Cinema is a democratizing artform. While the average family might not be able to afford a trip to see an opera or a ballet in-person, anyone with a library card can get a taste of those highbrow artforms by borrowing Powell & Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann from the library for free. Moviegoers regularly get exposed to great works of literature, far-off gorgeous vistas, and heady academic pursuits just by keeping our eyes on the screen, distracted from the financial inequalities that separate us from enjoying those experiences in real life. For instance, as a small child growing up in Chalmette, Louisiana, there was no chance I was ever going to travel to Paris to see the iconic American painting Whistler’s Mother in person, but thanks to the British culture-clash comedy Bean, I was educated on the piece’s historical importance anyway. Thanks to Bean, I was also exposed at an early age to the refined tastes of dry British wit, as embodied by the titular rubber-faced goon, Mr. Bean.

The basic premise of Bean hinges on Americans’ assumption that because Mr. Bean is British, he is therefore an erudite sophisticate. In reality, he is a working-class dolt who can barely keep his job as an art museum security guard, which mostly entails sitting quietly in a chair. Bean is such a disastrous embarrassment that his employer ships him off to America as the unlikely shepherd for the aforementioned James McNeill Whistler painting, risking major lawsuits & profit loss just to be rid of him for a while. It takes a few days for the Los Angeles clout chasers who are purchasing that famous painting to catch on that Mr. Bean is not the art-history expert Dr. Bean they made up in their heads when they heard he works for a British art museum. By then, he has already destroyed the multi-million-dollar painting through a series of escalating slapstick pratfalls, threatening to take down the life & reputation of an American museum curator with him (played Ghostbusters II‘s Peter MacNicol). And so, Whistler’s Mother was never the same again, in the film or out.

Rowan Atkinson is hilarious as Mr. Bean. That’s just a fact. It’s easy to brush off his style of humor as a haphazard collection of silly face contortions, but I believe there’s a genuine, traditional elegance to his sub-verbal shenanigans. He brought some classic Charlie Chaplin & Harpo Marx silent-comedy clowning to the 1990s video market, whereas American equivalents like Jim Carrey & Robin Williams were more focused on shouting t-shirt worthy catchphrases. When we first meet Bean in the opening scene, he breaks his ceramic mug while running late to work, so he resolves to mix his entire instant coffee concoction in his mouth to not waste time: coffee powder, sugar, cream, and boiling water straight from the kettle — swished around like mouthwash before painfully swallowed. While traveling by plane to America, he manages to explode a barf bag all over his fellow first-class clientele. The movie’s most infamous gag involves losing his wristwatch while stuffing a turkey. When he looks inside to find it, he ends up wearing the entire bird on his head, suffocating to death while stumbling around like a buffoon. Every room he enters is a potential disaster zone. Characters beg him to understand that, “If you do nothing, nothing can go wrong,” but he persists in fucking up everything he touches anyway. Children everywhere love him for it, as do the smartest of adults.

I was only being partially sarcastic in that opening paragraph. Bean really was my first exposure to Whistler’s Mother as a 10-year-old Chalmatian, and most of the movie’s plot revolves around showing that painting respect as one of the most important works of American art, positioning it as the nation’s Mona Lisa. Of course, the comedy’s art museum setting is mostly an excuse to shoehorn Mr. Bean into a quiet, stuffy atmosphere where his goofball theatrics can do the most damage, but it made an impression on me at that age nonetheless. Its jokes about the crass commercialization of fine art in the wide range of Whistler’s Mother merch designed for the LA museum’s gift shops is the kind of low-level satire that kids can feel smart for catching onto. It’s mixed with for-their-own-sake gags like Mr. Bean ironing his tighty-whiteys—which are funny to kids for reasons unknown—but the satire’s there all the same. One slapstick gag involves Bean getting smacked in the head by giant Alexander Calder mobile in the museum’s driveway, which is the perfect meeting point between its high-culture setting and its dumb-as-rocks humor. We’re always going to make idiotic slapstick comedies for kids as long as we’re making movies at all, so we might as well smack the little tikes over the head with some great works of art while we’re at it. It’s a public service, an investment in our future.

-Brandon Ledet