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Comedies unjustly take their pratfalls

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Tom SHADYAC has directed three consecutive $100-million-plus comedy hits. His latest film, “Bruce Almighty,” which made an estimated $86.4 million this weekend, will easily be his fourth. But to hear his critics tell it, Shadyac is right up there with Saddam and Osama as a scourge of Western civilization.

The Washington Post’s Stephen Hunter didn’t mince words: “If the road to hell is paved with self-deluding good intentions, then the makers of the appalling Jim Carrey comedy ‘Bruce Almighty’ are headed to the devil’s rotisserie for an eternity as gyros.” Or as Premiere magazine’s Glenn Kenny succinctly put it: “This picture can be summed up in two words -- God awful.”

The soft-spoken 43-year-old director, who with his shoulder-length hair and frumpy sweatshirts looks more like a guitarist you’d see on tour with Jackson Browne than a mega-hit filmmaker, makes comedies in a business where comedy is considered a second-class art form. Directors like Shadyac, who layer their comedies with in-your-face sentimentality, are especially reviled.

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His new comedy stars Carrey as a self-absorbed TV news reporter who, after being fired from his job, meets God (Morgan Freeman), who challenges him to make the world a better place. His 1998 hit “Patch Adams” focused on a doctor, played by Robin Williams, who cures sick kids with laughter. “Liar Liar,” Shadyac’s biggest hit, stars Carrey as a lawyer whose neglected son, crushed by his dad’s transparent excuses for missing his 5th birthday party, magically gets his wish of having his father go a full 24 hours without telling a lie.

If only those same subjects had been presented as drama, Shadyac would have a reserved, front-row seat at the Kodak Theatre. Bathos and sentiment are amply rewarded at Oscar time, hence the academy’s fondness for such gooey hooey as “Life Is Beautiful,” “The Green Mile” and “Chocolat.” But Shadyac has been raked over the coals because he mixes spiritual uplift with large servings of scatological humor.

This mix of slapstick and schmaltz has driven critics bug-eyed. Reviewing “Patch Adams,” Roger Ebert grumbled: “ ‘Patch Adams’ made me want to spray the screen with Lysol. This movie is shameless. It’s not merely a tear-jerker. It extracts tears individually by liposuction, without anesthesia.”

Shadyac doesn’t see a contradiction in mixing slapstick and sentiment. “For me, it’s not at all unusual to be on the set, having Jim talk out of his butt and then go home and read St. Thomas of Aquinas or Thomas Merton,” he says. “To me, that’s life. The extremes don’t just exist, they feed each other.”

This isn’t just about Shadyac. A generation of comics and comic directors haven’t gotten their props -- except at the box office. When it comes to crowd-pleasing comedy, there’s never been a bigger gulf between audiences and critics, who’ve given scathing reviews to a string of recent comedy hits, including “Bringing Down the House” and “Anger Management.” As Jennifer Aniston says in “Bruce Almighty,” “There’s nothing wrong with making people laugh.” But like heavy-metal crooners and arena-football quarterbacks, comic filmmakers and performers get no respect, be it from critics or from Oscar voters.

The motion picture academy always hires a comic to host the Oscars, but members would rather arm-wrestle with Harvey Weinstein than give a best actor or actress statue to a comedian (unless someone puts away the clown makeup and plays a serious role, as Roberto Benigni did in “Life Is Beautiful.”) You’d have to go back a quarter of a century, to Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall,” to find a comedy that won best picture. Whether it’s Carrey, Steve Martin, Bill Murray, Albert Brooks, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, the Marx brothers or Mel Brooks, who amazingly has never won for a movie he directed, the outcome for comedy performances is the same: zero Oscars.

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Today’s critics are just as comedy-blind. I found “Patch” just as cloying as my critical brethren, but there’s a reason why “Bruce Almighty” is such a monster hit. Its comic portrait of a man’s spiritual rebirth strikes a resonant chord with the average moviegoer, even if its aesthetic strikes critics as hopelessly cheesy.

Most comics never get their due until they’ve left the Friars Club on a gurney. Take “The In-Laws,” the other new comedy opening this weekend. To hear the critics tell it, the remake, which stars Michael Douglas and Albert Brooks, is a dumbed-down knockoff of the 1979 comedy classic. I’d call that wishful revisionism. When the original film arrived, critics like the Washington Post’s Gary Arnold dismissed it as “a heavy-handed, smugly cynical farce that relies on the willingness of spectators to play along with whatever gag occurs to the filmmakers at a given moment.”

Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles” is considered a comic paragon, but back in 1974 Pauline Kael gave it the boot, saying “most of the cast (including Brooks) mug and smirk and shout insults at each other.” “National Lampoon’s Animal House” was dismissed in similar fashion when it appeared in 1978. Every year some critic bemoans the banality of teen comedies, wistfully recalling the razor-sharp edge of “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” But of course when the Cameron Crowe-penned film was released in 1982, Time’s Richard Corliss sniffed that it “failed to provide the raunch or poignancy that would interest young moviegoers” while the New York Times’ Janet Maslin called the film “too fluffy and insubstantial.”

Producer Sean Daniel, who worked on “Animal House” and “Fast Times” as a young studio executive, recalls: “The reviews of both films were withering -- we were sent to potter’s field to die. The critics dismissed the movies as broad and gross, when in fact they had a truthfulness and depth of character that touched people, and is probably why they’ve stood the test of time.”

Most critics have no nose for comedy. Shadyac’s pal, comedy director Dennis Dugan, compares sending a Times critic to review the new Adam Sandler movie to having the critic who writes about the Boston Pops review the new Korn album. Give Newsweek’s David Ansen credit: He wrote a piece last year chronicling his blown calls, paying homage to two 1980s Albert Brooks comedies, “Modern Romance” and “Lost in America.” “The passage of time made it clear how audaciously original these quirky comedies are,” Ansen says.

Brooks admits to mixed feelings about his belated acknowledgment. “It’s nice that 20 years later he finally gets it,” he says. “But I remember the impact of the original review. That’s when they took my office away and the studio said, ‘OK, we’re done with that movie.’ ”

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So why does comedy get so little respect? One key reason: Comedy is supposed to look easy; if it didn’t appear effortless, it wouldn’t be funny. Critics rarely appreciate the workmanship, and occasional wizardry, that goes into structuring humor. “If you think the Farrelly Brothers’ work could be boiled down to just bodily function jokes, it’s a totally oversimplified view of what makes their films work,” says Shadyac. “There’s a lot of craft there that goes unappreciated.”

Albert Brooks says that when he gets a laugh in a film, people assume it’s an improvisation. “Good comedy doesn’t feel like an achievement, it feels like a reflex,” he explains. “Doing jokes is such an immediate thing. When I’m funny, people always say, ‘Did you just make that up?’ ”

One of the best scenes in “Bruce Almighty” unfolds when Carrey, testing out his new godly powers, tortures a hated rival by turning him into a blubbering idiot in the middle of the evening newscast. To hear Shadyac explain it, the scene is more complicated than it looks.

“The original scene went much darker -- originally Jim sets the anchorman’s hair on fire,” he says. “But when we tested it, the audience told us that we’d gone too far.”

Shadyac trimmed back the most extreme material, adding more of actor Steven Carell’s inspired facial antics. But that left Shadyac with a new dilemma -- the scene was such a hit, he felt he made the movie peak too early. When he moved it farther back in the second act, the film regained its balance.

“Editing is crucial to comedy -- it can either make or break a good joke,” Shadyac says. “Jim Carrey and I are always talking about rhythm when we make a movie. A couple frames too many or too few can make all the difference in the world.”

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Shadyac makes no apologies for the way his films careen between crass high jinks and spirituality. “Humor is a spiritual gift,” he says. “In the Koran it says, ‘He deserves paradise who makes his companions laugh.’ ”

As for his critics, Shadyac would never be so crass as to say he’s laughing all the way to the bank. “Life is just,” he says. “The reviews get written and then history gets written and I’ll side with history. People enjoy these movies.”

“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.

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