comedy

Harpo Numero Uno

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Do people rank their favorite Marx Bros the way they rank their favorite Beatles? There are some clear parallels between the two groups. Zeppo, of course, is the Ringo of the Marx family, putting in steady background work that catches all of the mockery and none of the credit. Groucho & Chico are the Marx Bros’ Lennon-McCartney songwriting duo: legendary lyrical talents who could craft a joke so brilliantly, beautifully simple that it appears effortless. That leaves Harpo as the Marx equivalent to George: the abstraction, the artist, the connoisseur’s favorite. Groucho & Chico might have the most widely remembered Marx bits thanks to the eternal quotability of their rapidfire wordplay, but Harpo is the unpredictable, undefinable element that makes the vaudeville group’s cinematic output for Paramount convincingly, enduringly rank among the greatest comedies every made. If Groucho’s 4th-wall-breaking smartassery was the inspiration for Bugs Bunny’s wascally, wisecracking persona, Harpo’s schtick was the blueprint for the zanier, more surreal touches of Looney Tunes slapstick – crafting all-timer sight gags out of nonstop chaos & violence. He’s just as deserving of celebration as a screen comedy icon, selling curly blonde wigs on costume store shelves right next to Groucho’s famous “beaglepuss” glasses.

The one time Harpo might’ve been properly appreciated as the best of the Marx Bros was in the group’s film debut, 1929’s Cocoanauts. Adapted from a stage musical at a time when Hollywood productions were still learning how to incorporate sound recording equipment, Cocoanauts finds Groucho & Chico struggling to get their puns & dirty jokes across with their usual clarity & machine-gun rhythms. Meanwhile, Harpo is just as funny as he ever was, acting as the rickety bridge from Chaplin-style silent comedy to the early sound era that the Marx Bros would soon collectively master. He is a mute little tramp, and a scoundrel. While Groucho plays the wisecracking manager of a failing Florida resort, Harpo tears into the scene like a human tornado, causing nonstop chaos for a business that’s already got enough problems without him. Within seconds of arriving, he’s eating jacket buttons off Groucho’s bellboys, tearing up guests’ mail into confetti, and stealing money directly from the concierge’s cash register. Much of Cocoanauts is a cutesy, well-behaved stage musical romance that happens to add in dashes of Marx Bros humor for flavor, and Harpo’s the one spice note that comes through the strongest. It’s no one’s favorite Marx Bros movie, but he makes sure it’s no one’s least favorite either.

It’s at the start of the brothers’ follow-up film, 1930’s Animal Crackers, where Harpo goes toe-to-toe with Groucho in direct competition for group MVP. The movie starts with Groucho being introduced to a society party as Captain Spaulding, an African explorer returning from safari with heroic tales to recount to anyone who’ll listen. Of course, Groucho immediately undercuts this ostentatious introduction by firing off a long string of hypersexual, self-deprecating one-liners that reveal his true nature as a pervert and a coward, much to his host’s embarrassment. Then, Harpo is given a similar grand introduction as The Professor, an erudite academic who is meant to impress the same captive audience with his expertise in fine art. Harpo looks unusually well put-together during this entrance, wearing a high-quality top hat & coat combo that doesn’t match his go-to scrappy pickpocket persona. When a servant removes his coat, however, the rest of his clothes come off with it, shocking the mansion’s welcome party with his underwear-clad body. Then, he immediately grabs a gun from Groucho’s safari arsenal and starts firing randomly at guests, clearing the room with a purposeless escalation of violence. Those two introductions are about as direct of a one-to-one comparison between Groucho & Harpo’s comedic styles as you’ll find and, while both are funny, it’s the latter one that earns the bigger laughs.

The Marx Bros didn’t only charm the masses with slapstick violence & punny wordplay; they also carried over vaudeville variety show tradition to the screen by playing beautiful music. Groucho would sing bright & bubbly show tunes with absurd in-character lyrics; Chico played a mean piano, often showing off by tapping keys with finger guns; and Harpo, of course, played the harp. Originally inspired by an advertisement’s illustration of a cherub, Harpo was a self-taught harpist who leaned heavily into the angelic softness of his chosen instrument, while also repurposing the childlike curly wig of a cherub to instead recall a circus clown. While he would spend the majority of his screentime performing manic prop comedy, chasing young women around the set like Benny Hill, and indulging in some sleight of hand pickpocketry, Harpo would always put his sadistic clown antics aside for a minute to treat his audience with the heavenly sounds of the harp. Imagine if Tom Green paused in the middle of Freddy Got Fingered to sincerely play the cello; it’s quite the switcheroo. The in-universe logic of whatever character Harpo’s playing never gets in the way of that indulgence, either. In 1932’s Horse Feathers, he plays a barfly dogcatcher who shows surprising talent as a harpist but no aptitude whatsoever for playing football with the boys; go figure.

There’s obviously no need to rank the Marx Bros against each other, since the fraternal goofballs work best as a full set. Groucho’s filthy wordplay, Chico’s circular logic, and Harpo’s madcap sadism would all get exhausting in isolation without their brothers balancing out the rhythms of their act; that’s mainly why Zeppo hangs around, acting as the group’s only calming presence. It’s just notable that Harpo is an impossible act to follow and is thus consistently slotted last in rotation, if not only because he’ll clear a room with a pistol or an industrial size bottle of chloroform when given the chance. There’s a famous bit in 1931’s Monkey Business where all four brothers, essentially playing themselves, take turns impersonating heartthrob crooner Maurice Chevalier as a way of getting one over on shipboard immigration cops. Zeppo’s got a handsome-enough look that he thinks he can get away with the deception but immediately fails; Groucho & Chico, of course, think they can talk their way out of the crisis but they don’t get very far either. Then, Harpo stomps onto the scene, tearing up the immigration authorities’ paperwork and causing his usual maddening chaos before then launching into an eerily perfect Maurice Chevalier impersonation . . . which is revealed to be a drag routine lip-sync act involving a phonograph player hidden behind his back. It’s such a perfectly, deliriously absurd escalation of the bit that no one can follow it. Harpo’s is always the ultimate punchline, which makes for a credible argument that he is the funniest person who ever lived, especially since his only true competition is his own brother Groucho.

-Brandon Ledet

The Player (1992)

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Every time I search for a particular review from At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert on YouTube, for the next month, the algorithm suggests other episodes from the duo for me. And I love it! After checking in to see what the two late film critics had to say about Miami Blues (normally, when the two are not aligned, I side with Roger, but Siskel liked the film and Ebert didn’t, surprisingly), their “Best of 1992” episode popped up in my recommendations. As one would expect, both men loved Robert Altman’s The Player, a neo-noir inverted mystery set amongst the wheelings and dealings of high profile Hollywood studio bigwigs. Although the film is very much a product of the early 1990s, with stars who were household names at the time (playing characters or cameoing as themselves) and may or may not be recognizable to a modern audience, the story itself is still very accessible even if the culture is somewhat alien to us now, nearly thirty-five years later. 

Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) is an executive who is respected at his studio for being the “writer’s guy,” liaising between upper management and the screenwriters who come into his office to pitch their ideas, preferably in twenty-five words or less. His long day of hearing concepts as scintillating as “Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman,” “Ghost meets Manchurian Candidate,” and a sequel about Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross’s daughter called The Graduate II (pitched by Buck Henry himself in a cameo) is interrupted by the latest in a series of threatening postcards from a writer who believes Griffin has blown him off. Sensing potential impending career troubles as the result of an up-and-coming exec, Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher), abandoning ship at Fox, coupled with the unplanned visit of tacky junior executives from the bank that finances the studio, Griffin combs through his files to try and figure out who might be sending the poison pen notes. 

Concluding it must have been a writer named Kahane (Vincent D’Onofrio), Griffin visits the man’s house and calls from his cellphone, surreptitiously spying on Kahane’s girlfriend, a painter named June Gudmundsdottir (Greta Scacchi), when she answers. He flirts with her, and she tells him that Kahane has gone to a repertory screening of The Bicycle Thief. Griffin then unconvincingly “accidentally” runs into Kahane there, and the normally teetotal Griffin agrees to talk business over drinks at a local karaoke place. There, Kahane grows increasingly frustrated with Griffin’s apparent condescension and the two part ways, but when they encounter one another on the street, a scuffle ensues, during which Griffin ends up killing the screenwriter. Coming to his senses, Griffin makes it look like a mugging and flees the scene. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before Detective Avery (Whoopi Goldberg) tracks him down, and she’s clearly not convinced by his protestations of innocence. His girlfriend, story editor Bonnie Sherow (Cynthia Stevenson), can also tell that something’s off, even before he goes to Kahane’s funeral and ends up beginning an affair with June. Perhaps worst of all, Griffin continues to receive threats from his stalker, which means he did it all for nothing. 

The film is, despite the presence of this murder, a fairly soft satire of the film industry. Mockery is made of the contemporary studio system’s flaws: an overreliance on test screening feedback, the inherent difficulties of trying to create art in a hypercapitalistic system, and the resultant way that catering to the sentiments of the lowest common denominator (especially with regards to demands for happy endings and uncomplicated morals) damages artistic integrity. It’s sharp, but it’s not necessarily cutting. As Altman himself noted, there’s not a single agent in the film, just actors, writers, executives, and the occasional director. Just like Griffin himself, he’s not “afraid of ‘political,’” only of “radically political [and] political politica.” Ultimately, it’s very cynical about the world that undergirds the movies that we all love so much, but it never quite becomes as mean spirited as it might have. Although he kills a man in a fit of paranoid, drunken rage, the most cutthroat things that Griffin does are cutting loose his the devoted, professional, and loyal Bonnie for the younger, more buxom, blonder June and deliberately allowing Larry Levy to take credit for signing on a film that Griffin recognizes is impossible, so that he can later swoop in and save the day, thus saving his own career. The most salient thing that the film does is have an intentionally absurd happy ending despite all that comes before, just as the film with the film, Habeas Corpus, originally a downer awards-baiter, ends with a one-liner and a kiss. 

The Player goes more for the darkly comic than the noirishly gritty, but what it sacrifices there it makes up for with its nearly constant stream of witticisms and dependably funny players. Fred Ward is a lot of fun as the studio’s fixer who also waxes poetic about the golden years of Hollywood; Richard E. Grant is as impeccable as ever as a director with a grand vision for an unworkable Oscar bait film (alongside a typically hyperactive Dean Stockwell as his manager); even country musician Lyle Lovett gets in on the action as the unsettling man following Griffin around the city in a role that feels like it was written for Crispin Glover. The only place where this really falls flat is in the performance of Whoopi Goldberg, who is not on her A-game in this picture. The actors who appear in cameo roles were encouraged to ad-lib their dialogue, which offers up great opportunities, like when an unprompted Malcolm McDowell insults Griffin, leading to real befuddlement on the part of Robbins, but Whoopi does several painfully unfunny bits that all seem to go on forever, especially the one about trying to find her tampons. It’s also worth noting that Greta Scacchi’s performance here is nothing to write home about either, but at least that’s potentially an intentional acting choice, as her general blank slate nature allows for Griffin to project whatever he wants onto her. In contrast to loyal, flat-chested Bonnie, June is forever dressed in silks and thin fabrics that do nothing to disguise her nipples. She is breasting boobily at all times, and she play-acts at having depth through her art. When speaking of her late boyfriend, she says that she never really thought of him as talented, ironically standing in the midst of several “artworks” that are composed of the word “ice” surrounded by cool colors. I might not be giving Scacchi enough credit for making her such an effective representation of a boring-but-hot woman trying to seem deeper than she is, but if it’s a deliberate choice, it’s relatively successful. 

In a modern context, the most off-putting thing that an audience may have trouble with isn’t the murder of Kahane, but getting lost in trying to keep up with the cavalcade of stars in the film, and tracking who’s playing themselves and who’s playing a character within the film itself. I’d also wager that an uninitiated viewer may find themselves distracted by the never-ending series of cameo appearances, especially for those whose stars have diminished in the intervening decades. Any audience would still know Bruce Willis, Julia Roberts, Burt Reynolds, and Cher, of course, but Sally Kirkland, David Alan Grier, and Robert Wagner? If you’re reading this, then those names are probably at least somewhat familiar to you at the very, very least, but to the under-thirty set? Probably not so much. The best advice I can give to someone coming to this film so long after the film’s release is to just go with the flow and have a good time. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Coyote vs. Acme (2026)

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I’ve been going through a Marx Bros phase for the past week or so, which again has me thinking about how many Old Hollywood icons & archetypes were introduced to me via Looney Tunes as a child, long before I would’ve been exposed to their originating sources of inspiration. The wisecracking Groucho Marx is, of course, Bugs Bunny in human form. Bugs also borrowed his trademark carrot-munching technique from Clark Gable and would occasionally dip into Humphrey Bogart parody, in addition to his more overt Marxisms. Caricatures of Frank Sinatra, James Cagney, Cary Grant and Mice & Men-era Lon Chaney Jr. would frequently pop up in Looney Tunes shorts as well, as would, most famously, a beautifully warped caricature of Peter Lorre. There’s something especially subversive about Saturday morning cartoons exposing young children to Peter Lorre long before they’d have any personal interest in seeking out his iconic villain roles in M, Mad Love, The Maltese Falcon, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and titles otherwise alphabetized. Once Lorre was introduced as an in-universe character among other Old Hollywood celebrities, Looney Tunes animators had a ton of fun slapping his distinct mug on a wide range of characters: a Casablancan Tweety Bird, a fish with disconcertingly fleshy lips, and a mad scientist named Dr. Lorre, whom I was happy to discover plays a major role in the latest Looney Tunes feature Coyote vs. Acme, continuing the tradition into a new millennium.

Dr. Lorre serves as the Maltese Falcon-like MacGuffin of Coyote vs. Acme, a missing scientist who was violently disappeared by the insidious Acme corporation in a covert coverup effort. Finding Dr. Lorre means uncovering Acme’s crimes against the cartoon citizens who purchase its products, treating them like disposable animal test subjects despite their overt anthropomorphisms. The corporation’s most frequent victim, of course, is Wile E. Coyote, who is addicted to purchasing & deploying faulty Acme products in his deranged, single-minded pursuit to capture & devour the Road Runner. Sick of all the backfiring rockets, misleading magnets, and trickster dynamite fuses that have mangled his body over the decades, Wile E. Coyote finally decides to sue Acme for personal damages, employing an overwhelmed underachiever lawyer to plead his case, as portrayed by a live & in-the-flesh Will Forte. While researching Acme’s culpability in the cartoon coyote’s never-ending marathon of Sisyphean failures, Forte’s personal injury law firm accidentally undercovers a larger corporate conspiracy involving Dr. Lorre’s disappearance and the second-class citizen treatment of all toons everywhere. The resulting fight for truth & justice makes for the goofiest X-Files conspiracy thriller sendup since Disclosure Day, with Bugs Bunny putting in a crucial cameo appearance as the firm’s shadowy Deep Throat informant (in another classic movie reference to All the President’s Men, which was similarly parodied by fellow introducing-the-kids-to-the-classics cartoon series The Simpsons).

While Coyote vs. Acme goes out of its way to continue the Looney Tunes shorts’ caricatural celebrations of classic Hollywood iconography, it’s clear that Hollywood does not love the movie back. The film’s years-long struggles to reach theatrical distribution has been oddly storied & public. The initial blow was an announcement that Warner Bros was going to scrap the completed picture entirely, finding more value in recategorizing it as a tax write-off than in marketing it as populist entertainment. The upstart indie distributor Ketchup Entertainment then came to the rescue, buying the film out of oblivion so it can enjoy a full life outside a cyclical tax audit. That extratextual backstory is only relevant, really, because Coyote vs. Acme happens to be about shady corporate machinations that value profits over people, so that when Will Forte and his coyote client take Acme to court, it plays as if Warner Bros is also on trial for its crimes against its own IP. Screenwriter Samy Burch (May December) finds great inspiration & pathos in Wile E. Coyote’s stubborn persistence while taking on both Acme in court and the Road Runner on the road despite his repeated, hopeless failures, which brings the twinkle back to his schmuck lawyer’s long-dead eyes. It’s something worth keeping in mind if and when reports of the movie’s box office disappointments hit national headlines; just getting the picture out to the public is a victory in itself, regardless of the result.

As admirable as I find Coyote vs. Acme‘s anti-corporate sentiments, and as charming as I find its classically minded participation in conspiracy thriller tropes, it’s difficult to claim that the movie ever rises above being, simply, cute. The jokes are consistently cute but never convincingly zany, with even Wile E. Coyote’s classic comedy-duo partnership with the Road Runner transitioning from violent to cute. Will Forte’s admiring relationship with his Sisyphean client is cute but never believably real nor tangible. Decades after Who Framed Roger Rabbit? mastered the form, there has yet to be another human-cartoon team up where the drawn & photographed characters share a physical space with the same movie-magic credibility. The textureless flatness of Coyote vs. Acme‘s computer animation does it no favors in that effort, nor does the choice to team Forte up with a mute character who can only communicate through exasperated grimaces & hand-written signs. We’re always aware that we’re watching a human actor speaking to no one but the camera, with his imaginary costar added later in post. More damningly, the film also struggles to replicate the madcap momentum of classic Looney Tunes shorts in its more stoic, procedural courtroom drama plotting. Just last year, Ketchup Entertainment distributed a much zanier, much more classically loony Looney Tunes revival in the fully animated The Day the Earth Blew Up, proving that it can still be done and making this secondary effort to keep the brand alive feel somewhat superfluous. It’s difficult to get too fired up about Coyote vs. Acme’s glaring shortcomings, though, since its very existence is an artistic fight against corporate greed and its overall effect is, not for nothing, cute.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Duck Soup (1933)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the classic Marx Bros war comedy Duck Soup (1933).

00:00 Welcome
02:26 Under Capricorn (1949)
09:50 The Samurai and the Prisoner (2026)
19:45 The Others (2001)
25:21 Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972)
29:12 Maniac Cop (1988)
35:58 Saccharine (2026)
50:05 Tony (2026)
59:16 Maddie’s Secret (2026)
1:15:39 Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)

01:33:33 Duck Soup (1933)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

I Want Your Sex (2026)

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Gregg Araki’s entire promotional campaign for his latest candy-coated slacker comedy has been focused on how Gen-Z is not having as much sex as Gen-X was at their age, a common online-discourse talking point you’ll hear echoed throughout the film itself. Araki will tell any interviewer who’ll listen about how kids these days aren’t fucking enough, that they’re robbing themselves of essential life experiences by being too socially timid during the most precious years of their sexual prime. Olivia Wilde acts as Araki’s Millennial mouthpiece for that complaint about the youth of today’s sexual cowardice in I Want Your Sex, while Cooper Hoffman acts as an ideological punching bag who has to suffer her blows, begging for forgiveness on behalf of his entire generation of anxious, undersexed dweebs. The only thing that saves this intergenerational dynamic from coming across as the “Old man yells at cloud” screed of a prurient 60-something curmudgeon is context & framing. Coming from Wilde’s onscreen persona as an art-scene dominatrix pushing her younger subordinate onto the mattress for a vigorous fuck session, Araki’s position shifts from a schoolhouse scolding to a form of negging dirty talk. It’s a way of teasing Gen-Z into having more sex with their elders in particular, not just each other, by turning that discourse into a degrading roleplay game all of its own — a playfully selfish maneuver.

Unfortunately, that kinky reframing of Gen-Z libido discourse is the only truly inspired idea in I Want Your Sex. The rest of the film swirling around it is just mildly naughty sitcom antics, with Cooper Hoffman playing Wyle E. Coyote to Olivia Wilde’s Roadrunner. Hoffman stars as a fresh-out-of-college slacker who’s openly groomed to become the next sexual plaything of his art-world celebrity boss, played by Wilde. Wilde pontificates through every conversation as if she’s always talking to press about her upcoming gallery show, exclusively communicating in platitudes about the philosophy, politics, and aesthetics of sex, which she’s built an entire career around commodifying in self-parodic pop art. The movie starts as a parody of Sunset Boulevard, with Wilde’s nude body floating face down in her own mansion’s swimming pool, which Hoffman’s befuddled underling has to explain to police detectives (Margaret Cho & Johnny Knoxville) in a classic noir flashback structure. Despite that tease of inevitable violence, the mood remains light & cartoony, to the point where even the S&M games between Wilde’s Norma Desmond dom and Hoffman’s Joe Gillis sub are too goofy to be taken seriously. Most of the kink in I Want Your Sex is comically gestured at instead of depicted in earnest. The seduction period where Hoffman is introduced to his boss’s dirty games is skipped entirely, with the edit jumping straight into depiction through montage rather than building genuine erotic tension scene to scene. The dialogue makes constant references to the act of pegging, but the only time a character straps on a harness onscreen is when they’re too drunk to figure out how it’s supposed to be worn. It’s a funny gag, but it’s also an indication that Araki may have lost some of his own sexually anarchic nerve as the decades have gone by. In his 90s indie days, he would’ve fully gone there instead of just talking about it.

For all of Araki’s preloaded discourse about the diminished returns of each generation’s sexual adventurism, the real story here is the diminished returns of each generation’s cinematic imagery. Araki recently gave an interview with GQ Magazine where he admitted that he vastly prefers the look & feel of digital cameras over the bulky analog film equipment of his early years, stating, “I love digital. I love the way it looks. I love the things you can do with it. I hate sprocket holes. I hate dealing with the labs.” It’s easy to see how that shift in format might’ve made Araki’s job easier & more fun, but he doesn’t seem to realize how detrimental it’s been to the overall quality of his work. I Want Your Sex‘s most pronounced visual idea is the contrast between the candy-colored pop art of Wilde’s art studio, the breakfast cereal commercial production design of Hoffman’s man-child apartment, and the grim, grey blandness of his checked-out girlfriend’s place, which is supposed to represent the sexless, passionless monotony of Gen-Z living (with Charli XCX playing its against-type spokeswoman). The problem is that, because it’s shot on digital cameras, there’s no richness or vibrancy to the colors in the more cartoonish spaces, and they end up looking a little bland as well, undercutting the point of the contrast. Some of the best touches of Araki classics like Nowhere & The Doom Generation are the absurd pops of color in the teenage fashion & interior decor, which is now being sacrificed for the convenience of digital filmmaking (an excuse that gets a little flimsy when you look at the high-contrast cartoon imagery of last year’s Araki-inspired, digitally shot Rats!). The unintended result is that I Want Your Sex often looks & feels like a straight-to-streaming comedy from an anonymous hack rather than the latest pop-art provocation from an indie cinema legend. Gregg Araki wants I Want Your Sex to read as a grand statement on the current moment in intergenerational sexual politics, but it instead mostly reads as a cute but inessential workplace comedy with a few more onscreen dildos than usual.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The Hairy Bird (1998)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the ensemble-cast boarding school comedy The Hairy Bird (1998), a.k.a. All I Wanna Do, a.k.a. Strike!

00:00 Christopher Nolan
14:00 The Odyssey (2026)
33:00 War and Peace (1965-1967)
37:48 Conan the Destroyer (1984)
40:40 Red Sonja (1985)
46:30 The NeverEnding Story (1984)
53:20 Her Private Hell (2026)
1:00:11 The Taste of Tea (2004)
1:04:55 Millennium Actress (2001)
1:10:46 The Invite (2026)
1:20:12 After Hours (1985)

1:27:20 The Hairy Bird (1998)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

After Hours (1985)

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The time of another adaptation of The Odyssey is upon us, which means that it’s time for the underemployed to crack their knuckles and start making Letterboxd lists of films that are spiritually similar. One that’s been popping up more often recently is the Martin Scorsese film After Hours, one of the director’s more underdiscussed pictures. The 1985 dark comedy, set in the wee hours of the morning in New York City, follows word processor Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) on, well, an odyssey across the city as he faces various challenges in trying to get back home from Soho. In a diner one night, he’s reading a Henry Miller novel when the lovely Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) strikes up a conversation with him. They flirt, and she tells him that she’s staying with a sculptress friend, Kiki (Linda Fiorentino), whose work includes making plaster bagels with cream cheese. Intrigued, he calls Kiki’s loft later that night and Marcy invites him over, but he ends up losing the only cash he has on him, a $20 bill, when it’s blown out of a cab window. 

This is only the beginning of Paul’s troubles for the night. As it turns out, not only is Marcy already married (albeit separated from her husband, whose fetishization of The Wizard of Oz has made him incapable of orgasming without screaming “Surrender Dorothy”), she’s also already got a boyfriend, with whom she quarreled earlier in the night, prompting her flirtation with Paul in the first place. She behaves erratically, tells harrowing stories about her past that may or may not be true, has a book of images of horrific burns, and is constantly leaving the room to giggle and whisper conspiratorially with Kiki; she is, in short, a manic pixie nightmare woman. Paul sneaks out of the apartment but is unable to make his way home as he’s short the fare for the subway, as there was a price change that went into effect at midnight, and he makes his way to a late night bar, where he befriends bartender Tom (John Heard) and finds himself the object of desire for dissatisfied, forty-something cocktail waitress Julie (Teri Garr). Tom takes pity on Paul and offers to give him the dollar that he needs to get home but is unable to open the register. Paul leaves his own apartment keys as collateral in order to take Tom’s keyring and collect the spare register key from Tom’s place. On his way out, he’s spotted by some of Tom’s neighbors, who accuse him of being the neighborhood burglar who has been hard at work in the area in recent weeks, but he manages to convince them otherwise. 

Returning to the bar, he comes upon the real prowlers (Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong) loading Kiki’s life size papier-mâché sculpture of a screaming man into their van, and he scares them off. Returning the sculpture to Kiki’s apartment, he finds her in the middle of a BDSM session with a hulking man named Horst, who scolds him for running off on Marcy. Paul attempts to apologize to Marcy but finds that she has overdosed on barbiturates. When he goes to Kiki and Horst for help, he finds that they’ve left a note saying they’ve gone to a club. Paul calls the police to report Marcy’s death and returns to the bar to return Tom’s keys. Tom has closed the bar for half an hour, but Julie, who lives across the street, invites him in from the rain. Her apartment matches her beehive hairdo, which shows that she’s stuck in the 1960s; it’s pink, decorated with the occasional rainbow, and stocked with an entire shelf of Aqua Net. After a few more contrived coincidences and turns of the vice that’s gripping Paul, he ultimately finds himself at the mercy of a mob that’s out for the blood of the neighborhood burglar, led by an irate ice cream truck driver named Gail (Catherine O’Hara). Will this be the end of Rico? 

After Hours is a very funny movie, and it’s a shame that it’s not considered one of the essentials in the director’s oeuvre. Paul’s initial situation is a familiar one, in which one finds themself in the home of someone that they barely know but slowly comes to the realization that instability can present as cute quirkiness on first impression, and has to extricate oneself with as much finesse as possible. From there, the continuous downward tumble and increasingly hostile interactions with the bizarre characters who haunt Soho’s streets during the darkest hours of the night make for a hilarious, anxiety-inducing social nightmare. It reads like an early version of Beau is Afraid, in which an ill-equipped everyman must grapple with an increasingly bizarre reality. Here, it’s because everyone involved is connected (Tom is, of course, the boyfriend with whom Marcy had a fight earlier in the night) and are caricatures of normal people with their neuroses turned all the way up. This makes for some very funny characters who are still well-observed. One of the bits that I enjoyed the most was when Julie invites Paul up to her apartment out of the rain while he waits for Tom to reopen the bar, and she puts on a Monkees record. When she realizes that Paul is in a somber state after finding a dead body, she soundtracks the new mood by playing Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning,” seamlessly changing the records. From the punks who try to forcibly shave Paul’s hair into a Mohawk at Club Berlin to the woman who lives beneath the club in a cluttered museum of antiques to a neighborhood that’s as trigger-happy for mob justice as Springfield, everyone is a portrait of a weirdo, and I loved After Hours for that. 

Three years after After Hours, screenwriter Joseph Minion would pen Vampire’s Kiss, known to the general public as the image source of an infamous Nicolas Cage meme, but which has a similar sense of humor to this one. This came right on the heels of another Scorsese comedy, The King of Comedy, which found a balance between being a funny comedy and a genuine thriller, and King continued the Scorsese tradition from Taxi Driver of having the source of danger be the character that we spend the film with. This one not only breaks that tradition by making Paul more of a Hitchcockian falsely-accused-man-on-the-run archetype who’s mostly the victim of circumstance (and a few poorly considered lies), but also in tone from King, having more of Minion’s fingerprints on it than Scorsese’s. There are no long tracking shots that are a hallmark of the director’s filmography, no fancy camera movement, just workmanlike competency, but this allows more room for the comedy to breathe, to the film’s benefit.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Irony, Sincerity, Hilarity, Clarity

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Does a comedy owe its audience even an ounce of heartfelt sincerity, or is it enough to just tell jokes? Is ironic detachment an open excuse for artistic laziness, or can it be a useful tool that cuts deeper than straightforward sentimentality when wielded with intent? I recently took in a double feature of new-release comedies that challenged my relationship with ironic, bad-on-purpose humor, which I used to enjoy without reservation half a lifetime ago. In my early 20s, I would’ve been over the moon for David Wain’s latest ironic joke-fest Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, which is so relentlessly, purposelessly stupid it’s almost indistinguishable from a hack studio comedy from a lesser mind. Instead, I swooned for the equally ironic but much more purposeful Maddie’s Secret, a new John Early vehicle that parodies hack TV movies & afterschool specials of a bygone era while also honoring their ability to make an audience cry.  Both were funny on their own terms, but only one made me genuinely feel something, which is an effect I didn’t know I needed in a comedy until I saw it was possible.

To paraphrase the great Robert Bresson, Gail Daughtry offers neither beautiful images nor necessary ones. The film starts in Everywhere, Suburbia, mimicking the imagistic sensibilities of a studio comedy from at least two decades ago. When our titular plucky hairstylist (Zoey Deutch) leaves the safety of the suburbs behind for a life-changing adventure in Los Angeles, the images shift to mimic the B-roll stock footage of an Entertainment Tonight segment showcasing the glitz & glam of Hollywood living . . . also from at least two decades ago. Everything you see in Gail Daughtry is intentionally, hideously stale, and much of its humor relies on its jokes being punishingly unfunny, all for the sake of above-it-all ironic detachment. If there’s any emotional investment in its low-effort mockery of pre-existing entertainment, it’s in the film’s broad parody of the Old Hollywood classic The Wizard of Oz. Gail Daughtry’s name is a mirrored slant-rhyme of Dorothy Gale’s. The wizard she hopes to meet in the emerald city of Los Angeles is Jon Hamm (playing himself), whom she’s desperate to sleep with after her fiancée improbably acts on his own “celebrity sex pass,” to even the score. Along the way, she gathers a ragtag group of daffy bozos: a brainless management-agency desk clerk (Ben Wang), a heartless paparazzo (Ken Marino), and the cowardly John Slattery (again, himself). Along for the entire ride is her pet gay bestie Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), another anagrammatic reference to Toto. The Wizard of Oz homages are genuinely cute & heartwarming throughout, acting as the one shining beacon of effort & sincerity in a comedy that would otherwise rather not bother.

Maddie’s Secret is a different story. Ostensibly, the film is a winking, ironic parody of the made-for-TV “women’s issues” movie Kate’s Secret (1986), now set in the modern world of culinary “content creators.” Only, it’s not clear exactly how much of that parody is meant to be taken as a joke. John Early stars as the titular Maddie, reviving the same exaggerated drag mannerisms he brought to his 2021 “redux” parody of Showgirls. Early’s performance is a kind of post-ironic magic trick, one that can only be compared to Divine’s domestic melodrama performances in Hairspray & Polyester. You immediately forget that Maddie is a woman played by a male comedian; you just accept her as a person worthy of the world’s love, from the hairs on her stringy blonde wig to the everyday commonality of her sagging breasts (arguably, the MVP movie prop of the year) to the sensible shoes on her feet. Maddie’s in-movie audience loves her too, as she finds fast fame online making relatable cooking videos that outpace the view counts of her more pristinely put-together coworkers (most notably, Claudia O’Doherty as her test kitchen employer’s queen bitch). The fame gets to her, though, exacerbating her private struggles with bulimia so violently that she’s voluntarily institutionalized. From there, the movie takes a detour into Girl, Interrupted homage, introducing the audience to a clique of other women in crisis to fall in love with (including Vanessa Bayer as her ditzy roommate and Kate Berlant as her predatory lesbian sidekick). Everyone involved is technically putting in ironic, going-through-the-motions comedic performances, but the effect of the scene-to-scene drama is still deeply, painfully heartfelt. It’s a lot like watching an actual vintage made-for-TV melodrama on Lifetime, in that it can make you laugh and cry, often simultaneously.

Some of the disparity between Maddie’s Secret & Gail Daughtry‘s respective relationships with visual, effortful beauty is that the imagistic standards of all media have declined over time. Gail Daughtry may borrow its story structure from The Wizard of Oz, but its visual cues mock the pedestrian, smartphone-quality digital footage of modern filmmaking — intentionally deglamming & demystifying the Hollywood dream factory. Meanwhile, Maddie’s Secret is set in the world of digital content creation, but it pulls its visual cues from an era when even made-for-TV movies were expected to be relatively beautiful. The standards of basic craft were just higher in past decades, so that certain lighting & framing choices in a TV movie about bulimia could be mistaken for a Fassbinderian homage to Douglas Sirk. As such, I should probably cut Wain’s film some slack for being so aggressively ugly & mundane, since its lifeless visual aesthetic is itself a critical commentary on modern comedic media production. It’s just difficult to do so while there’s another comedy in theaters that proves ironic humor does not necessarily require a lack of effort, emotion, or purpose. Maddie’s Secret looks great, lands laughs, and earns tears while maintaining the same dedication to feature-length ironic parody. It can be done, and it is worth the effort.

-Brandon Ledet

The Invite (2026)

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After the much derided (but enjoyed by me) Don’t Worry Darling, Olivia Wilde was put in director jail for a while, only returning this year with the premier of The Invite, a comedy starring Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, and Edward Norton. Wilde and Rogan portray Angela and Joe, a couple whose married life is circling the drain, with Norton and Cruz as their upstairs neighbors Hawk and Pína. Taking place over the course of a single, awkward, semi-disastrous, illuminating dinner party that Angela and Joe host, the film plays out as a less biting, more comedic version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The strains on Angela and Joe’s married life are self-evident from the get-go. Angela is a consummate (and bad) liar who, when caught in her dishonesty, simply freaks out until something else comes up conversationally that distracts from her lies. She prepares an elaborate meal and charcuterie in her excitement over the dinner, which was only planned earlier that morning after a chance encounter with Pína, despite lying to Joe that she told him about it the night before, and that he simply didn’t listen to her. When Hawk compliments her on a designer rug, she claims to have found it at a flea market, despite the audience seeing her unpack it and lay it out during the film’s opening title sequence. It appears that she has chosen to fill her life with these falsehoods (and too many podcasts) to distract herself from its banality, despite that life being one that she chose, as she admits that she got her degree and never did anything with it. For his part, Joe is also dissatisfied, seeing himself as a failure due to the one hit wonder nature of his band, his employment as a music instructor at a third-rate, non-prestigious conservatory, and the fact that the couple and their daughter live in the apartment that he grew up in. From within the horizon of her own unhappiness, Angela can only see that they live in a beautiful home, have a daughter who adores her father, and that Joe has an ideal job, regardless of the lack of respect that his institution commands. 

Into this dynamic comes the duo of Pína and Hawk, whom Angela is desperate to impress and for whom Joe has nothing but contempt, as he finds Hawk’s casual small talk in the elevator annoying, not to mention that the upstairs couple’s sex life is both very active and extremely loud. The dinner itself is a disaster, Angela’s souffle is completely burnt, Pína is revealed to be a vegan (debatable, given that her contribution to the meal is a flan) and unable to eat anything other than the charcuterie olives, and Angela’s lack of planning means that their only option for wine is a bottle given to them by Joe’s late uncle to save for a future anniversary. The two break off into pairs, with Pína joining Joe for a joint in his office while Angela gives Hawk a tour of the house that ends with tequila shots. With everyone properly socially lubricated, Hawk and Pína apologize for the frequent ruckuses upstairs before Joe can address the subject more hostilely, and admit that they are swingers who are interested in their hosts. Angela is fascinated by the possibilities that this opens up, and Joe, initially resistant to the idea based on the assumption that he would be excluded, also warms to the idea. The results are moderately disastrous, but not in the way that one would expect. 

The Invite is an adaptation of the 2020 Spanish film The People Upstairs, with a screenplay from Rashida Jones and a co-credited Will McCormack, whose only feature writing credit prior to this was as a co-story writer on Toy Story 4. The script is a delight, capturing a great deal of insight into relationships and their idiosyncratic disconnections (or, as Leo Tolstoy might put it, each failing marriage is “unhappy in its own way”) while never losing sight of the fact that this is first and foremost a comedy. That doesn’t mean that the film treats every part of its subject matter with levity, with a particularly noteworthy scene in which Norton’s Hawk delivers a sobering monologue about his failures as a husband to his now-deceased wife, but even that is undercut by the fact that this is Hawk’s self-rationalization for his current sexual curiosity. Penélope Cruz struts around this film with the knowledge and understanding that she is one of the sexiest people on earth, and her calm, casual demeanor is as magnetic to the audience as it is to an enraptured Angela. I also found myself charmed by Seth Rogen here; much of his film career consisted of variations on the single central idea of “pothead gets into A Situation,” which has never been a brand of humor that resonates with me. In The Invite, Rogen is still the snarky stoner providing commentary on everything that passes before him, but he’s also a sad, trapped man, and he conveys that complexity in a commanding way. 

The real revelation here, as is the case with all of her projects, is Olivia Wilde. Booksmart was universally praised while the critical reception to Don’t Worry Darling was… harsh. It’s impossible to fully sift out every part of that backlash to the latter that had more to do with the casting and behind-the-scenes controversy than the actual quality, but criticisms of Darling included that it was a bit of a mish-mash, never fully committing to any of its myriad ideas enough to coalesce into a solid thesis. While that wasn’t a problem for me, The Invite is a film that’s so confident and singular in its vision that it feels like a direct answer to that critique. This film is the twenty-first century reinvention of Woody Allen’s 70s adultery comedies (the film is even dedicated in memoriam to Diane Keaton), but Wilde has so thoroughly committed to separating the art from the artist that she has taken on Allen’s role as both director of the film and neurotic lead, with great success. Wilde reveals herself here as a very talented physical comedian as well; one of the biggest of my many laughs in this film came during Angela’s argument with Joe about cancelling the dinner, where the camera shifts to a downward angle that positions the front of the oven on the left side of the screen. Wilde crouches into the frame, almost feral, gesticulating to the souffle within. It’s very confident, but also strangely vulnerable, and I loved it. 

A story like this has the potential to feel extremely heteronormative, especially as it revolves around two typical man/woman pairs, one of them sexually repressed and the other more permissive and exploratory. While it stretches belief that a modern day couple would be completely unfamiliar with swinging, if this were an American film of even a decade ago, the main couple would open things up a little, have an awkward interaction that proves that they really love one another, and resolve to recommit to heteronormative routines. The Invite doesn’t do that; in fact, it never gets to the “sex” part of the sex comedy, and instead has the encounter collapse before it ever really gets started. Angela and Joe’s relationship isn’t rattled by temptation in order to come out stronger on the other side; instead, the revelations that emerge from both the need for trust and the rejection of anger that open relationships demand highlights that each is miserable. The ending is deliberately ambiguous, as Pína tells them directly that, in her opinion as a psychotherapist, their relationship is over, but also that a new relationship can form between two people if they try. It’s sweet without being overly sentimental, and it works.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Scary Movie (2026)

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Of all the various legacy sequels that are propping up the Hollywood economy right now, the overwhelming majority have very little reason to exist beyond desperately trying to milk the cow one last time before the entire industry is put out to pasture. The new Scary Movie, to its credit, is the one among them with the most justification to be made in the current moment. After all, the last time that one of these shallow parody films was released was nearly 15 years ago, and the last time that they really had anything to do with parodying horror movies was in 2006. Franchise originators Shawn and Marlon Wayans departed the franchise after Scary Movie 2, all the way back in 2001. In the interim, a half-dozen horror trends have come and gone, so there’s a whole lot of ground to cover. We’ve seen the rise and fall of torture porn in Hostel and the Saw franchise, the glut of mid-aughts remakes that saw (among other things) Jackie Earle Haley take a turn as Freddy Krueger, a resurgence of zombie movies, an abundance of horror legacy sequels like David Gordon Green’s Halloween films and the Radio Silence-produced Scream sequels, MCU-ified horror like The Conjuring, and, of course, the much-vaunted rise of “elevated” horror. For 2026, though, the Scary Movie franchise returns to what it does … well, not “best,” exactly, since—despite the decline in quality over the series’ repeated returns to the well—none of these movies are particularly great, but it’s back to what it does adequately. 

Scary Movie (2026) bases most of its “plot” around 5cream, although its opening sequence most closely parodies Scream VI and cribs the NYC subway scene from the later sequel as well. The opening features a cameo from Carmen Electra and sees Teyana Taylor reenacting the opening sequence of Scream VI, in which Samara Weaving was lured into an alley in New York City. Here, however, she summons a crew of burly men to assist her in kicking Ghostface’s ass. As part of the movie-within-the-movie series Horror Movie, Teyana’s would-be date/killer calls her directly after a couple of back-and-forth text exchanges, and they break the fourth wall by noting that an audible phone call provides better exposition for the presumed audience than on-screen text messages, citing that most people who would turn out for a Wayans Bros. movie “are probably illiterate.” It’s supposed to be self-aware mockery of the audience but it mostly belittles the filmmakers themselves, demonstrating just how little regard the script has for its audience. Make no mistake; I laughed myself silly during this movie (under the influence of an edible, admittedly), but there’s not a single joke in here that doesn’t wear out its welcome by belaboring the point. One of the best bits arrives near the end when Brenda (Regina Hall) pretends to have been shot so that she doesn’t have to go back into the killer’s house with Cindy (Anna Faris), and we see that she’s faked her injury with ketchup packets. It’s funny stuff, but then Brenda overexplains the joke, and it makes the whole thing less comic than if the film wasn’t (over)narrating itself. There’s a potential cut of Scary Movie that’s twenty minutes shorter, cuts several of the dead-on-arrival “comedy” bits, is less dialogue heavy, and would be twice as funny. 

It’s been some amount of time since the last time Ghostface showed up to harass Brenda, Cindy, Brenda’s closeted partner Ray (Shawn Wayans), and her brother Shorty (Marlon Wayans). In the intervening time, Cindy has had two daughters, Sara (Olivia Rose Keegan) and Tuesday, who essentially play the parts of Sam and Tara Carpenter from the recent Scream sequels — because Jenna Ortega also played Wednesday Addams, get it? Brenda has had two kids of her own, the Chad and Mindy equivalents Brad (Gregg Wayans, who is thirty-seven years old) and non-binary Dei (get it?). With the return of Ghostface and an attack on Tuesday, Sara returns home alongside her clearly-the-killer boyfriend “Jack” to find her mother, who now has Jamie Lee Curtis’s frazzled white hair from the aforementioned Green-helmed Halloween films. This leads to Cindy’s reunion with Brenda, who has turned into a Ma-like figure for the local high school kids, including Shorty, who is in his third decade of attempting to graduate. Ghostface comes back to town, stirs up some interpersonal conflict between Sara and her mother (whose insistence that the return of Ghostface is all about her drives her daughter insane), some people die in wacky ways, and the film frequently finds itself sidetracked into various shallow references to contemporary flash-in-the-pan pop culture. That’s all that these movies have ever been; when they manage to parody something that stood the test of time, like The Matrix, it’s more of an accident than it is an insight into cultural longevity (and, like, everyone was parodying The Matrix). 

Last year’s rebootquel of The Naked Gun proved that there is a place for parody films in the market. It was so much fun that it led me to rewatch the original and its sequels, and I’ve also long been a proponent of Top Secret! and recently rewatched both Hot Shots films. The thing about those ZAZ parodies is that the jokes are so layered and come so quickly that even if one of them lands with a resounding thud, the movie moves along quickly enough that you’re laughing again moments later. In Scary Movie, every bit is 1.5-4 times as long as it should be, which means that even the jokes that do land can wear out their welcome quickly, and when there’s a swing and a miss, one still has to sit there for an interminable amount of time before we move on to the next bit. The first real clunker is when Cindy tries to remind Sara of the good times from her childhood, which is illustrated by taking her to see a mall Santa who’s actually the Terrifier; it goes on just shy of forever and isn’t funny at all. Other particularly unfunny sequences include full recreations of non-horror pop culture as well. After the memorably surreal image of Ghostface taking the place of Catherine Keener across from Shorty as Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out, the film segues into Shorty’s Sunken Place, which he calls a k-hole before Ghostface corrects him that he’s in a K-Pop hole. This leads to a fully animated sequence that sees Shorty hooking up with the three leads of KPop Demon Hunters while spoofing the song “Golden” with a chorus that includes the refrain “Gonna be gonna be smokin’.” It’s peak “Remember this?” style parody, and although that film’s widespread success may mean that this “joke” makes sense in twenty years (we’ll see if the references to Smile and cameo from Kai Cenat do the same), there’s no amount of time that will pass for it to ever be funny. (That having been said, the choice to do a parody of the marketing campaign for Michael with “Tubi original” Jermaine, featuring Kenan Thompson as Jermaine Jackson, was something that I thoroughly enjoyed. But why is it here, in Scary Movie? That’s an orphaned SNL sketch if I’ve ever seen one.)

Ultimately, Scary Movie leaves one with too much time to linger on and ponder the bits that aren’t landing. I was one of a group of five who went to see this movie, and only two of us laughed enough for it to have been worth the price of admission (one of whom was me), one person seemed to enjoy parts of it, and two people utterly hated it. One of the haters was a surprise to me, given that this is a longtime friend with whom I’ve spent no small time over the years chatting about our fondness for the first two Scary Movie films; we recognize that they’re not very good, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a certain nostalgia for movies that were airing virtually every week on Comedy Central during our formative years. He was the person I expected to enjoy this the most, since its comedy is really no different from the earlier Wayans Brothers-produced films. He was actively miserable the entire time, and I think that if you’re trying to decide whether this is worth your time, this is worth considering. It’s exactly as good as Scary Movie and Scary Movie 2, and if you didn’t like those, you probably won’t like this. If you do have positive memories associated with those, it’s still a crapshoot whether or not the humor of this one will land. All I can say is that, if you’re going to see it, you should try to get as high as Shorty beforehand (and for legal reasons, I remind you all to toke responsibly).

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond