Bill Murray's slack-jawed grounds keeper, locked in a life or death feud with a pesky gopher, is self indulgently stupid, Rodney Dangerfield over-acts appallingly, while Chevy Chase sleepwalks through the film offering not a shred of evidence to justify his reputation as one of America's top funny men of the period.All three stars are comprehensively outperformed by the gopher and he's nothing more than a mechanically operated prop.
CADDYSHACK is just the kind of film we Brits offer in evidence when making the case that Americans have a weird sense of humour, and by weird we mean a propensity to laugh at material that's just not funny.
Nothing that's actually funny happens in CADDYSHACK. There's plenty of scenes and characters with comic potential if only someone had remembered to write some genuine humour into the script rather than settle for a ragbag of half-finished routines and one dimensional characters. There are too many set-ups which simply peter out before they reach the punchline. Even the grand climax - the thing the whole story's been building up to - falls flat.
I've got nothing against American comedy - I'm a big fan of Woody Allen, Groucho Marx, Laurel and Hardy, David Letterman, Larry Sanders, and Jack Benny among others - nor do I dislike low brow humour. It can be the funniest comedy in the world if it's done right, But I do object to a bunch of over-rated 'comedians' who've so bought into their own inflated reputation that they believe absolutely anything they do must be funny simply because they're doing it. Today we call it 'Will Ferrell syndrome' and there's really only one cure for it. Make these people earn the title of 'funnyman' instead of just bestowing it on them because they tell us they're funny.
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