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Starring Jay Mohr, et al. Released to DVD on January 19, 1999. ![[Photo]](/photos/mafia1.jpg) Crafting and creating humor is a strange and sometimes tricky occupation. Comedy is the most subjective of genres; never has the phrase 'to each their own' felt more at home. Personally, I have an affinity for a wide range of humor, spanning from the dark and macabre like Head Above Water or The Trouble with Harry, to the penultimate displa.html>spla.html>spla.html>spla.html>splay of toilet and gross out humor in There's Something About Mary or Happiness. However, the one vein of humor that I just do not find appealing is Mafia! Writer/director Jim Abrahams' sight gag and rip-off spoof brand of comedy. During the seventies, Abrahams, along with David and Jerry Zucker (who were collectively known as ZAZ) helped redefine American comedy with films like Airplane and The Kentucky Fried Movie, and later, the enormously successful Naked Gun trilogy. These films were clever and funny takeoffs of other popular genres. And while these spoofs did rely on the presupposition that the audience had knowledge of other films, one could view a ZAZ film and still find the choice one-liners and background sight gags damn entertaining. When the ZAZ trio split in the late eighties, it became quite obvious while watching Abrahams' individual efforts that it was the Zucker brothers who had the penchant for true comedy writing in their group; Abrahams' scripts and films were movies whose humor was based on props, background jokes, and direct rip-offs of other films. And in this respect, Mafia! Is no different. What little of a cohesive plot there is, isn't very hard to describe. Lloyd Bridges, the poor man's Leslie Nielsen, stars as Don Vincenzo, an aging mob boss who is looking to pass his power down to one of his two sons. The rest of the movie is filled with the clumsy Bridges bumping into things, accidentally thrusting his head through windows, and tripping. A lot. ![[Photo]](/photos/mafia2.jpg) There was only one problem I found with the material in Mafia! It was all stupid. Every single bit of it. This was a comedy, and I wasn't laughing. We can dissect this into smaller pieces, delving into the acting abilities of Bridges, Jay Mohr, and Christina Applegate, or investigating Abrahams' tentative nature when it came to pushing the envelope for the sake of humor, but, in the end, it all boiled down to the fact that this was a comedy, and I wasn't laughing. Much like Rick Friedberg's '97 debacle Spy Hard, Mafia! Was too scattered and too interested in having the audience laughing for every single second of its hour and a half running time than actually creating four or five of those stellar scenes like Nielsen at the White House dinner in The Naked Gun 2 1/2, or the battle scene in Top Secret! The litmus test for Mafia! Is this: as a young boy, Bridges' character is forced to hide inside the ass of a donkey. Yes. You read that correctly. And then the jokes about being in the ass of an ass come flying at you like asteroids at the Millennium Falcon. Personally, I was offended. Not because Abrahams had created the illusion of putting a child in the anus of a barnyard animal, but because Abrahams had expected me to find that find. And that I most certainly did not. I went into Mafia! With lowered expectations, as I have gone into all '90's spoofs, and was greatly disappointed even with these lowered expectations. Of the two recently released spoofs, see Wrongfully Accused, it's the only choice.
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