A Farce To Be Reckoned With

Forging a career in carefree celluloid idiocy is hard work. As if the budget costs for giant wooden rabbits weren't astronomical enough, there's the critical indifference shown towards slapstick to navigate. Comedy doesn't win big at awards ceremonies anymore, least of all when they feature a musical number whose chorus consists entirely of well timed farts. Playing the idiot is a thankless task, even with heritage as rich as Chaplin and Keaton (Buster, that is, not Diane), and you'll rarely ever see a comedy actor winning plaudits until he or she turns "serious." Which is somewhat sad because making 'em laugh is damned hard work, and the hardest workers of them all are those who deal in buffoonery.

The Monty Python gang had to endure lousy weather, dwindling budgets and growing personal conflicts in order to get a film as gloriously stupid as Holy Grail made. And if the shoot wasn't enough of a hard slog, they faced the constant fear all comedy writers confront when separated from their audience: we've got homicidal rabbits, sexually adventurous nuns and flatulent cherubim, but is it funny? Paradoxically, it takes a stern commitment to the laws of lunacy to make a truly anarchic farce.

Observe, if you will, the masters. Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker were the trio responsible for Naked Gun and Airplane, two films that if broken in half would have "lunacy" written all the way through. They work harder for your laughs than any of the other flicks on the block. It's the cinematic version of carpet bombing: the more jokes they put in, the more there are likely to hit - only these ones are so expertly crafted they never seem to miss their mark. ZAZ films are so densely packed you miss half of the gags the first time round; for pure value for money, they're gold.

Alas, after years of lacklustre rip-offs, Western filmmakers seem currently cautious of outright farce and comedies rarely drift into realms of surreal nonsense. Few seem able to deliver the level of idiocy found in the best ZAZ titles (take for example the Scary Movie films which missed the mark completely) and end up trying to save an unfunny script with a set-piece that attempts to revolt rather than amuse, goading the would-be moral guardians with tepid attempts to shock. The jokes just aren't as fast or inspired and plots constantly suffer from taking themselves too seriously. Amusing as they are, the most popular current comedies rely on mawkish sentiment to serve as an antidote to the lunacy. The central romances in films like American Pie and Old School may experience standard pratfalls and tomfoolery, but they aren't played for laughs - at least not to the extent that Ted and Elaine's is in Airplane, nor Frank and Jane's in Naked Gun, and sit uncomfortably at odds with the picture's tone. The romances of the former two are tacked on for fear of letting the film fully embrace farce, but fail to flesh them out enough to justify detracting from the jokes. Billy Wilder and Neil Simon got the balance right time and time again, mixing slapstick, vaudeville and pathos perfectly without losing their audience. But then that's the trick to all great comedy: you treat even the lowbrow laughs with a highbrow mentality. Ye gods, even Shakespeare worked hard to keep his toilet gags in. The best comedies understand what they are and don't strive half-heartedly to be anything different. Yet far from suffering the woes of creative complacency, these comedies pace their territories with a constant critical eye striving to be consistently odder and funnier. It is with great pleasure then to find that this is not an obselete concept. Step forward Stephen Chow.


Despite training as a martial artist, he broke big as an actor in China by presenting children's television shows. It's a country that adores slapstick in all its forms and over the years Chow proved himself adept at visual comedy. A chronic hard-worker, Chow writes, directs, acts in and often produces his films - an artistic commitment all the more impressive considering the nature of his movies. Here is a purveyor of ultimate farce - an auteur dedicated to the highest forms of idiocy. He has taken physical and visual comedy into new realms, blending the absurd and the fantastic through deliberately overwrought computer graphics, a twisting of martial arts conventions and a fierce sense of comic timing. Following his first effort, Shaolin Soccer, a kung-fu football flick that almost knocks Escape to Victory off the top spot of Most Idiotic Football Film Ever (though thankfully for being funny, and not for featuring Pelé), his latest film Kung-Fu Hustle has broken out of China and made a sizeable impact in the West. Styling itself as a depression-era kung-fu gangster western, there is little here that could be accused of taking itself too seriously, and yet it remains strangely thrilling. It is built out of an innate understanding that farce can still excite and emotionally engage despite preoccupying itself with hitting a fat man in dungarees repeatedly with something that makes a good clang. It's been coloured by the feverishly gaudy pallette of an 8 year-old and matches it with a constant youthful enthusiasm, remaining refreshingly free of the constraints of overbearing sentiment or convention.

Kung-Fu Hustle is unlikely to be remembered in the West as little more than a whimsy, despite its undeniable Eastern box-office clout. More's the pity, as here lies a film that works tirelessly for your attention and finds its success through well-placed humour. True farce lowers your guard with cheap feints before delivering its knock-out blow, and the worst mistake you could make is to dismiss the genre as mere folly. The most memorable films are all the more potent for their ingenuity - there is no laziness to the humour here. Beware then, o curious sceptic, for there is a force at work that understands how to cast its appeal across the audience bounderies of gender, race, age and even culture. And just because it pretends to have lost its mind doesn't mean it isn't thinking.