Top Comedies #2: "Serpentine!"

There are a handful of common activities that provide the basic material for, without speaking too generally, most metaphors we use today. Sports, dinner parties, and poker. Comedies are like poker. Situations, actors, quotable lines, and combinations thereof are the hands that are dealt. A winning comedy finds a way of using what is dealt and a little of what Sting called "the sacred geometry of chance" in order to succeed. But success isn't beating other players (all metaphors are limited), it is making us laugh.

There is also bluffing, which is essentially overplaying your hand. See every Will Ferrell movie ever made for examples. Sure, Ferrell is funny. And when he has a strong hand to play, he wins big. But when he has a weak hand, despite a few quotable moments, he and his standard set of cohorts play it as though it was strong anyway. And the results are hard to watch, or even just plain forgettable. Dissecting these movies to see what went wrong is difficult. They seemed to have all the parts necessary to be a success. The problem is, when you put them together, there is only so far you can take them. Any further is based only on undue confidence in their strength. They are a bluff. The In-Laws is just the opposite.

This movie is like calling on four kings. The two lead actors, Alan Arkin and Peter Falk, are two very funny people, who had built careers around playing the straight men. OK, so Arkin had attempted to build up his comedic cred by replacing Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther franchise. Big mistake. But he seems to have learned his lesson, and waited until he had a hand worth playing before deciding to ante up again. Falk, of course, had made his name as Columbo, a homicide detective who, though the smartest person in every room he is ever in, plays a fool in order to provoke suspects into revealing themselves. His whole method, Falk's as an actor and Columbo's as a detective, was to give other actors, other characters something to react to. In The In-Laws, both actors play off each other in a crescendo of dead-pan. Later movies, like Airplane learned to go all in on this type of delivery. Leslie Neilson, belive it or not, had only played dramatic roles before taking on the role of Dr. Rumack. But in my opinion, the restrained nature of The In-Laws is four of a kind to Airplane's full house.

The setup is simple enough. Arkin and Falk are meeting just a few days in advance of their children's nuptials. Falk claims to be a business man. Arkin is in fact a dentist. But Falk, taking advantage of Arkin's eagerness to start off on the right foot with his new "in-law" (Are the parents of children who get married still considered in-laws? Were they ever?) uses him to carry out a robbery in what is Falk's own office, maybe. He then claims that he is actually a covert CIA operative, who needs some help in a clandestine mission in a banana republic. Sound silly? Of course it does. But Falk's calm confidence in what he claims is very persuasive. He even, at one point, takes responsibility for The Bay of Pigs in an "at least we tried" tone of voice that would seem to suggest his perspective on the fiasco wasn't formed after the fact, after the total failure of the operation, like the rest of ours was.

In the middle, after deboarding on a runway in the banana republic, Falk and Arkin are attacked by snipers waiting for them.  Arkin, only slightly panicking, runs for, and nearly makes it to a car they can use to escape. In the middle of this, however, Falk directs him to run "serpentine!" Arkin stops, pauses for more instruction, and watches Falk demonstrate the appropriate way to avoid gunfire. They then spend somewhere in the range for five to seven times as long as it should take to run to the car weaving back and forth in erratic patterns, creating the most lasting joke of the movie.

To describe it, it sounds like a standard goofy, slapstick Farrelly Brothers movie. To dissect it, you find cards that would usually be played for bigger returns. Will Ferrell might even win with these. Nevertheless, nothing beats the deadpan poker face that these two achieve.