People sometimes ask me why I pay the money to have cable, including one of the premium packages, every single month. Answer: Last night, I bumped into a late-night showing of ‘The Kentucky Fried Movie‘, a treasured bit of cinema from my youth, featuring some really stellar humor from the Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker team. Though it’s an anthology flick, the spine of the whole schmegegge is ‘A Fistful Of Yen’, a loving-but-goofy parody of Kung-Fu movies in general, and ‘Enter The Dragon’ in particular, featuring nice pacing and some truly funny moments in the ZAZ tradition. (These are the guys who did ‘Airplane!’ and ‘Top Secret!’, before breaking up to give us the Naked Gun movies and parts of the Scary Movie franchise.) Whereas today’s parody movies seem content to mimic a scene and let us fill in the blanks with “I KNOW THAT REFERENCE!”, KFM is genuinely funny on a wide variety of genres, and without it, we might not have gotten ‘Animal House’, ‘This Is Spinal Tap’, or even Deadpool, which leads us to today’s Amazon-Women-On-The-Query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) also thinks that any movie that launched the career of John Landis should be lauded far and wide, asking: What’s the funniest, all-around BEST parody in all of pop culture?
3 Comments
That’s a tough one. I’m making a case for Big Trouble in Little China. It’s not a parody of specific film or such, but a homage to whole classic kung fu genre.
i think Big Trouble is much more homage than parody. i feel like parodies make much more fun of their subjects (ie Airplane making fun of those 70’s airport disaster movies). if anything, maybe Kurt Russell’s character is a parody of John Wayne.
does Blazing Saddles count, or is that more just a straight up comedy in an old west setting? is Cabin in the Woods a parody, or another loving homage that just happens to have some self-aware jokes in it? this is a surprisingly tough question.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It works on many levels, from literary parody to film parody, from social satire to slapstick. It’s rare that humor can be rewarded by subsequent viewings, but this one has enough layers that it works.