The Big Mouth (1967)

Learning how to laugh

Not too long ago Cadillac ran an advertising campaign designed to reach out to more youthful car buyers. “This is not your father’s Cadillac” proclaimed the commercials. The hope was that younger buyers would stop seeing the Cadillac as a stuffy boat of car, the kind you transition into during your autumn years. For me, the ads just solidified my feelings of the Cadillac being a car for older people. Jerry Lewis comedies pose a similar problem. They feel both modern and dated; like a new Cadillac.

While I have giggled at many Lewis comedies I feel like I have to meet the films on their terms. They never rise to my hopes or expectations.

The Big Mouth looks and feels like an artifact from a bygone era. The humor is innocent, cartoonish, a tad racially insensative, but not vulgar. Jerry Lewis’ bumbling, good-hearted, love struck hero is not that far removed from Jim Carey in Dumb and Dumer or Adam Sandler in just about any of the roles that launched his career. Still, Lewis drops this man-child persona from time to time and there are glimpses of a suave straightman that show through. I cannot think of a time when I have felt like Sandler or Carey are mature grown men playing fools and not just grown boys foolishly trying to avoid adulthood. It is no wonder they have such trouble with serious roles.

Lewis’ character is an innocent, childlike creature in a sea of adults. The Big Mouth features an entire cast is of adults, not thirty-years olds, twenty-somethings, teens, or kids. Yet, the film carries none of the so-called ‘mature’ humor that makes up a genre known today as adult humor. I find it hard to imagine adults in 1967 enjoying this film or finding that it entertained their adult senses of humor. This is, after all, the work of a man who surely told filfthy jokes at Friar’s Club roasts.

For me the film, is a challenge. I feel as if I am watching an  film that has been neutred of all that makes things ‘adult’. I am not speaking of vulgarity or sex, but rather politics, personal and worldly. I cannot come to terms with its humor.

Then, I read an essay like the one linked to below and I realize how I’m not coming at th film from the right perspective and that maybe I’m asking a fish to be horse.

http://templeofschlock.blogspot.com/2009/03/big-mouth-1967.html

Right or wrong, this essay makes me re-think and value The Big Mouth slightly more. It also helps me feel less guilty about finding Twin Peaks laughable.

~ by Ryan Sarnowski on September 21, 2009.