Roger Ebert Quotes on Humor
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Deuce Bigalow is aggressively bad, as if it wants to cause suffering to the audience. The best thing about it is that it runs for only 75 minutes. : Does this sound like a movie you want to see? It sounds to me like a movie that Columbia Pictures and the film's producers : should be discussing in long, sad conversations with their inner child.
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I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny.
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Parents: If you encounter teenagers who say they liked this movie, do not let them date your children.
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We can laugh at comedies like this for two reasons: Because we feel superior to the characters, or because we pity or like them. I do not much like laughing down at people, which is why the comedies of Adam Sandler make me squirmy (most people, I know, laugh because they like him). In the case of Napoleon Dynamite, I certainly don't like him, but then the movie makes no attempt to make him likable. Truth is, it doesn't even try to be a comedy. It tells his story and we are supposed to laugh because we find humor the movie pretends it doesn't know about.
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The movie cheerfully offends all civilized notions of taste, decorum, manners and hygiene... is the movie vulgar? Vulgarity is when we don't laugh. When we laugh, it's merely human nature.
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There are two things you can't argue in film: comedy and eroticism. If something doesn't make you laugh, no one can tell you why it's funny, and it's difficult to reason someone out of an erection.