Why People Laughed + Paper Moon Review

     When watching Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, the main reason why people laughed was, in my opinion, due to expectation subversion. Or, put more simply, something happened that we didn't expect. Something that, due to the circumstances surrounding the occurrence, was amusing because it flew in the face of our brain's pattern recognition. For me personally, I laughed at the running gag of Fred Benson being stuck as a faux-paraplegic for most of the movie, with Lawrence being able to take advantage of him all the while. I also laughed at the end, when both men realized simultaneously that they've been conned by Janet the entire time. I laughed most, however, at the reveal that Lawrence's manservant Arthur was played by none other than Ian McDiarmid, aka Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars. All of these were funny to me because they subverted my expectations. I didn't expect one of the main characters to be forced into a wheelchair for half the movie; I didn't expect the men to be out-conned; I didn't expect the most straight-laced villain in film history to be a witty manservant. I also noticed the class as a whole laughed at Steve Martin's facial expressions while in character. Other than expectation subversion, I suppose what makes people laugh is a funny face. Then again, a funny face can be considered an abnormal face, which defined another way, is a face that subverts one's expectation of the face. To sum up, people laugh at the unexpected, at least our class (and myself) did. 

    I realized I unfortunately never gave a summary of the film Paper Moon, though I did follow through on my email and watched the remaining 20 minutes on VUDU (or Fandango at Home, whatever it's called now). At any rate, I really enjoyed this film. I thought it was a stroke of genius to cast the O'Neal father and daughter pair. The tour-de-force tandem played off each other so well and so naturally that they sold the reluctant father figure taking custody of a wild child trope marvelously. In fact, I even related them to other famous pairings like Bonnie & Clyde and the Howard brothers from Hell or High Water in the sense that you know what they're doing is bad (Moses and Addie to a lesser extent than these other examples), but they're so charming and charismatic that you love them anyway and want them to succeed. Paper Moon to me is just one of those movies that makes you smile. It's sharply written, well-directed, acted like nobody's business, and tells quite an interesting story about greed, parenting, and the meaning of love through shared experiences. In lesser hands, this movie could have been either extremely cliche and cringy, but director Peter Bogdanovich and the cast elevate this film above the sum of its parts to leave a lasting impact in the comedy-crime genre.