Gene Wilder has died at age 83 of Alzheimer’s.
He was one of his generation’s great comic actors, with a natural gift for underplaying a straight man and perfect deadpan delivery, and was in some of the greatest comedies of the 1970s.
Blazing Saddles, of course:
And who can forget the freaky boat ride from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory:
And here’s an animated overview of his life in his own words:
It’s the day after Worldcon, and I’m more than a little toasty, so expect slow blogging while I get up to speed.
So here’s a long interview with Gene Wilder about his career, working with Richard Pryor, Mel Brooks, Gilda Radner, etc. Wilder has reached the stage in his life where he speaks slowly and carefully, but always cognizantly, and it’s an interesting interview. I suspect that if it were not the day after Worldcon, I’d find it a little slow, but right now slow is just fine.
Warning: Deceased Equine Flogging Next 500 Words
So: A little while back College Humor put up a list of the top 100 movie comedies of all times based on the votes of their readers. (If you want to avoid giving these idiots click traffic (and you should), this Fark thread helpfully offers up the entire list in the fourth post.) Based on the evidence, their readers are all either people who have consisted on a diet of nothing but chips of lead-based paint for several years, or under the age of 18. Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a credible choice for number one, but not only is that about the only thing they got right, it’s almost the oldest movie they have on the list; both Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles came out a year earlier. (Man, what a year Mel Brooks had! It’s pretty much been a long, slow slide ever since…) That’s right: The oldest film on the list is from 1974.
No Eeling comedies. No classic screwball comedies. No Marx Brothers. No Charlie Chaplin. No Buster Keaton. No Harold Lloyd.
However, even in the woefully inadequate time period covered, the Super-geniuses at College Humor managed to leave off This is Spinal Tap, but managed to make room for Jackass, Jackass 2, Black Sheep (a film that comes in at a robust 28% at Rotten Tomatoes) and (at number 11) Spaceballs.
I think this may in fact be the worst “Best of” movies list ever submitted to the public at large. Perhaps College Humor should rebrand themselves as “Middle School Humor”…