Wayne's World, which airs Thursday, is the sixth installment of a special eight-week cult classics series at The Athena Cinema. Each movie will run on Thursdays at 7 p.m. For a full schedule, click here.
Gee whiz. Remember when lowbrow comedies were, y’know, actually funny? Way back before corporate executives wrote the jokes, before the punchlines were stale and formulaic, before focus groups dominated the industry, before Adam Sandler (post-Punch Drunk Love) was paid millions to write a script in a weekend and mope around depressingly on screen. Wayne Campbell sure remembers that unbelievable haven of the 1990s, and boy, was it “excellent.”
That is not to say that Wayne’s World, Mike Myers’ SNL skit turned feature film about two friends and their public access television show, is a masterpiece of any kind, nor a particularly smart or thoughtful film — it indeed contains much of the bad taste humor that has characterized many of the genre’s subsequent entries. But, what Myers (who wrote the script) and producer Lorne Michaels had in spades, that other certain Jacks and Jills and Joe Dirts and Zookeepers have lacked, was a passionate dedication to the art of stupidity that avoids the cardinal comedic sin of feeling contrived and forced.
At the heart of the enduring success of Wayne’s World as one of the most memorable comedies of the '90s is its so-outdated-it’s-timeless charisma, which is driven by the fantastic performances from the main and supporting cast, as well as a consistent creative vision shared by the director, writers, and the producing and editing teams. Co-stars Myers and Dana Carvey (who play Wayne’s best friend and the show’s co-host, Garth Algar) nail their characters with eccentric hilarity, constantly landing repeatable one-liners (“If Benjamin were an ice cream flavor, he'd be pralines and d--k”), and showing off ironic intellectual depth in short bursts (“We hope you found it entertaining, whimsical and yet relevant, with an underlying revisionist conceit that belied the films emotional attachments to the subject matter”). That, on top of the fantastic soundtrack choices (the famous Bohemian Rhapsody scene comes immediately to mind), as well as the cleverly-written and original gags (such as the obvious product placement, which has been nauseatingly repeated in nearly every comedy since), lend the film a magnetic personality that few other films have been able to recreate.
While feature-length films stemming from SNL skits have seen their reputation destroyed by ill-advised sequels and the mistakes of a young Will Ferrell (see: Night at the Roxbury, Superstar), Wayne’s World is an anomaly which has managed to maintain its sweet, innocent, but most of all, hysterical stupidity. A uniquely reminiscent embodiment of the early '90s, it leaves viewers longing for a simpler time just as well as it puts them in a state of tear-inducing laughter.
Four stars (out of five).
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