When I was growing up, the name Christopher Guest was synonymous with comedy. Not just any kind of comedy, but the best kind: the kind that blends absurdity, intelligence, sight gags and fart jokes into one incredible melange that makes you laugh just to remember certain scenes from Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and This is Spinal Tap. They represent a sensibility that was natural for me to form and understand. Because all these movies—brilliant as they are, hilarious as they are—live solidly and comfortably in the world of the middle-class. And this is both a strength and a huge problem for me personally.
A Mighty Wind is perhaps not the film most people think of as their favorite Christopher Guest film. It’s probably the iconic Waiting for Guffman, his most poignant and, after Spinal Tap, most referenced work. But A Mighty Wind, with the fart joke simply sitting there in the title and the already-funny choice of the world of 60s folk music existing as the perfect sitting duck for Guest’s brand of humor, is perhaps most illustrative, to my mind, of what Guest does well, and what he does poorly.
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