Inspiring Minds

Waiting for Guffman is such a funny mess that it keeps you laughing even when you realize it's not much better directed than a cable-access talk show. Christopher Guest's is-this-where-I-point-the-camera? auteurism, last seen in The Big Picture, is redeemed by the performers -- himself most of all -- and the material they worked up from improvisations. (Guest and Eugene Levy, who costars, are credited with the screenplay.) Framed as a documentary about the staging of a local-talent musical in the town of Blaine, Missouri, the film is a triumph of inspiration over craft. The musical celebrates Blaine's 150th anniversary, and Waiting for Guffman also is a celebration: It shows you just how hilarious a movie can be when you gather together a great cast -- including Catherine O'Hara, Fred Willard, Parker Posey, Lewis Arquette, and Bob Balaban -- and allow their comic antennae full sway.

I'm a sucker for comedies about life in the theater in the same way I'm a sucker for stand-up comedy even when it's bad -- the flop sweat and petty rages and cast-iron narcissism are in themselves entertaining; it may not be possible to appreciate great theater without also appreciating bad theater. What unites these appreciations is a love for playacting in all its glorious self-aggrandizing nuttiness. Waiting for Guffman is the most piffling of piffles, but it makes you smile at its troupers' puffed-up exertions.

Everybody on view is seriously deluded: the cast putting on the show, the town council that sanctions it, the audience members who eat it up. It's as if we were watching a mass hallucination -- which, in essence, is what all theater is. Corky St. Clair (Guest) is the writer-director-choreographer-costumer of Red, White and Blaine, and he has the unbounded egomania of a monster artiste -- without, of course, the artistry. Swept away by his own nudnik brainstorms, he convinces the talentless and the gullible -- which includes just about everybody -- that he's a genius.

Corky is the epitome of froufrou show-biz vanity. Guest gives his diva-ness a distinctive spin. Watching Corky mince and wiggle, you might think he's a butterfly. But he's an iron butterfly -- he knows how to preen to get what he wants, and when that doesn't work he goes a bit banshee in the head. His hair-trigger tantrums catch you by surprise. You wait for them -- they're like little electrostatic arias -- just as you wait for his prodigious costume changes. (They usually go together.) He dresses for success: loud polka-dot pullovers; a T-shirt with Judy Tenuta's face on it; a corseted, drum-majorette-looking jacket. Retreating from a disastrous meeting with the town council, where his budget request for $100,000 is rejected, the shower-capped Corky soaks at home in a bubble bath while Mexican music tinkles from his cassette player. He's blissed out by unblinking rage -- a dying swan frothing in his own suds.

Corky is a flaming revue-sketch caricature, and Guest goes all the way with him; he's a sketch that's fully filled in. We put together his past: He spent time in the navy, then flipped onto the New York theater scene in its off-off-off-off-Broadway environs. He craves a return to glamour, and he sees Red, White and Blaine as his ticket to Broadway. He has pinned all his hopes on Guffman, a New York theatrical agent he invited to the show's opening night.

So has his cast. Dr. Allan Pearl (Levy), the town dentist with goggle-thick glasses, traces his performing roots to his Yiddish-theater grandfather, whose signature song was "Bubby Made a Kishke." Pearl's audition medley takes off from an almost surreally out-of-tune "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair." Married travel agents Ron and Sheila Albertson (Willard and O'Hara), all plastic smiles and plastic hearts, audition for Corky in leisure jump suits while murdering "Midnight at the Oasis." (They fancy themselves the Lunts of Blaine.) Dairy Queen counter girl Libby Mae Brown (Posey) does a wiggly, cutesy-poo "Teacher's Pet." She's coming on to Corky without really thinking about what she's doing or to whom. He's flattered -- and flummoxed. Transfixed by the wealth of talent before him, he muses, "You find people.... Is it karma?"

Amid the blandness of Blaine, Corky might appear to be practically extraterrestrial. But the more you get to know its citizens the more you realize Corky is in his element. Town legend has it that Blaine was visited by UFOs in the 1940s, and a grizzled abductee (Paul Dooley) remembers his probe-a-thon. At a Chinese restaurant with the uptight Dr. Pearl and his wife (Linda Kash), the Albertsons get boozy and bawdy. Sheila, in her girl-talk mode, leans in to Mrs. Pearl to ask, "What's it like to be with a circumcised man?" The sexual/ethnic humor in Guffman is proudly off-color and out of bounds.