Pun Salad

I wanted to like An American Carol, but the truth is that it's not that funny.

The movie was written and directed by David Zucker, who knows how to do the funny (Airplane, Naked Gun) And the premise was promising: take a thinly-disguised America-hating Michael Moore, vowing to abolish the Fourth of July, and put him through the Scrooge treatment to demonstrate the error of his ways. He's visited by the ghosts of General Patton (Kelsey Grammer) and George Washington (Jon Voight). He's the unwitting dupe of terrorists who are using his connections to try to blow up Madison Square Garden on the Fourth of July.

But, while the movie got a few chuckles out of me, most of the humor just didn't work. The funniest scenes weren't particularly political: for example, Tiny Tim transmogrifies into three kids, one on a crutch, one with vision problems, one on dialysis, all disclaiming as profanely as the PG-13 rating will allow on their famous relative.

Maybe political satire just doesn't work in a feature film; I can't think of a successful one, can you? The most reliable source of political satire these days is probably Saturday Night Live, and they misfire more often than they hit. And there are have been dozens of SNL-based movies, but I can't think of any based on their political sketches. Hm.