Say you’ve had the kind of no good very bad day where you slip and land on your tailbone or spill coffee on your keyboard or find out you have to spend holiday gift money on a new water heater.
Or say you’re reading the paper and become overwhelmed with Obama Disappointment, Boehner-McConnell Nausea or Favre Fatigue.
You need cheering up, right? The question is, what can you do that, in Huey Lewis’ words, won’t make you sick, crash your car, hurt your head, keep you up all night or make you sleep all day?
Here is the substance-free idea my kids and I came up with last holiday season: We made a list of our favorite ridiculous movie and TV scenes. The next step was to digitally paste our picks together so that when we storm in after a particularly vexatious day all we have to do is open that file and voila, instant mood lift.
We haven’t actually gotten around to Step 2 yet, but I offer our hit parade in hopes that it will inspire you to compile your own personal or family list — and watch the movies you haven’t seen. I’m not claiming these are the funniest scenes ever; they’re just the ones that we find ourselves quoting from over and over and so have become part of our family folklore.
Reluctantly, I’ve boiled our selections down to 10 items and arranged them in Letterman-style reverse order:
- Though Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein” are better known, my family loves his “The Twelve Chairs.” Dom DeLuise is particularly ridiculous as a greedy priest. Look for the scene where he seeks help from those he is trying to swindle by saying, “I have always liked you…”
- From the vast trove of Looney Tunes possibilities we originally limited ourselves to Elmer Fudd, in Pilgrim attire, singing “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby”; but I now unilaterally add Daffy Duck inquiring of Fudd’s weeping hunting dog, “Why the copious flow of lachrymal fluid, my garrulous canine?”
- There’s a totally goofy monologue in “Best in Show” where Jennifer Coolidge explains what she sees in her codger husband. In addition to their mutual fondness for snow peas, she explains, “We could not talk or talk forever and still find things to not talk about.”
- Fond as I am of Woody Allen’s “Broadway Danny Rose,” the family fave is the scene where Woody and Diane Keaton attempt to “clone the nose” in “Sleeper.”
- One of the items on our list is simply “parfaits,” which refers to the scene in “Shrek” where Eddie Murphy, as the voice of Donkey, delivers an ode to parfaits as “the most delicious thing on the whole damn planet.”
- If you’ve never seen Cyril Ritchard (rhymes with “wish hard”) as “Mrs. Hook’s little baby boy” in the 1960 version of “Peter Pan,” you must. In one scene that is positively Shakespearean in its gender-bending, Mary Martin, a female playing the male Peter, tricks her/himself out as a “mysterious lady” to romance the instantly lovesick Hook.
- It’s hard to isolate one scene from Jack Black’s tour de force performance in “School of Rock,” but we love three bits in particular. One is where he informs the faculty that his borrowed name, Mr. Schneebly, is actually pronounced “Schnay-blay,” accent on the “blay.” The others are “Legend of the Rent” and the massive rock-out during the closing credits.
- For sheer manic riffing it’s hard to top Robin Williams’ genie explaining how the whole three wishes thing works in “Aladdin.”
- We have two nominees from “Singin’ in the Rain.” One is Donald O’Connor’s “Make ‘em Laugh” number. Suffice it to say that this is like watching Daffy Duck made flesh. The other is the scene where O’Connor and Gene Kelly are taking elocution lessons to prepare for the advent of “talkies” (talking motion pictures). The line they recite and then sing: “Moses supposes his ‘toeses’ are roses but Moses supposes erroneously.”
- And the clear all-time favorite of the Frank family is: the justly famous scene in the Marx Brothers’ “A Night at the Opera,” where 15 people crowd into Groucho’s tiny shipboard stateroom, including a manicurist who asks him if he wants his nails long or short. “You’d better make ‘em short,” he decides. “It’s getting kind of crowded in here.” Of course, we couldn’t go with only one Marx Brothers scene so we also included the production number “He Always Gets His Man” from “Horse Feathers” and Harpo’s lemonade stand scene (with Edgar Kennedy) in “Duck Soup.”
Now it’s your turn. Assemble your list (and send a copy to me!), then go us one better and assemble the clips. And then, when you’re weary, feeling small, like a bridge over troubled water, it will crack you up.
Maybe next week I’ll offer my family’s favorite YouTube clips.
