#11 of 28 in the 20th century series

Here’s another comedy that sadly no longer registers as particularly funny to me because I’ve seen it a million times and know it by heart.  I came to it pretty late, though⁠—even though Siskel and Ebert were talking it up as early as my junior high days, I don’t think I watched it until I was in college.  For a while, I was prejudiced against it!  See, when I was fourteen or so I regularly played strategy board games as part of a club with the grandiose name “The Yalta Conference”; frequently these games would go late into the night and turn into sleepovers.  One night while I was in the living room trying to sleep, everyone else was over in the dining room⁠—which wasn’t even really a separate room, just the other leg of an L shape⁠—watching This Is Spinal Tap and laughing loudly.  I held a grudge against the movie for years.

That’s probably for the best.  This is Spinal Tap is a mock documentary⁠—the one that launched the genre⁠—about an aging heavy metal band’s disastrous 1982 U.S. tour.  There are basically four sources of comedy in the film: one, the parodic songs and the mishaps that occur when the band performs them in concert; two, the story of the tour falling apart, with various humiliations befalling the band; three, the ridiculous things the band members say in the interview segments; and four, the backstory.  It turns out that Spinal Tap started out as a British Invasion band in the mid-’60s and went through a hippie psychedelia phase before making the jump to metal (and then taking an abortive stab at a new direction: jazz odyssey).  If you’ve seen any real documentaries tracking the way musical acts evolve over the years⁠—the Beatles progressing from moptops to avant garde in the blink of an eye, the Who bringing in keyboard loops, David Bowie reinventing himself every few albums, etc.⁠—this pushes all those “hey, I get it!” buttons.  Meaning that at least that aspect of This is Spinal Tap would have been lost on me when the Yalta boys were watching it, because I didn’t get into the Beatles and start learning about all this rock history until my senior year of high school.  By the time I finally watched it in college, though, I found it hilarious.

As with Airplane!, I was curious to see whether Ellie, who’d never seen This Is Spinal Tap before, would find it funny; for the most part the answer seemed to be “not particularly”, though she did laugh at Nigel’s complaints about his dressing room bread and completely lost it when the miniature Stonehenge descended from the rafters.  Really cracking up at something is one of the true joys of this life so I was very happy that one of my dusty cultural touchstones could still have that effect.  However, as I was researching this article I learned of the existence of a 4½-hour working print of the film, which presented an amazing opportunity to take an old thought experiment and make it real.  What if you could take one of your favorite songs, or books, or movies, and experience it again for the first time?  Here was enough material to make This Is Spinal Tap all over again⁠—twice!  Admittedly, it was material that was deemed weak enough to drop from the released film, but still, it’s the same cast working in the same vein.  The working print turned out to have not only hugely expanded versions of scenes I knew, but also entire sequences that had landed on the cutting room floor: Derek’s movie role, David’s grown son, Nigel’s replacement.  So how many of the new-to-me jokes would have me laughing the way I did thirty years ago?  Answer: I think I may have smiled once or twice.  So… yeah.  Either this deleted material was an order of magnitude weaker than the stuff that made it into the released film, or This Is Spinal Tap really doesn’t appeal to my sense of humor the way it did when I was seventeen, and it’s not just familiarity that was getting in the way.

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