Another one from the fog banks of my childhood memory. I know I saw Ernest Goes to Camp when I was young — probably the year it came out on video (it was released to theatres in 1987). But I remember very little of it beyond, of course, Ernest himself, who was already pretty indelible from his commercials (and who is one of the very few successes in the “Let’s turn a pitchman character into a movie or TV show” genre.) Despite my brother and some friends absolutely loving Ernest P. Worrell, I somehow never saw the film after that one mostly-forgotten viewing, and have never seen any other Ernest film. A $5 DVD three-pack allowed me to rectify this situation, so at the very least I wouldn’t have to put up with any further ragging from my friends about not having seen it (my friends are, as you might guess from my own leanings, very insistent upon seeing all the popular films from the 1980s and most of the unpopular ones as well.)
There’s an art to making a comedy about stupid people, and I think it’s been virtually lost nowadays. As the Three Stooges knew very well, you have to be pretty smart to be funny at being stupid. It takes work, it takes timing. It takes some planning beyond “ha ha, this guy is dumb.” I’m not convinced that, for example, Ben Stiller is smart enough, and I’m pretty sure Rob Schneider isn’t. But Jim Varney, the man beneath the khaki cap of Ernest, seems to know what he’s doing. Continue reading
