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Title : "I'd like to think that sometime, maybe 10 or 20 years from now... there'd be something I could laugh at... anything."
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"I'd like to think that sometime, maybe 10 or 20 years from now... there'd be something I could laugh at... anything."

Said Spencer Tracy, as the thoroughly disgraced Captain T. G. Culpepper, encased in a body cast, at the end of "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World," which I watched — all 2 hours and 39 minutes of it — as the 1963 entry in my imaginary movie project. This is a movie I saw in the theater when it came out. I was 12, and I didn't know much about gigantic epic comedy chase movies. In fact, I still don't. It's been more than 50 years since then, and I've found any number of things to laugh at along my way, but I can't say I laughed much rewatching this sprawling, raucous monster. I wasn't in a theater full of people who'd assembled to enjoy the hell out of themselves, as I was back in 1963. I'm sure I laughed a lot back then, but I only half-laughed twice in the present-day rewatch.

Tracy, musing about ever laughing again, in fact gets to laugh almost immediately. Buddy Hackett (also in a full body cast) peels a banana, throws the peel on the floor, and Ethel Merman, who's been yelling at everyone throughout the film, comes strutting in, yelling at everyone, and she slips on the banana peel and falls hard on her ass. Do we really want to see a woman get hurt? Yes, in this case, we've been conditioned to wish harm on her, because she's been the loud-mouth mother-in-law visiting aural pain on all the men (except her beloved son Dick Shawn) for the entirety of the movie.

I get it. And yet, I do not get it. And I did not get it the first time around. Yes, I understand the old comic convention of The Mother-in-Law — specifically the mother-in-law to a man. She's got her daughter's devotion and she's going after the daughter's husband, crushing his masculine pride at every turn. You don't ask why these people are like this. They just are. They're characters. They're assigned these positions. Do not pause to reflect or all is lost. That is, nothing is funny. It's just loud. And — oh! — Ethel Merman is loud. Did you know her original last name is Zimmerman — just like Bob Dylan? She lopped off the "Zim." Why not lop off the "man" — it would be more castrating-y — and be Zimmer?
The man she emasculates is Milton Berle. (Milton Berle's original last name was Berlinger. He lopped off the back end of his name. And yes, I know his penis was big.) He's the fragile male, and that's supposed to be inherently funny. His wife, Dorothy Provine, is there to be the ingenue female. That couple contrasts to Sid Caesar and Edie Adams, who burgeon with fleshly amplitude, perhaps because they don't have a mother-in-law on board, draining them of sexual energy.

Everyone in this movie is after a treasure trove, which for some reason is $350,000. Not a million, not a half million, not a quarter million, not halfway between a quarter million and a half million, but $350,000. Someone must have thought that was a funny amount of money, perhaps because the math is hard when they get into conversations about dividing it up into shares. I guess the main idea of this movie is that these people — who learn simultaneously that there's money buried in a particular, incompletely described place — can work together or they can break up and go every man for himself. That is the ultimate great theme: Order or chaos. Society or a raw state of nature. Driving according to the rules of the road or speeding and veering and sailing off a cliff. They must decide!

It's a comedy, so they keep choosing chaos. They only come back to order — let's work together — now and then to create a new opportunity for crazy chaos. Here's a high point — showing how short bouts of order are overwhelmed by chaos:



Anyway... my "imaginary movie project" requires me to say what the difference was between then and now — the me who watched this thing in 1963 when I was 12 and the me who watched it 56 years later. I believe I truly felt the comedy at the time. I felt the anxiety of the danger and destruction and delighted in the comeuppance the greedy connivers experienced. For all the mishaps, the only death is the one that occurs right at the beginning, when Jimmy Durante sails off the cliff and survives long enough to tell Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Buddy Hackett, Mickey Rooney, and Jonathan Winters about the buried treasure and then figurative and literally kicks the bucket. It's like a porn movie, isn't it? It has to work on you inside, physically, and cause spasms — laughter/orgasms — or it's nothing, not worth your attention.

Eh. I guess I shouldn't say that when I'm trying to talk about myself, the 12 year old. But that's how I feel about laughter. And, you know I have no taste for porn.* I like my physical experiences in the real world, not aimed at me from a screen, with me reacting to what other people are doing or pretending to do. And the same goes for comedy. I laugh a lot, but it's in the context of real life. Something happens and funny things are observed and said. I'm in the middle of things. That gets my laughter.

No matter how big the movie is — and this was Cinerama and very long, with a cast packed with famous faces (Jerry Lewis drives up just to run over Spencer Tracy's hat and the 3 Stooges are suddenly there, holding firehoses, and then gone) — it isn't life. It's somebody's idea of how to jostle the people into spasming. It flows at you, long and hard. But I don't enjoy being at the receiving end of a firehose. Every day, in the casual environs of Meadhouse, there are half a dozen little things that make me laugh more than the entirety of "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World." I need the laughter that comes from within, not the greedy insistence of Hollywood — LAUGH!

There's something sad in the desperation of throwing everything at the big screen. But at least this movie was about greedy human desperation. Or so I muse, at age 68, 56 years after 12-year-old me sat in a big group and laughed because this is what people do, laugh at stuff like this, marvel at all the comic celebrities. Was it really funny back then, or was I greedy and desperate to get up to speed on what human beings think is so funny?

I remember my best friend sitting next to me, nudging me to notice Edie Adams posed in profile on the extreme left of the Cinerama screen. She knew — and I hadn't yet realized — that it was intended to be highly entertaining that her breasts were so large. I acted like, yeah, I got it. Now, I'm old, and I don't feel that I have to get anything. I get what I want, not what's foisted on me.

________________________

* Longtime readers already know this, but I must point it out again so that you can understand Young Althouse. I grew up in a home where Playboy (and sometimes Swank and Escapade) were out on the coffee table along with Life and Look. Anyone was free to look through these magazines. They were never forbidden or fetishized. They were simply part of the normal in the Althouse household. I'm the opposite of Puritanical about porn. It just means nothing to me. It seems kind of old-fashioned. Quaint.

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