Welcome to Matt and Nate’s matinee!
Who are Matt and Nate? Well, if you aren’t able to figure out who “Matt” is right now — the guy with over 100 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes to date and whose website, matthewrozsa.com, hosts this review — than I can’t help you. As for Nate? Let’s just say that he is a local comedian in eastern Pennsylvania who shares my love of Yocco’s hot dogs, ukulele-based improv and low-budget indie flicks that most people have never seen. For several years we have had a tradition of meeting up and watching movies together, everything from the Norm MacDonald comedy “Dirty Work” and the unapologetically offensive camp horror film “Leprechaun 6: Back 2 Tha Hood” to the cult classic Crispin Glover comedy “Rubin and Ed” and the Bobcat Goldthwait romcom “Sleeping Dogs Lie.”
For our first collaboration as critics together, we decided to return to the Bobcat Goldthwait well, and we couldn’t have picked a better vehicle for doing so. The 1992 comedy “Shakes the Clown” may have faded into obscurity, but it is one of the better undiscovered gems out there. Written and directed by Goldthwait himself, who plays the titular character, it stars Julie Brown as his love interest and two up-and-coming comedians before they got big: Tom “SpongeBob Squarepants” Kenny as the antagonist Binky the Clown and Adam Sandler as Shakes’ friend Dink the Clown. The premise of the movie — which, like many good comedies, is less about the plot than the premise — is that clowns are an underground community with their own warring tribes including party clowns, mimes, rodeo clowns and others.
Since I shared Nate’s views on the movie, I’ll quote directly from his feedback at this point:
“’Shakes’ is an allegory for alcohol and drug abuse, using the existential clown universe to represent the entertainment world as a whole. For a dark comedy with some rowdy rude humor, it actually has a positive message with the redemption of its main character, an out-of-control alcoholic clown.
The clown community depicted in the film also serves as a metaphor for society’s problems of classism, racism and tribalism as the ‘party clowns’ seems to make up the majority of the contained universe while resenting any anti-clown sentiments and slurs. (Shakes’ hostile interaction with a father at a kid’s birthday party reveals this). The party clowns seem to hate mimes as ‘artsy’ or weak, while the mimes fear and distrust the party clowns. The mime instructor — played by an uncredited but very obvious Robin Williams — acts like a bullying drill instructor and calls out Shakes who infiltrates a mime lesson, saying ‘What are you, a clown?’
Meanwhile in this clown hierarchy the rodeo clowns seem to be the ‘tough guys’ and cocaine dealers that the party clowns reverse as intimidating. The psychopathic and cringily unfunny clown Binky asserts his edge by killing the party clowns’ boss in front of rodeo clowns, in a Tony Montana type of power switch to demonstrate who is in charge.
The multiple celebrity cameos, intelligent dialogue and redeemable character study makes this a smarter movie then what one might expect from a crude clown picture. Williams in particular is a standout: It seems Williams, a longtime friend of Goldthwait, extended a role to his former co-star Paul Dooley, who plays a hapless boss clown here and was Wimpy in Robert Altman’s ‘Popeye’ movie.
‘Shakes’ follows in the footsteps of other offbeat clown movies including Stephen Chiodo’s 1988 horror film ‘Killer Klowns from Outer Space,’ Conor McMahon’s 2012 horror film ‘Stitches,’ Jon Watts’ 2014 horror film ‘Clown’ and Damien Leone’s 2016 horror film ‘Terrifier,’ as well as dramas like Bryan Johnson’s 2000 film ‘Vulgar’ and the more recent smash hit, Todd Phillips’ 2019 movie ‘Joker’ (which Matthew Rozsa panned). All these films (except for ‘Killer Klowns’) may have Goldthwait to thank, for his comic style and vision stand out as intelligent, dark, meaningful and most important… genuinely funny.”
I second all of Nate’s sentiments and close this review with a few random observations of my own:
- I’m impressed with Florence Henderson’s self-aware performance, mocking her squeaky clean Americana image by playing a cynical, promiscuous lush.
- One of the charms of this movie is identifying the celebrity cameos. This is chock full of them.
- It’s interesting how Adam Sandler is an insecure, ineffectual virgin in his early comedies (Shakes, Going Overboard) and overcompensated by being an unrealistic ladies’ man later in his career.
- It’s a very dialogue centric movie, characteristic of other great comedies from the‘90s indie circuit. One can draw a direct line between Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” (1992) and Kevin Smith’s “Clerks” (1994) and the kind of delightfully self-indulgent banter and patter that is featured here.
- The rivalry between Binky and Shakes is hilarious and shows a fascinatingly quirky and dark side of Tom Kenny, who has great comedy chemistry with Bobcat Goldthwait. If one did not know in advance that this was the future SpongeBob Squarepants, it would be very difficult to guess it.
- I love that the clown bar is called The Twisted Balloon.
- Great line: “He’s thrown his last pie in this town.”
- Robin Williams is absolutely brilliant. Seeing him harass Goldthwait about how to be a mime, and his drill sergeant routine toward teaching other mimes, is great.
If there are any flaws in “Shakes the Clown,” they mostly involve the very distinct brand of comedy that Goldthwait brings to the table. It’s fair to say that I don’t think fans of Sandler’s usual fare would like this movie, nor should they. (If you’re a Sandler fan, you deserve the misery that you receive when trying to watch movies made by people who care.) Yet I suspect even people with finer tastes in comedy might have problems connecting with the comedy here. It is very dark, heavily reliant on wordplay and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it visual gags, and requires an appreciation for subtle social commentary that can be easily missed.
Goldthwait’s main character, furthermore, is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. He is not likeable, at least not in the sense that moviegoers usually expect from their heroes. He is a self-pitying, arrogant, alcoholic jerk at the start, and the havoc that he wreaks in the lives of the people around him can be cringe-inducing even as it is also funny.
To be clear: I enjoyed this movie as much as Nate. I am only mentioning these flaws because Nate had not done so; if I was writing this review on my own, I would have made many of the same observations that Nate did, particularly about the satire. Yet I must point out that “Shakes the Clown” is for a very specific type of moviegoer. If what you’ve read so far sounds interesting to you, you’ll probably have as much fun as we did.