Bill Murray names the greatest comedy movie of the 21st century: “It’s not even close”
Having starred in some of the most popular comedy movies of the last four decades and become one of the genre’s most recognisable stars, Bill Murray has a decent nose for what makes people laugh.
What often doesn’t make people laugh are his behind-the-scenes antics, though, with the Academy Award-nominated actor and Saturday Night Live veteran leaving a lot of noses out of joint. Plenty of comics have been described as tortured geniuses over the years, and he certainly fits the bill.
A lot of them have been dubbed eccentrics, too, which is another box he ticks. In the most conventional use of the term, Murray is a legend, but that doesn’t make him universally beloved. However, the one area where he can’t be faulted is making comedy that lasts for generations, which gives him instant authority.
Stripes, Meatballs, Caddyshack, Ghostbusters, Scrooged, Groundhog Day, The Royal Tenenbaums, and more have been and will continue to be rewatched and adored for generations to come, but when he cast his eye over the landscape of the 21st-century rib-tickler, he had bad news for the United States.
As far as he was concerned, the pinnacle had been reached, and a bar had been set so high that he doubted anyone, whether they hailed from his home country or not, would be able to replicate. It sounds hyperbolic, but anyone who’s seen Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle would be inclined to disagree.
A madcap blend of martial arts, slapstick, outright buffoonery, more visual gags than you could shake Leslie Nielsen at, and a delirious sense of nonstop pacing that places it somewhere between Buster Keaton and Tex Avery, Murray called it “the supreme achievement of the modern age in terms of comedy.”
“It’s not even close,” he added. “Quick Change, after it, looked like a home movie. It looked like a fucking high school film. I was like, ‘Oh man, I just saw this thing’, and ‘God, that’s just staggering, just staggering’. When I saw that, I was like: That. Just. Happened.'”
While it’s odd for him to compare Kung Fu Hustle to his solitary directorial effort, when they were made decades apart, are completely different in every way, and one of them is vastly superior to the other, Murray was nonetheless so impressed by the former that he issued an ominous warning to his peers.
“There should have been a day of mourning for American comedy the day that movie came out,” he concluded, and while that seems drastic, it just goes to show how much he was blown away by its bonkers majesty.
