Hear Me Out: ‘Coneheads’ is a stone-cold comedy classic
Just as the 20th century gave its last sputtering breath before keeling over and giving way to a new millennium, it let out one final hurrah in the form of a deluge of commercially successful science fiction comedies like Men In Black, Galaxy Quest and Mars Attacks! — but Coneheads was not one of them.
Released in 1993, the film was a resounding critical and financial flop. The project lost roughly $10million and was panned across every major publication. This is a terrible shame and one of the great tragedies of cinema because, in nearly every aspect, Coneheads is a stone-cold comedy classic. Following the attempts of an alien family to blend in with suburban New Jersey, Coneheads took elements of the family sitcom, the ‘odd-neighbours’ trope, and goofy 1950s science fiction while blending them all together with comic and often wholesome results.
The actual plot of the film, in which it’s revealed that ‘The Coneheads’ original mission was to infiltrate Earth in order to eventually aid in its destruction, is incidental; it serves as a mere vehicle to explore what ‘The Coneheads’ represented and reinforce the idea that, despite their differences, Earth is very much their home.
The origin of this oft-overlooked gem begins almost two decades prior. In 1977, only a couple of years after its inception, NBC’s Saturday Night Live (SNL) debuted ‘The Coneheads’ in what would become a recurring sketch for the series. Dan Aykroyd, of Ghostbusters fame, first conceived of the pointy-headed extra-terrestrial family whilst likely getting stoned. “I had been looking at TV — I guess I’d smoked a ‘J’ or something. I thought, ‘Everybody’s heads don’t really reach the top of the screen. Wouldn’t it be great if you added four inches to everybody?’”
Several seasons of SNL and an animated feature later, ‘The Coneheads’ were ready for their first outing in live-action on the big screen. The comedy of the film can be split into three distinct levels of humour. The first: their appearance. This may seem too obvious, but it’s an element that naturally pervades throughout the entire film. If you’re not giggling the minute you see their huge bald heads, it’s likely that you won’t enjoy watching them for the rest of the film. But you should, because it’s hilarious.
Secondly is the behaviour of The Coneheads and the cultural mishaps that occur when their alien customs get in the way. They speak rapidly, with a high-pitched nasal inflexion, and they describe things in an absurdly technical way. Parents are called “parental units”, and eggs are “fried chicken embryos”. Their alien appetites are vastly different; they love beer, gulping down six-packs in one sitting, and tucking into mountains of bacon, referred to as “swine flesh strips”.
The third level, which along with the second contributes to the slightly more cerebral element of why Coneheads is so funny and insightful, is the absolute obliviousness of the rest of the humans around them. Nobody notices the obscenely large and pointy baldness of the family’s heads, and their strange and alien ways are something to be brushed off with a shrug. This is both funny and heartwarming because it suggests two things: that humans, particularly Americans, are completely stupid, but also that they have a huge capacity for tolerance and acceptance.
The fact that the film was about an immigrant family didn’t quite sink into people’s minds until well into the 2000s, but it is the resounding factor that makes Coneheads such a classic. By utilising the literal ‘alien’ family, Aykroyd, his fellow screenwriters and director Steve Barron are able to interrogate the very notion of American culture, examining its pros and cons and turning the so-called ‘nuclear family’ on its head. It’s satire at its best, doing what The Simpsons did except with the addition of gigantic conical heads.
If this hasn’t convinced you, take it from the man himself; speaking to Parade magazine in 2021, Aykroyd picked his all-time favourite film he’d worked on. It wasn’t Blues Brothers, nor Ghostbusters I or II. No, it was Coneheads. “It’s by far the best work I have ever done and will ever do,” said Aykroyd. With webbed feet and different-coloured eyes, it seems he feels a certain affinity for life beyond planet Earth. “I’m very close to the alien spirit — and ready for them to arrive!”
