Mel Brooks once said something to the effect that if he tripped on a banana peel, that wasn't comedy, but if he tripped on a banana peel and fell into an open sewer and died, that was comedy. After seeing Say It Isn't So, I felt as if I had walked into an open sewer, but I wasn't laughing much.
There is often a fine line between irreverent comedy and tasteless ridicule, and this movie remains on the wrong side of it from the start.
After we witness a man get the top of his ear snipped off with scissors, we are encouraged to laugh at stroke victims, people in wheelchairs, a double amputee, bestiality and incest. (It's as if the filmmakers had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find any cultural taboos that hadn't already been violated in gross-out adolescent comedies like Scary Movie).
Lest I leave anything out, there is also a character who sticks his fist into the back end of a cow -- twice. And only once by accident. On another occasion, he disguises himself with a fake beard made of pubic hair.
His name is Gilly Noble, and he is played by Chris Klein, who is actually funnier in the teen sapfest Here on Earth, though unintentionally. A dog catcher in Indiana, Gilly falls in love with a hairdresser named Jo (Heather Graham), who turns out to be his sister. (He's an orphan who never knew that his mom is Valdine Wingfield, also Jo's mother, played with gleeful trashiness by Sally Field).
Devastated by this embarrassing revelation, Jo moves to Oregon and is about to marry a pompous jerk when Gilly discovers that maybe they're not related after all. Comic mayhem ensues.
Apart from the fact that many of its smaller moments do not work (for example, why so many scene fades?), the overriding problem with Say It Isn't So is that it has little more than contempt for most of its characters. The would-be humor on display throughout is of the sort that serves primarily to coarsen our culture and cheapen the value of human life.
Mel Brooks was half right -- it really isn't very funny seeing someone trip on a banana peel. Or suffer a stroke. Or have sex with a cat.
Pitiful might be a better word.
Grade: D
(R, 96 minutes)
