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Rating: The sketch started like this: a man wearing a stars-and-stripes jumpsuit and helmet would land with a hang glider and address the camera. Meanwhile, adrenaline-pumping music and an on-screen caption introduced the segment “Danger seekers.” The presenter, having just arrived by hang glider, would turn to the viewer and introduce a new episode of this segment.
Then the camera would cut to another man: “half-time mechanic, full-time daredevil, a man who risks his life for the thrill of adventure, seeks it, chases it, and surpasses it,” said the presenter. He was a thin, short, almost frail man, with big glasses, who was preparing for a great feat, putting on a white helmet and suit. “He’s Rex Kramer, aka Woody.”
Woody focused intensely, taking a deep breath. He sprang into action and ran offscreen. He crossed the street, but the camera followed him. He stopped and looked back at the camera; he raised his arms before reaching, on the other sidewalk, a group of six African Americans. He got right in the middle of them, interrupting their conversation.
He took a deep breath. The group stood still. Another breath. And then he yelled: “Negriiiiiii!!” and took off running as fast as he could.
Baffled by the absurdity of the scene, after a couple of seconds, the six started to chase after him.
End.
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I’d known about this sketch for I don’t even know how long. As a longtime fan of Mia Farrow’s even older ex-partner, I had always thought it was his. It seemed to me just one more stroke of genius in his career.
It wasn’t.
The Allen lookalike is Robert Starr, one of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker crew. The brilliant idea was theirs and the great John Landis’s. It’s taken from Landis’s second film: The Kentucky Fried Movie. The film represents the precursor to success both for the director and the screenwriters. Just two years later, they would all break box office records.
The Kentucky Fried Movie is a crazy collection of twenty-two nonsensical and explicit sketches: twenty-one of these are extremely short. In them, cinema is dissected, overturned, remixed, and twisted through various gags to create fake commercials, fake TV series, fake horoscopes, fake news programs, fake trailers.
In high adventure, the shotgun microphone—that boom mic usually hovering offscreen held by a pole—is possessed: it intrudes increasingly into the dialogue between presenter and guest, sowing chaos and terror in the studio. Does it remind you of a similar gag in Airplane? A.M. Today is the newscast that kicks things off: civility gives way to profanity and wild violence that culminates in a spectacular breaking of the fourth wall. Catholic High School Girls in Trouble is a trailer that promises “a movie wilder than Mandingo, more scandalous than Behind the Green Door, more erotic than Deep Throat.” Born from the incredible success of these three porn films, it actually uses chilling wordplay to create an absurd gulf between what it promises and what it delivers. The gags are almost always excellent, even in the longest sketch of all: A fistful of yen: the classic “fistful of dollars” turns into yen in this parody of Japanese martial arts films.
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Many, even in Italy, have drawn heavily from here, in some cases even paying due tribute: The producer of the films whose trailers or segments we see is Samuel L. Broncowitz, a fictional yet cult character. Does the name sound familiar? The Italian comedy group comprised of Crozza, Signoris, Dighero, Cesena, and Pirovano took their name from him.
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And there’s a breezy, playful performance by Jo Stafford and Paul Weston of the tune The Carioca.
The film is still funny forty-eight years later.
It entertains in the truest sense of the word, diverting the expectations it creates elsewhere.
To be seen and, if possible, seen again.
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