Tomb
What is the deal with movies? And airplane food?
I love movies and I love standup comedy. That means when a comedian starts telling jokes about movies I’m pretty much all ears. Plenty of standup comics have built successful routines out of parodying mocking or re-enacting classic (and not-so-classic) films. Check out these classic “movie bits”:
• Jay Leno — Back in the 1980s before he was host of The Tonight Show I caught one of Leno’s standup performances in Spokane. It was a terrific show and I got to hear about a truly ridiculous black-and-white monster movie that Jay had seen on television late at night. He couldn’t remember the exact title but he described a scene in which an attractive young lady is watching the news and hears that a 60-foot-tall man has been spotted on a destructive rampage. The woman gasps “My husband Glen is 60 feet tall. I wonder if…!”
Funny stuff! Incidentally the film Leno describes is War of the Colossal Beast (1958) the woman is actually the giant man’s sister and the scene is substantially different from Jay’s description. Nevertheless the movie is just as silly as it sounds.
• Greg Morton — You might not recognize the name but once you see this rubber-faced comic do his impression of the original Star Wars t rilogy in just 90 seconds you’ll be a fan for life. The guy can do picture-perfect re-creations of Chewbacca R2-D2 Luke the Emperor and Jabba all in the blink of an eye while providing his own sound effects. Then he goes on to do a 30-second version of the Lord of the Rings t rilogy. There’s just no stopping this guy.
• Eddie Murphy — Everybody remembers Eddie’s raucous concert film Delirious (1983) right? At one point Murphy observes that in horror films white people always stay in the haunted house too long. Describing the scene from The Amityville Horror (1979) in which the toilet magically fills up with blood Murphy affects a stuffy high-pitched voice and deadpans “That’s peculiar.”
• Richard Jeni — In one of the late comedian’s most beloved bits he ridicules Jaws: The Revenge (1987) as “a movie so stupid it just slaps you in the head over and over with how stupid it is.” He then assaults his own face with repeated slaps crying “Look at you! It’s four in the morning you’re sitting there with one sweat sock and a burrito watching a shark that only kills one family out of an entire ocean full of perfectly edible people and you won’t turn it off because you think it’s going to get better!”
Fortunately the film is sufficiently ludicrous to supply Jeni with a wealth of material. When the female protagonist figures out that the shark is after her she leaves town. (“Isn’t that a bit drastic? Wouldn’t an apartment building be sufficient protection from the average shark?”) Later she flies to the Bahamas in a further attempt to elude the fish only to learn that the shark is waiting for her there having presumably made the journey faster than a jet aircraft. (“A fish is the fastest mode of transport available! Tear up those Concorde tickets and hop a flounder!”)
• Patton Oswalt — The voice of Remy the gourmet Rat from Pixar’s animated feature Ratatouille (2007) is also a screenwriter and standup comedian. In his concert film Werewolves and Lollipops (2007) Oswalt explains how difficult it is to write a complete screenplay and marvels over the existence of the movie Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977).
Death Bed: The Bed That Eats is about a demonically possessed four-poster bed that consumes and digests people who have sex on it. The film is narrated by the ghost of Aubrey Beardsley who is trapped in a painting in the bed’s room forced to watch the bed’s murderous activities but helpless to warn the victims. It’s an unbelievably peculiar idea for a film even today and must have seemed absolutely bonkers back in 1977 when the horror genre was much less played-out than it is now. The film was never released and got a belated DVD release in 2004 attracting a cult audience with its slow-paced artistic originality.
Oswalt calls the film Death Bed: The Bed That Eats PEOPLE and shows astonishment that any writer could possibly complete such a screenplay let alone get the film completed without wondering just what the hell they were doing. Did the writer really believe in the project that much? (“A bed that eats people! This is awesome! Reach down God gimme a high five!”) Oswalt closes with a pitch for his own upcoming horror film “Rape Stove: The Stove That Rapes People.”