Saturday, April 6, 2019

April 6-7, 2019: Crowd-sourced 80s Comedies


[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I decided to AmericanStudy a handful of classic 1980s comic films. This crowd-sourced post is drawn from the responses and nominations of fellow ComedyStudiers—add yours in comments, please!]
Responding to Monday’s Airplane! post, Irene Martyniuk shares, “Airplane!  A huge family favorite. Explains Autopilot perfectly. J
Other 80s (or 80s adjacent) comedy nominations:
Diego Ubiera goes with What about Bob? (1991) and Weekend at Bernie's (1989).
Andy Cornick rants, “I could lecture an entire semester on the nonsensical depiction of the 1984 All-Valley Karate Tournament final round. It is so patently obvious that Johnny Lawrence of the Cobra Kai dojo won.” In terms of the film’s genres, he adds, “Of late, the funniest part of watching most of those movies is realizing how far societal standards have come since they were funny and not cringe-worthy.”
Andrew DaSilva writes, “I didn't grow up in the 80's but my brother did and he shared those comedies with me as every older brother should. The ones that come to mind are Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, gotta love that John Hughes he was big in the 1980's; Honey, I Shrunk The Kids; and of course it wouldn't be the 1980's without the 3 Amigos!, the SNL tri-fecta Martin, Chase and Short! Yet none of those compare to Paul Reubens in the PEE WEE HERMAN Show!”
Tim McCaffrey shares, “Rewatching Revenge of the Nerds and realizing that there is a blatant rape in the movie...well, let's just say that it doesn't stand up.”
And on Twitter, Mark Helmsing writes, “Deconstruct ‘the city as garden of earthly delights’ theme in Adventures in Babysitting and maybe read The Great Outdoors via Roderick Nash and theories of American wilderness and pastoralism vs. ‘the big city.’”
Next series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Other 80s comedies (or other comic films) you’d highlight?

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