By Marc S. Sanders
As I close out this year, 2023, it’s funny that one of the last films I watched was The Jerk, directed by Carl Reiner with Steve Martin as dumb, lovable, idiotic, adorable, and moronic Navin – who was raised as “a poor black child.” I find it funny because I have just come off the heels of directing a play I co-wrote with a best friend I just lost from ALS. That friend was a part of my life for thirty years, and his name was Joe Pauly. The play was a smack in the face, a head slammed against a door with an enormous amount of pratfalls to Charles Dickens’ holiday classic. Joe and I called it A Christmas Carol Gets Decked.
The play was an enormous box office hit for our theater, but the reaction to the show was mixed. There were big laughs each night, but we also had some walkouts at intermission, and I wasn’t surprised. Slapstick is not for everyone. The cast was always brilliant though.
As I watched The Jerk, first I was sad that I never, ever talked about this movie with my pal Joe. I bet he loved it. Second, I found it fitting that my heroes Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel didn’t care for it. Their review from 1979 can be found on YouTube. Ebert simply said he didn’t like Steve Martin’s form of comedy. He’s just not a fan. Fair enough. Siskel said the star’s brand of humor was Steve Martin doing Steve Martin, and it would have worked better as Steve Martin doing comedy as the character, Navin. I do not think Gene Siskel is wrong. I look at The Jerk, and I think Joe and I accomplished what Steve Martin was doing. There is a collection of gags that I do not think are funny, but then there are at least an equal amount of jokes that are utterly hilarious and thankfully shocking. Joe and I took a risk with comedy, just like Steve Martin; like anyone who is brave enough to enter through that dark valley alone where the act is always a test, night after night, performance after performance.
I love the plot of The Jerk, which is straight out of a Three Stooges short. Navin stands out from his family as the one with white skin and no rhythm amongst his large southern, black family. I was so pleased to see Mabel King from What’s Happening!!! portraying Navin’s mother. Following his birthday, Navin embarks on a journey to St. Louis to discover a life for himself. He gets a job working for Jackie Mason at a gas station and falls into a fortune when he shares his invention for eyeglasses with a random customer (Bill Macy). Along the way, he falls in love with Marie, a sweet Bernadette Peters, who looks like Alfalfa’s crush from The Little Rascals. They get a mansion and live filthy rich, blah, blah, blah. SPOILER ALERT!!!!! The film’s famed director, Carl Reiner, reveals that Navin’s invention is defective and following a one, two, three class action lawsuit, Navin and Marie are flat broke. I love the body of this plot. Rags to riches to rags opens an invitation for one gag after another.
There’s his trusty dog named Shit Head. Navin insists on no longer drinking the old wine. Bring him the new stuff. A crazed sniper (M Emmet Walsh) tries to kill Navin, misses and Navin reasonably concludes that it must be the oil cans that the killer has a grudge against, when the bullet holes spring leaks. Makes sense to me! If you accidentally run outside naked to chase after the one you love, who is leaving you, then of course you will reach for the dogs nearby to cover up your bare behind and “your special purpose.” Hilarious stuff.
There’s material that doesn’t work as well, but that’s just me. Like the audiences that saw the play Joe and I wrote this year, what one person thinks is funny, another will not. It’s a balancing act. I’m not here to mandate what works and does not work for you. I just want to celebrate Steve Martin’s inspired Three Stooges spawn that welcomed him to the big screen, long before the antics of Jim Carrey – who I rarely think is funny and simply comes off as an annoying child who won’t sit still. That being said, I still prefer Martin’s later work where he played the straight man victim to someone else’s annoyance such as in Planes, Trains and Automobiles (a favorite film of Joe and I, collectively) and Parenthood, not to mention the brilliant Only Murders In The Building, and his routines on Johnny Carson (a hilarious magician was my favorite) and Saturday Night Live. The guy is an enormous talent far beyond The Jerk or The Man With Two Brains.
The Jerk had always eluded me, until now. I think my parents wouldn’t let me watch it. Dad thought the material was “filthy.” He probably saw the one gag where the kid is running around with a t-shirt having the phrase “Bull Shit,” and thus opportunity passed me by. Yet, he didn’t mind if I watched Dirty Harry or any of Bill Murray’s comedies. Go figure. That’s what the varying degrees of humor lend to you. There are no straight answers in comedy.
Still, I’m glad I watched the movie. 2023 was melancholy for me. There were some enormous ups, but losing my pal Joe, the Del Griffith to my Neal Page, was an expected but very hard moment to accept when he passed on December 4. I’m still struggling with the loss. In his last six months, he couldn’t speak with me on the phone, but at least I could text with him, and once the movie ended with Steve Martin happily dancing to banjo rhythms with his black family, I picked up my phone ready to write to him. It couldn’t happen anymore. At least not that way, from now on. So, here I am on holiday break surfing Netflix, and there’s The Jerk with a warning that it was leaving the streaming service soon. Joe must have been urging me to finally catch up with Navin, the poor black child. Thanks Joe.
Chin up everyone. We were all a name in a phone book. Happy New Year!!!!
2 UNPAID MOVIE CRITICS!!!! 