Silence of the Hams (Il silenzio dei prosciutti) (1994)

On some level appreciation or lack thereof for all art and entertainment is subjective, a fact critics struggle with especially in an age where anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can in record time cuss out even the most professional and established critic for not appreciating the oeuvre of Michael Bay, but something about comedy makes it even more so. A personal case in point, I just don't get Garrison Keillor, in spite of his undoubted success. You can accuse me of being a typical east coast elitist, but, like the Simpsons, I can't watch him tell jokes or amusing homilies or whatever he does to an audibly appreciative audience without thinking that something must be wrong with the television. As for the things I find funny that few other people do...well, that brings us to the spoof Silence of the Hams.

Spoofs themselves are a tricky business, which may be why the genre goes into hibernation every now and then - and why the most recent crop of spoofs have been so reviled. David Zucker taught the world with Airplane! and The Naked Gun that a good spoof, despite its dogged detachment from reality, manic gag-a-minute nature, satire that rarely strays outside the confines of pop culture and broad humor (An American Carol being the exception that proves the rule), and disregard for plot and character except as sources for even more gags can be a comedy classic, but then for some reason he decided to later teach us that a bad enough spoof can scientifically qualify as a form of psychological torture. Even I have to admit that Silence of the Hams does fall more on the Scary Movie 4 side of the spoof quality scale than on the other side with "Police Squad!" And yet I like it. For God's sake, why?

Despite the title, Silence of the Hams is actually more of a spoof of Psycho than of Silence of the Lambs, enough so that I couldn't help but wonder if the script in embryo was entirely about Psycho but the jokes, characters, and plot points referencing Lambs were slapped on to make the movie more current for 1994. This may be one core explanation for why the movie is the way it is, in spite of rich material ready to be mined for satire. Another is that the film is the brainchild of Italian comedian Ezio Greggio, who directed, wrote, and starred, proving that fantasy, horror, and sci-fi aren't the only genres in which Italian filmmakers have made great strides through the medium of b-movies. Although the movie isn't really a product of the Italian film industry - the cast is mostly American and the entire film was shot in the United States - Ezio Greggio not only plays the character who receives the most time on screen but narrates the entire film. The narration itself is one of the movie's very few gags with any degree of subtlety, a take on films with narrators who are not only conveniently omniscient but by necessity have to be piling on lots of insane digressions and irrelevant details, but Greggio's accent is so thick and his English so belabored enough that one almost expects subtitles. I won't go as far as to say that the language/accent barrier is so dense that it's difficult to understand what Greggio is saying, but it does at least lend the film a layer of off-kilter weirdness, like you're watching the end result of a rogue international comedy conspiracy. Plus there are jokes that fall so flat and are so seemingly random that perhaps cultural gaps really are to blame.

On the other hand, so many of the jokes are so militantly puerile an Egyptian from 3000 BC might be able to understand them. There are midget jokes, people-entering-inappropriate-sets joke (in this case the film gives us an upscale restaurant located right in the middle of an asylum for the criminally insane), Mr. Magoo-esque elderly jokes, fat man jokes, sexually ambiguous big burly men jokes, name gags (the Hannibal Lecter send-up here, Dr. Animal Pizza (Dom DeLuise!) as well as our hero, Joe Dee Foster (Billy Zane), for instance), and of course abusive slapstick, much of which is heaped on poor Larry Storch and Phyllis Diller. What's surprising is that, in spite of the subject matter, the film ardently avoids the realm of black comedy. The film's version of the iconic "shower scene" is a parade of light-hearted visual gags while the closest thing to a shot of gore turns out to be a set-up for a '90s frat humor trifecta: a fat guy joke, a fart joke, and a Terminator 2 reference. Speaking of cultural references, was there a law in the mid-'90s that required every goofball comedy to have at least one Rodney King and Terminator joke?

To be honest, it's actually the scattershot, fairly predictable gags that make me like this film. The sublimely generic depiction of FBI headquarters, which deliberately confuses them with the archetypal police station (and places them in Los Angeles!), is a pretty nice jab at the banal, unrealistic nature of big-budget Hollywood genre films and the late, great Dom DeLuise easily gets a couple of nice running gags - his guessing that Joe Dee Foster is, for example, a black female journalist every time they meet as a parody of Jodie Foster's first meeting with Anthony Hopkins in Lambs and his tendency to squeal "Ichyboo!" every time he's excited - although otherwise Dom is criminally underused. Plus, as silly as it is, the climactic unmasking scene, where just about every character in the movie turns out to have been disguised as someone else, is goofiness done at precisely the right pitch.

It helps that most of the cast, who is like a who's who of well-known and quasi-famous comedy stars (Dom DeLuise! Phyllis Diller! John Asten! Rip Taylor! There are even cameos by Joe Dante and Mel Brooks!), all seem to be having a good time, especially John Astin and Shelley Winters, despite the former being subjected to the film's worst recurring joke (and, yes, it's an "Addams Family" reference; how did you guess?). I don't think I can come up with a better reason for me and others to like this film; it has a good-natured sense of fun, underlined with its writer and director's infectious admiration for Psycho. And if it does seem overly derivative of pre-career dive David Zucker and Mel Brooks circa Spaceballs, it's hardly the only '90s spoof to have the same problem. Sure, it's uneven, it hardly taps into some of its best assets, and there's a good argument to be made that the movie is too soft and silly to be a worthwhile parody of either Psycho or Silence of the Lambs at all, but in my opinion it's still pretty fun to watch. In its favor I can also point out that one thing Silence of the Hams doesn't do is, in lieu of jokes, make constant references to blink-and-you-missed-them pop culture fads, making the spoofs as dated the day they are released as the political jokes in Aristophanes' plays. For that reason, I can, without qualification, recommend Silence of the Hams over the likes of Meet the Spartans.