THE JERK - carl reiner - 4.6 / 10

Comedy is one of those things that, for whatever reason, often just doesn’t age well. No one watches Charlie Chaplin films today and thinks they’re hilarious. Critics like them and film students respect them but I find it impossible to believe that either of those groups really thinks they’re all that funny. And you don’t have to go back nearly that far to find something that was once beloved but no longer makes anyone laugh. The TV show M*A*S*H, today known mostly as the signal for a whole generation of twenty- and thirty-somethings that it’s time for bed (because reruns aired every night at 10:00 when we were kids), was thought to be pretty outrageously hilarious in its day. But to almost anyone under the age of thirty-five, the show falls completely flat. For whatever reason (socio-political, cultural or just because the way stories are told on television has evolved), the show didn’t age well.

That’s not to say that no comedies age well. I still found Annie Hall hilarious the first time I saw it more than twenty-five years after it was first released. New and younger viewers discover the Monty Python films everyday and think them uproarious. But by and large comedy is measured in dog years. The pop culture references and in-jokes that litter even solid comedies like Role Models are going to be seem hopelessly dated in five or ten years. And though the film will still work for those of us who remember those jokes, to a younger generation they will be lost. And so our kids will look at us with amazement as we laugh our asses off at old South Park reruns (though I hold out hope they might still enjoy The Simpsons).

All that’s a long way of saying that despite its reputation as one of the best comedies of the past half century, The Jerk is pretty boring to a modern audience. This has less to do, I think, with the jokes in the film and more to do with the way in which the story is told. If it were made today, The Jerk would probably have employed a different structure and would have been a little less crudely produced. Those two things might add to the charm of the film for those who grew up with it, but for someone coming to the film now, it’s a fatal flaw.

The structure, in particular, is the film’s Achilles’ heel. It opens on Steve Martin’s Navin sleeping on the street outside a theater. The camera tracks over to him and he begins to tell his story, saying that he was once rich, powerful and famous but is now a bum. Then the story proper begins. But because the viewer knows Navin ends up penniless and sleeping on the street, there’s always a sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop. And because of that, a weird sort of tension is created in which the audience can’t fully enjoy what they’re seeing on the screen because they’re thinking about how this could lead to Navin’s downfall.

Whatever you might think of Forrest Gump (a film that seems to have borrowed quite heavily from the structure of The Jerk), the film only works because the framing story (the one where Forrest sits on the park bench and talks to strangers) takes place before the end of the main story. If Forrest had been telling his tale after having visited Jenny, found out she was dying and that her son was his, a lot of air would have been let out of the film. There would've been much less to hold the viewer’s interest and the film would certainly have been long forgotten by now (though I suppose you might think that would be a good thing).

The Jerk, of course, is primarily a comedy so aside from getting in the way of the humor, the clumsy structure really shouldn’t matter all that much. But because the comedic parts of the film have aged poorly and are no longer all that funny to a viewer who didn’t come of age during that period (or at least it’s not funny to this viewer anyway) all that’s left is the story. And what could have been a compelling tale is robbed of any emotional weight by the knowledge of how it’s going to end. Thus the film is pretty much a failure for a modern audience. It’s easy enough to see why audiences at the time thought it a classic, but comedy’s a very fickle thing. Here’s hoping that The Simpsons ages better.