Funny Bones – Tödliche Scherze (1995)

Funny Bones – Tödliche Scherze: Directed by Peter Chelsom. With Oliver Platt, Jerry Lewis, Lee Evans, Leslie Caron. An unsuccessful comedian uncovers a family secret and learns the true price of letting inherent talent shine.

“Not really a comedy – more a surreal, sometimes weirdly comic piece about comedians, about families, about the awfulness of having a famous father, about genius, about the problem of what makes a comic funny, about the sublime sadness of failure. Lee Evans is absolutely haunting as the tortured comic genius, the natural comic who is so purely a comedian that he can barely communicate except in gags, yet who will never be allowed to perform in public because of his dark past. Leslie Caron is heart-rending as his mother, a brave, faded French beauty stranded for ever singing mildly risque songs in Blackpool pubs, and their tender scenes together are for me the best thing in the whole film.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe whole cast is incredible…right down to Oliver Reed camping it up gloriously in a bizarre sub-plot which at first I thought might be part of the Evansu0026#39; characteru0026#39;s fevered imagination. It is a movie absolutely crammed with magic but in one of my favourite scenes, Oliver Platt arrives in Blackpool and instantly sees it peopled with characters from Donald McGill postcards – fat ladies, saucy girls with flouncy skirts, burly men. The ending is a bit wonky and looks to my eye to have been changed from a tragic one to a u0026quot;happyu0026quot; one to please audiences. In the two opening sequences, both Evans and Platt utter the words u0026quot;Iu0026#39;m going to dieu0026quot; in very different circumstances, and mean very different things, and other variations on the theme of death and laughter follow – all this seemed to be pointing down a much darker alleyway than the one we got. Doesnu0026#39;t matter, though. Still a great movie.”