Last night Amy and I caught Tommy Boy which starred Chris Farley and David Spade (a very young-looking David Spade and a very alive-looking Chris Farley). I hadn’t seen it probably 10 years, possibly a bit longer. I laughed pretty much all the way through it. Oddly, it was being shown on the Game Show station. I found that a little odd.
The last time I recall having seen Tommy Boy was when I was in fairly early high school at the Meaford Youth Rally. I stayed with several friends from church (though we were not the ‘cool’ group. For more on this phenomenon see this article). One of my friends brought a copy of Tommy Boy up with us and the family we were billeted with had never seen it before so we tossed it in.
Something I have noticed about some church people (and particularly those who don’t have a whole lot of contact with the outside world, like people in very small towns that are a long way from larger towns or cities, or really a whole lot of people in the American south) is that they really don’t have a concept of appropriate reactions to comedy. Any time I’ve seen a Christian comedian on something like the 700 Club or 100 Huntley Street, the audience is falling out of their chairs laughing and having what look like small heart attacks in response to jokes that are only sort of funny. It looks as though they blue-screened this mediocre comedian into reaction shots from somebody like Mitch Hedberg. This family who we stayed with had a similar reaction to the comedic genius of Tommy Boy.
We got there on Friday night around 10:00. We watched Tommy Boy and enjoyed it (and they convulsed with mirthful exuberance). We went to bed somewhere around 1:00, mostly because they had rewound the tape and were watching it again. When we left on Saturday morning, they didn’t see us to the door because they were re-watching the movie. When we came home in the middle of the day to change out of wet tobogganing clothing, it was on and it was on at such a point to suggest that they had managed to get at least one additional viewing in between when we had gone and when we came back. We got back late that night and they put it in for us and sat down to watch it with us. Looking back, I wonder if we perhaps caused a minor Groundhog Day effect simply by bringing it into the house.
When we left on Sunday we made sure to take the tape with us because we didn’t want to read in next edition of The Gospel Herald that this family had all been fired from work and/or wasted away because they were unable to do anything but watch Tommy Boy.