Comedy About an Actor Making a Movie
I got some big laughs out of Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story (2005), a zany British film that stars Steve Coogan. After starting out as a comic and mime, Coogan became widely known in Britain in the 1990s for his mock television talk show Knowing Me, Knowing You With Alan Partridge. More recently he's appeared in several feature films, the most widely seen of which is probably the Jackie Chan version of Around the World in 80 Days, in which Coogan plays Phileas Fogg. Coogan is a very funny man with a number of movies in the pipeline, and I wouldn't be surprised to see him emerge as a major international comedy star over the next few years.
In Tristram Shandy, Coogan portrays a version of himself, and his character is also named Steve Coogan. The fictional Steve Coogan is making a movie that gets him caught up in wacky situations, such as dealing with a hot chestnut down his pants and being lowered upside down into a large model of a womb. Also, the real-life Coogan does some material developed from improvisation, such as during the opening where he is playing an 18th-century character who anachronistically quotes Groucho Marx.
Film-Within-the-Film Based on a Classic Novel
The movie the fictional Steve Coogan is making is an adaptation of the 18th-century novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne, and roughly a third of Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story consists of footage of the film-within-the-film. I confess I've never read Sterne's book, but I thoroughly enjoyed the movie anyway. It seems to me the film stands alone well enough, although it might be even funnier to those familiar with the novel.
The fictional Steve Coogan plays two roles in the film-within-the-film: the mature Tristram Shandy, who is looking back on his own life story, and Tristram's father Walter. The story supposedly takes place in the 18th century, but the makers of the film-within-the-film aren't all that concerned about staying in period, and at one point Tristram has a hilarious bit involving Pavlov's salivating dogs.
Verbal Humor
Although Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story often relies on farce for its humor, there's verbal wit as well. For example, the fictional Coogan tells an interviewer that Sterne's novel "was a post-modern classic written before there was any modernism to be post about."
Later a cinema nut (Naomie Harris) claims that when two knights encased in armor keep hitting each other in Robert Bresson's film Lancelot du Lac, it's a metaphor for "the impossibility of actually connecting with another human being."
Is It Just Shtick, or Is There a Story?
In Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story, the fictional Steve Coogan is a not-completely-likable actor who must deal with several issues, including the press threatening to expose his dalliance with a lap dancer called Heather Gobbler, an attempt by a good-looking production assistant (Naomie Harris) to seduce him, and his not-so-friendly rivalry with a fellow actor (Rob Brydon). But in the end, Coogan comes to realize that his problems are all relatively unimportant because he has a loving girlfriend (Kelly Macdonald) and an infant son he adores.
As far as I am concerned, this does constitute a story, and it's a comic variant of that old standby, the hero's journey: a protagonist who's a jerk goes through a series of unusual experiences and emerges from them as slightly less of a jerk.
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