club dressed as a woman:

Hellzapoppin'

Some artists and entertainers strive to be innovative, but real innovation is almost always an accident. Truly groundbreaking work rarely comes from artists who set out deliberately to experiment. It comes from those who set out to entertain their audiences, and through some special quirk of expression, or the need to compensate for a shortcoming, stumble upon something that's never been done before. Because nobody would set out to do it.

Take Olsen and Johnson: Their particular shortcoming was that they were a mediocre comedy team. Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson started as musicians, and met in a jazz quartet in 1914. When they became a comedy team, they threw together a "kitchen sink" act consisting of jokes stolen from other comedians and jokes so old nobody knew or cared where they came from. As performers, they were likable enough, but they lacked the sharply-drawn characterizations and precision timing of the great comics. And so, in the richly-endowed comedy landscape of the Thirties and Forties, the only way Olsen and Johnson could possibly make an impression was by pulling out all the stops.

First, they pulled out the guns. Armed with starter pistols, Olsen and Johnson took to shooting each other during their act. Then they started using audience plants and exchanging gunfire with them. They began incorporating other props to build on the gunplay; they'd shoot their guns at the rafters and get showered with ducks. And a cow. Audiences had so much fun seeing Olsen and Johnson get hit with things that Olsen and Johnson figured the audience might like to be hit with things too; they'd come out on stage and, before saying a word, pelt the audience with fruits and vegetables. They loved it. The act kept growing in this fashion, becoming larger and more outlandish, until the "kitchen sink" approach evolved into an aesthetic. They started with a trite, hackneyed act, and wound up with a delirious, surrealist parody of the whole idea of doing an act in the first place.

Their greatest achievement was the revue Hellzapoppin', whose title has become synonymous with fourth-wall-breaking, pull-out-all-the-stops lunacy. It opened on Broadway in 1938, with songs by Sammy Fain and Charles Tobias and a book by Olsen and Johnson, and became the longest-running musical in Broadway history (eclipsed in 1945 by Oklahoma!). Its advantage, largely, was that it was a Broadway show; Olsen and Johnson finally had a permanent enough home -- and a large enough budget -- to realize their more elaborate notions. They turned everything up a notch, cultivating a circuslike atmosphere of chaotic excess. Anticipating Mel Brooks by thirty years, Hellzapoppin' opened with a man dressed as Hitler delivering a Yiddish dialogue routine. Another number featured trained pigeons. During the second act, Olsen and Johnson held a raffle, and the grand prize turned out to be a fifty-pound block of ice, delivered directly to the lap of someone in the audience.

In the show's most famous running gag, a deliveryman enters holding a small potted plant and inquiring as to the whereabouts of one Mrs. Jones. He keeps returning throughout the show, still helplessly calling after Mrs. Jones, and every times he appears, the plant has grown larger, until at the end of the play it's an enormous bush springing from a very small pot. Then, after the curtain calls, the audience would file out into the lobby -- where the branches of a mighty tree now protruded from the wall, with the deliveryman sitting on one of the branches, crying, "Mrs. Jones?"

Hellzapoppin' was devoid of plot or structure, and its greatest strength was its subversion of theatrical convention. So there was no reason to think it would work as a film, but there was also no way a stage show that successful was going to avoid being made into a film. The 1941 Universal Pictures version of Hellzapoppin' was, like the Broadway show, better than you might think. Assisted by Marx Brothers screenwriter Nat Perrin, Olsen and Johnson adapted the play's sendup of theatre into a film which sent up film. Characters argue with the people in the projection booth. During a musical number, a series of titles announce, "Stinky Miller, your mother wants you home," with increasing severity; finally, the young couple on screen interrupts their love song and addresses the audience, urging Stinky to go home to his mother; the silhouette of a little boy is seen at the bottom of the screen, crossing to the exit; the singers go back to their song. Elsewhere, the film seems to have slipped from the sprockets, and is nudged back into place first by the characters in the scene, and then by an enormous pair of disembodied hands.

Hellzapoppin' was groundbreaking as a stage piece, but the film was even more so. Its all-out assault on the medium's conventions had almost no precedent; there was Groucho's 1929 innovation of speaking directly to the camera, and a few satirical gags in W.C. Fields' The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933). But Olsen and Johnson took this self-conscious use of the medium further than anyone had -- or would, until Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and Monty Python. (In an appropriate tribute, one of the Rock Ridge locals in Brooks' Blazing Saddles is named Olsen Johnson.)

Oddly, the film version of Hellzapoppin' is well-regarded among dance enthusiasts, who consider the Lindy Hop sequence to be the best of its kind ever committed to film.

Here are the first and last scenes of the movie. The first, in particular, features a number of celebrated gags, including the discovery of the sled from Citizen Kane ("I thought they burned this"), the deliveryman with his growing plant, and the similarly hapless woman looking for "Oscar." It opens with a typical Broadway chorus, liltingly singing "I once had a vision of Heaven, and you were there" -- and then they fall straight through the floor and into a representation of Hell that is somewhat startling for a 1941 film.

The film, like the stage show, was damned by critics. The New York Times memorably complained:

Those who finally recovered their hearing after the Broadway Hellzapoppin' probably will lose it all over again at the Rivoli, where the film version went off with a loud report yesterday. And like all large explosions it has left nothing but a shambles on the screen with little rags and bits of old vaudeville gags smoking among the wreckage. For with the true instinct of performers at a convention brawl, those Katzenjammer boys, Olsen and Johnson, know that a sudden noise can sometimes cover a dull joke. Hellzapoppin' is full of sudden noises; it is also chockful of an anarchic collection of unfunny gags; it is not only insane, it is labored. Theatregoers coming out of the Rivoli yesterday wore startled expressions on their faces.

The Times reviewer, "T.S.," concluded that Hellzapoppin' was "a jerky sequence of third-rate gags punctuated by gunfire." So I'm sure T.S. didn't care for the rest of Olsen and Johnson's career, which was mostly spent trying to recreate Hellzapoppin', with limited success. There were films (Crazy House), stage revues (Funzapoppin') and television shows (Fireball Fun for All, a 1949 summer replacement for Milton Berle), all of which tried to approximate the freewheeling anarchy of Hellzapoppin' and never got it quite right.

Other artists have also attempted to bring back Hellzapoppin' over the years. A catastrophic 1977 stage version, starring Jerry Lewis and Lynn Redgrave, never made it to Broadway. Thirty years later, the American Century Theatre in Arlington, Virginia mounted an ambitious revival of Hellzapoppin', and their online audience guide contains some interesting essays about the history of the piece, and their efforts to create a faithful contemporary version.

Fred Allen

There were many great comedians in the golden age of radio, but Fred Allen was the only satirist. Ironically, although Allen is a somewhat forgotten figure compared to the other giants of his era, his influence seems greater than theirs in this age of self-conscious media satire. You can't get to The Simpsons and South Park and The Daily Show and The Colbert Report without going through Allen's Alley. Another irony is that today, Allen himself is less familiar than some of the characters he introduced as residents of the Alley, like Titus Moody, Mrs. Nussbaum, and especially Senator Claghorn -- whose catchphrases are still used every day, and are recognized by most as signatures, ah say signatures, of Foghorn Leghorn.

The reason Fred Allen's name is often missing from the roster of immortals is that he did his great work in radio. He never took off in movies, and despite several frustrated attempts, never had a successful television show. So if you got to know your classic comedians through movies and reruns -- as almost all of us did -- Fred Allen was missing from the picture. Radio was his medium, and his inability to catch on in television probably stemmed from his utter contempt for it. Many of his most famous lines denigrated TV: "I don't like furniture that talks." "Television is called a medium because nothing is well-done." "Imitation is the sincerest form of television."

Allen did thrive in at least two media other than radio. At the end of his life, he wrote two delightful books, Treadmill to Oblivion and Much Ado About Me. (Both are now in the public domain and can be read in their entirety at archive.org.) The first is a memoir about his radio career, the second a more conventional autobiography, left unfinished at the time of his death. Allen was a skillful performer with a distinctively wry, laconic delivery, but more than half his greatness always came from his writing, and these are two of the best and funniest books ever written about comedy.

He was also a big success on the stage, and always argued that radio was more like vaudeville than television. Notably, in his most celebrated stage routine, the audience read his writing before they even saw him. His act was performed in front of an "art curtain" -- an enormous mural, dreamed up by Allen and rendered by the cartoonist Martin Branner (of Winnie Winkle fame, if such a thing exists). The concept of "The Old Joke Cemetery" -- where old jokes go to die -- entered the American vernacular. Audiences would sit there reading the punchlines on the tombstones, and laughing, for as long as a minute before Allen made his entrance.

Later in the act, Allen would read the audience a supposed letter from his mother, from which he quotes in Much Ado About Me:

My dear son,

A few lines to let you know about our new neighborhood. The man next door has bought pigs; we got wind of it this morning. Your father had a terrible fight with him about it, but the man hit your father with a rock in the left ear. It didn't bother your father; he is stone deaf in that ear. The policeman who took him away said he would get his hearing in the morning. The other man, the one who owns the pigs, was arrested for fragrancy. Your brother Pete has taken his Civil Service Examinations, but he is too ignorant for the Police Department. They will probably put him on the School Board...

The man upstairs sent down for his wash boiler this morning. Your father had to put the home brew he was making back into the bathtub. Nobody will find it there...

There is no other news except that our oil stove exploded yesterday and blew your father and me out into the back yard. It is the first time we have been out together for twenty years. I am sending your spring overcoat to you separately. I have cut off the buttons to make the package lighter. You will find them in the inside pocket.

God bless you and keep you from your loving

Mother

You'll find a little bit of him on YouTube, mostly from his appearances on What's My Line. These are amusing enough; Allen was an incredibly sharp comic improviser. But the only way to really get to know the genius of Fred Allen is to listen to his radio shows. The long arc of his satires makes it difficult to single out highlights. Fortunately, you can listen to a great many Allen shows online, including here and here. In small pieces, the comedy (and the whole Allen's Alley conceit) can seem pretty schmaltzy; only cumulatively do these conversations gain satirical weight.

One of Allen's most beloved running gags was his feud with Jack Benny, which was vicious, passionate, and entirely fictional. In this clip, Allen continues his feud with Benny and also satirizes television. The premise: Convinced that his show will be cancelled in favor of a game show (the ethos of which, he once said, was "If you can't entertain them, give them something"), he revamps The Fred Allen Show as King For a Day, and Jack Benny arrives, in disguise, to be a contestant. (Interestingly, this exact premise was also used by Benny when Groucho Marx appeared on his program, and that wonderful clip is here.)

Click here to listen to "King for a Day."

Marx Brother, Where Art Thou?

So there's this moment in Animal Crackers when the lights go out, and Groucho Marx and Margaret Dumont sit there in the dark and exchange some dialogue. Over the years, many Marxists have noticed that if you look closely, the guy sitting in the dark with Dumont doesn't really look like Groucho. Some have theorized that it's actually Zeppo.

It's hard to discern in this YouTube clip, but here's the scene, for reference:

Here are some still details from the scene, adjusted to increase the contrast:



The shape of the cheek, ear, nose, and hairline do suggest that this could be Zeppo. Here are some images of Zeppo from the same film:

Pretty convincing, isn't it? The problem is, here are some stills of Groucho from the same film:

My theory is that Groucho and Zeppo were brothers and looked very similar.

As for the voice: The dialogue in this scene has obviously been added in post, and it really doesn’t sync very well; although you can’t see whether lips are matching, the lines don’t match the performers’ movement at all. Now, it sounds exactly like Groucho. But we know from Marx legend that Zeppo understudied for Groucho on numerous occasions, notably during the Chicago run of Animal Crackers. Supposedly, Zeppo was able to recreate Groucho's performance so uncannily that nobody thought for a second it wasn't Groucho. After the show friends went backstage to congratulate Groucho and ask why Zeppo wasn't in the show tonight.

Now, why they would sub in Zeppo for Groucho in this scene, and then post-sync the dialogue with Zeppo doing Groucho’s lines as Groucho, I have no idea. Come to think of it, you can’t see Harpo and Chico at all in this scene; maybe Harpo is actually Groucho (since Groucho isn't busy being Groucho at this particular moment) and Chico is actually Harpo. We are stuck in a cul-de-sac of cinematic anomaly, and these things always yield more questions than answers, but there’s one thing I am sure of: That is definitely Margaret Dumont.

I hope you've enjoyed this special look at one of the world's least important questions. I feel I've been able to discuss this question without shedding much light on it.

Comedy's Greatest Detective

Everyone knows that Inspector Jacques Clouseau, as embodied by the great Peter Sellers, was one of the outstanding comic creations of the twentieth century. It wasn't Sellers' favorite role, but it was our favorite Sellers role, and he obliged us through five films. On paper, Clouseau was intended as a gentle parody of Agatha Christie's Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. What elevated him to iconic status was Sellers' priceless characterization. It's hard to think of another comedian or actor as equally skilled at both verbal and physical humor. The character of Clouseau is so well-drawn that just the thought of him makes you laugh.

It's surprising, then, to revisit the original Pink Panther films and find that for long stretches, they're actually quite boring. Producer/director Blake Edwards was an ingenuous choreographer of slapstick, but he was also a shameless perpetrator of cinematic excess. The Sixties and Seventies were full of lavish, crowded, absurdly overproduced comedies; Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Charles Feldman's What's New, Pussycat? are two good examples. This strange subgenre, the megacomedy, is a mixed bag. There's always major talent involved -- sometimes a ridiculous amount -- and there are always interludes of great comedy. But these films tend to be overlong and overindulgent. A lavish comedy is harder to take than a lavish drama; extravagance gets in the way of laughs.

When Sellers is on the screen, The Pink Panther, A Shot in the Dark, Return of the Pink Panther, The Pink Panther Strikes Again, and Revenge of The Pink Panther all have their inspired moments. These are the moments we always remember. They are so good, and our memory of them is so vivid, that we've exaggerated the greatness of the Pink Panther films. Reacquainting myself with these movies a few years ago, I was shocked to discover that the really good stuff in any one of them could be edited down to a twenty-minute reel. In a way, Sellers' Clouseau is best enjoyed on YouTube, where you can savor the highlights without having to sit through the dreck.

Of the first five Blake Edwards Pink Panther films, The Pink Panther Strikes Again is both the best and the worst. Its comic high points are probably the greatest in the whole series, but it suffers from overlength and overproduction more than any of the others. Its delirious zenith is the interrogation scene, which begins with Clouseau's descent from the parallel bars and ends with a bullet in the ass. This beloved sequence is especially notable for perfectly showcasing the character's physical and verbal problems.



Another fondly-remembered Clouseau encounter, from the same film, includes the famous line about how he always accepts a challenge:



By the time they got to Revenge of the Pink Panther in 1978, the whole enterprise was tired. But nothing could stop Blake Edwards from trying to squeeze a little more -- not even the death of Peter Sellers in 1980. In 1982, Edwards released Trail of the Pink Panther, a schlocky misfire premised on a search for the "missing" Clouseau, and featuring Sellers in outtakes from previous Panther films. As terrible as Trail was, though, Edwards proved he could do even worse when he released the aptly-titled Curse of the Pink Panther the very next year. This time, the story was that Clouseau had had plastic surgery. Why? So he could be played by...Roger Moore.



In addition to the joke casting of Roger Moore in Curse, three other actors have stepped into the role of Inspector Clouseau, always with mixed results. The fact that all three of them are comedic giants in their own right suggests that Clouseau was only a truly great character when Peter Sellers was playing him.

The 1968 film Inspector Clouseau proves the point acutely. It was only the third film to feature Clouseau, after The Pink Panther and A Shot in the Dark. Sellers and Edwards had decided not to make any more Clouseau films, so United Artists hired Bud Yorkin to direct, and cast Alan Arkin in the lead. The film is an interesting anomaly, and if not for the memory of Sellers, Arkin's Clouseau might seem inspired. But it withers in comparison to the real thing. Sellers and Edwards returned for the next outing, Return of the Pink Panther, in 1975. (I don't have a clip from Inspector Clouseau, but you can watch the film in its entirety here.)

Ten years after Curse, Blake Edwards decided to give the series yet another try. Son of the Pink Panther (1993) concerned the adventures of Clouseau's son, Jacques Jr. The casting of Roberto Benigni seemed quite promising; the great Italian clown was uniquely suited to the role of Clouseau's offspring. His performance was enjoyable enough, but Edwards' screenplay never gave him a chance.

In 2006, with great apprehension, we learned that the Pink Panther series was to be revived -- or, as we say now, rebooted -- with Steve Martin as Clouseau. On one hand, the whole history of the franchise has overwhelmingly indicated that what made it great was Peter Sellers; all attempts to get by without him fell flat. On the other hand, if anyone could figure out how to successfully reimagine Clouseau, it was probably Steve Martin. A Modern Comic Hero of the first order, Martin has Sellers' equal mastery of wordplay and slapstick.

Martin did find a way to embody Clouseau; the character feels simultaneously like an homage to Sellers and a fresh start. But too many of the details are wrong. I have no problem with the screenwriters changing elements of the Clouseau mythos, but the choices seem to have been made out of a simple desire to mix things up, at the expense of humor. In the original films, Clouseau had instructed his servant, Cato, to attack him without notice, in order to keep him on his feet. The Cato attacks, which always happened at the worst possible times, contained some of the funniest moments in the series; this clip from Return of the Pink Panther is one example. In the 2006 reboot, the device is tinkered with: Now it is Clouseau who will attack his assistant without warning (here's a clip), in order to keep him on his feet. It's a daring break with tradition, but it doesn't work. Clouseau launching into random attacks on someone is just not as funny, or as consistent with his character, as someone else launching into random attacks on Clouseau.

Probably the most memorable scene in the 2006 version is Clouseau's English lesson, in which he struggles mightily with the pronouncement of "I would like to buy a hamburger." Martin's vocal performance is remarkable in that it accomplishes the same things as Sellers' without ever becoming an impersonation; Martin's Clouseau has a different voice and a whole different set of bizarre faux-French tics and mannerisms.

Springtime for Hitler -- in Germany

Last month, in what is surely one of the great victories in the history of comedy, Mel Brooks' musical version of The Producers opened in Berlin. The show, as I'm sure you know, is a symphony in schtick, about two men who endeavor to produce the worst musical in history. Both the 1968 film and the 2001 musical benefit from taking place in two worlds. There's the world of Bialystock and Bloom, a timeless version of the New York theatrical district -- Damon Runyon filtered through Mel Brooks. And then there's the show within the show.

As great as The Producers is -- and I dearly love both the original film and the musical -- nothing in it tops "Springtime for Hitler," one of the funniest musical production numbers ever conceived. It's a great example of what we might call the Mel Brooks Principle of comedy: "If you're going to go up to the bell," Brooks has said on many occasions, "ring it!" (He's credited the line to producer John Calley.) A measure of the greatness of "Springtime for Hitler," I've always thought, is that it can't be nearly as shocking now as it was in 1968, but it's still incredibly funny. In Berlin, however, it still has the power to make people very uncomfortable.

It opened at the Admiralspalast, a Berlin opera house where Hitler once had a private box. The "Fuhrer's Box" had been torn out after the war, but was reinstated for The Producers. Michael Kimmelman, covering the Berlin production for the New York Times, wrote:

Theatrical promotion is a ruthless business, whether the producer in question is Max Bialystock or the leather-suited Falk Walter, the real-life man who runs the Admiralspalast and on Sunday wore a pretzel-emblazoned Nazi armband when he came out to hand a prize to Mr. Brooks. (It was accepted in his absence by Thomas Meehan, who wrote the book with him and said, "I'm sorry I'm not Mel Brooks," one of the night's best lines.)

...[Walter] has been....hoping to drum up some controversy by selling a New York farce about Broadway con men as a litmus test for German tolerance of Hitler jokes. They've even hung what look like Nazi banners on the street outside the theater (again, with pretzels), making hay when a few people complained.

Here is the original "Springtime for Hitler" number, from the 1968 film:



I know there are purists who cannot abide the musical version of The Producers, but I consider it a triumph. In several key ways, it improves upon the film -- which, I think even purists have to admit when they watch it, doesn't entirely live up to our recollections. Remarkably, the one element from the film which you'd think would transfer to the stage untouched -- the "Springtime for Hitler" number -- has been tinkered with, and it's even better. In the film version of the number, Hitler himself doesn't appear at all. He comes out after the number, and that take on Hitler was, as Kenneth Tynan wrote, a "redneck high on flower power and L.S.D.," which "mixes up too many incompatible jokes." In the musical, Hitler (as understudied at the last moment by Springtime for Hitler director Roger DeBris) appears, as a big Broadway queen, and gets to sing an aria called "Heil Myself." Brooks described it as "Hitler's big Ethel Merman number."

It's rare that a perfect gem of comedy can be made even better with the addition of more material. But "Heil Myself" brings so much to the table that it's now hard to imagine "Springtime for Hitler" without it. It's at least as funny as the main theme, and it sets up the satisfying return to that theme in the finale. It also contains some of Brooks' most inspired couplets:

Everything I do I do for you-ooh!

If you're lookin' for a war, here's World War Two!

The 2005 film The Producers -- the movie version of the musical -- is disappointing in several respects, but it does have its moments. It contains the definitive "Springtime for Hitler," including "Heil Myself." (Brooks did shorten the number slightly for the film, omitting the "Fuhrer is causing a furor" section, but little is lost. For a sense of how the number looked on Broadway, this bootleg is reasonably watchable.)

Here's the number as presented in the 2005 film:

Mel Brooks has always said that he considered it part of his life's work to make Hitler look ridiculous, to make people laugh at him. "It's the only way to get even," he said in one interview.

The Producers was Mel Brooks' first film, and for the last forty years he's been accused of bad taste. Something about its specific premise made it definitive of his work, partly because it was a story about two guys who put on a show which is in bad taste. But in 1968, Brooks wasn't ready for a magnum opus, and that's why the 2001 incarnation is, for me, a richer piece of work. In 2001, Brooks has a lot of fun with the audience-within-the-show and its ongoing denunciations of Max Bialystock, bellowing things about his work which have been bellowed about Brooks' own work all along.

It seemed strange to see him lapping up all those Tony Awards: What was once shockingly subversive was now being eagerly fawned over by a pretty posh crowd. But then I recalled that the 1968 film won Brooks an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. It was considered a surprising and offbeat choice. That screenplay was the work of a TV comedy writer desperately trying to establish himself as a filmmaker, an emerging talent. But with Brooks' entire film career behind him -- and in a South Park age of shocking irreverence which he helped to create -- he can't rely on the shock of Nazi jokes. So the musical Producers winds up being a titanic tribute to his talent, and the talent of his collaborators. Since it couldn't coast on shock, it had to coast on being a beautiful, hilarious, expertly crafted comedy.

In Berlin, where apparently it could coast (or sink) on shock, The Producers has been enthusiastically received by critics, and greeted with standing ovations from audiences. I'm not sure what the connection is, but The Guardian points out that the week it opened, a former Berlin police officer was fined for walking into the city's Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum and lopping off Hitler's head.

Whatever Works

I wish I could report that Whatever Works is a fine return to form for America's greatest comic auteur. I wish I could say that back on the soil of Manhattan, Woody Allen has produced what he used to give us quite regularly, and hasn't in many years: A great comedy. I really, really wish I could say that. It would have been a dream come true.

As it turns out, Whatever Works is a mid-level effort. The best thing about it is that it is funny. It's not as funny as it should be, but it's full of sparkling, barbed one-liners about death and religion which could have come from no other pen. There are more great lines in Whatever Works than in any Woody Allen movie since Deconstructing Harry, and that means a lot. To that degree, the film is a cause for rejoicing. The Saturday night crowd I saw the film with (at Lincoln Square) laughed uproariously throughout, and even applauded at the end. It was a Woody Allen movie.

It begins with promise in the air; during the opening credits, we hear Groucho Marx singing "Hello, I Must Be Going!" I will probably see the movie again in the theatre just for the thrilling combination of that sound and those white letters (Windsor Light Condensed) on a black background.

What's depressing about Whatever Works is that it has all these things going for it, and it still feels trite and lifeless. As we all know, Allen wrote the first draft of this screenplay in the Seventies, and watching Whatever Works I kept thinking that if he had made this movie then -- regardless of who played Boris -- it would have been a masterpiece. The familiar bliss of a real Woody Allen comedy was cut by the annoying question, Why doesn't this work? (The title is a shame, because it's impossible to watch the movie without constantly thinking about how and why it doesn't work, and so Woody has provided the setup for a million hack entertainment writers to bellow, "WOODY'S WHATEVER WORKS DOESN'T," which is what most of the reviews are saying.)

The casting of Larry David seemed promising. What we really want is for Woody to play the lead, just once more, but if it's not to be, then Larry David seemed an inspired choice. We can trust Larry David with the material. We were right about that; he doesn't time the jokes the way Woody would, but he is a comedian of similar vintage, and that does work. But his performance is all one note. If Woody had played the role, he would have played it with far more depth, and depth is what's missing from the picture, on Larry David's shoulders. I like him a lot, but, you know, for thirty minutes at a time. He would make an excellent Woody surrogate in a supporting role, but he doesn't have enough levels to carry a film.

Somewhere within Whatever Works, there is a great comedy that might have been -- a red state / blue state culture clash, in which conservative Christians from the deep south come to New York and are magically transformed into gay Jewish artists. This is just one of the many good ideas in the film. But the good ideas are hampered by a formulaic storyline, cardboard characters, and the sense that Allen has done all of this before, and better.

Like most of his films of the last decade, it suffers from a kind of malaise. He says he's never made a great film and doubts he ever will. To those of us who feel that he has made great films -- some of the best ever -- Allen's dismissal of his own work has always looked like integrity, the tireless perfectionism of an artist forever challenging himself. Once, even his failures were magnificent, because they were the failures of an ambitious genius trying hard and missing the mark. But you just can't say that about his recent output. He says he doesn't really care about his work, and maybe it's time to take him at his word.

There is no artist I hold in higher esteem, and very few I admire as much. There has never been anyone like him; he was already the best comedian in the world, extolled as an heir to Chaplin and Groucho, before he wrote and directed forty films. Movie buffs are divided over whether he ranks with Coppola, Scorcese, Spielberg, Kubrick. To me they are all pipsqueaks compared to him.

His failures had always been noble. We could go on defending Scoop and Melinda and Melinda on the same grounds as Interiors and Shadows and Fog. (I love Shadows and Fog.) That's why we were all so excited about Whatever Works. All these years, we've been thinking: Well, that was another noble failure, but I know that if he would just make a neurotic comedy set in New York, of course it would be a masterpiece. The heartbreaking thing about Whatever Works is that it fails that test.

Still, it's the best thing I've seen in a long time. James Agee said of the Marx Brothers, "The worst they might ever make would be better worth seeing than most other things I can think of." Yes, and Woody Allen too. Often his films change over time; maybe years from now, if we hit shuffle and happen upon Whatever Works in the mix with Mighty Aphrodite and A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy it will look like another pleasing minor entry in a canon without equal. So we'll say what we say every year: Maybe next time. Next year in -- Paris? London?

I hope he never dies.