Jump on!

Today we’re going goofy. Just because you’re in a high-speed chase does not mean you can’t have some fun along the way!

Tyler Clark
May 16, 2023

Good morning Consumers. Good morning Consumers, This is Please Consume, the newsletter that loves the Godfather and Fast Five equally.

What’s Up Doc (1972)

Today we’re going goofy. Just because you’re in a high-speed chase does not mean you can’t have some fun along the way!

We’re talking about one of the great comedies of the 70s, one of the best homages to the 30s-40s screwball comedies, and one of the highest-grossing films of its year.

But before we start, it looks like you have some Up Doc on your shirt.

What’s Up Doc, you say?

Exactly!

Influences

What do Peter Bogdanovich and John Carpenter have in common?

Not much, admittedly. They’re about as different as genre directors tend to get. What they do share is their obsession with Howard Hawks.

Carpenter, director of Escape from New York and Halloween, put four Hawks films in his Sight and Sound Top 10.

Bogdanovich loved Hawks so much that he spoke on the Criterion Collection’s edition of Bringing Up Baby for that film's re-release. He also based much of What’s Up Doc on Bringing Up Baby.

From the male lead being stuck in a loveless engagement just to get swept by a seemingly malignant turned incredibly charming woman to our female lead insisting on calling our protagonist by the wrong name, even down to the characters meeting over a torn suit, Bogdanovich wears his influence on his sleeve.

It may be torn by Barbara Streisand but he’s wearing it nevertheless.

Rule of 3s

In a 2014 interview at the American Film Institute, Bogdanovich said that the film’s comedy works because of the “rules of threes”.

“You set up something with a laugh, you get another laugh with it, then you top it.

There’s a scene where there are cars all making a U-turn and they each smash into this Volkswagen bus which is parked along the curb. Each time it gets a bigger laugh.

The topper is when the guy who obviously owns the bus runs out from his house, opens the door of the thing and the whole bus falls over into the street. That’s the big laugh.”

Bogdanovich would add later about his issues with modern comedies saying “nobody understands the principle of topping a joke.”

While we can’t quite agree with him wholesale on this one, we certainly can agree few do it quite as well as he does.

Today’s Scene

Stream It

If you would like to watch What’s Up Doc? at home, you can find it here.

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