Getting up the wall

"This is really driving me on my nerves!"

-- My daughter, age 7

Goonie Goo Goo

The first time i saw Eddie Murphy Delirious was on Betamax at John Hockenberry's house. I laughed so hard i nearly fell off the futon. I watched it again later, and still thought it was pretty funny, although i started to have doubts about the attitudes displayed towards gays, women, and pretty much everybody else (Bigfoot still seemed like fair game).

A third viewing had me convinced that, although there was some fine, funny material encased within the crude, obscenity-laced performance, as a whole it was an outrage, too full of gratuitous profanity and casual bigotry even for hardened criminals.

A fourth viewing, many months later, had me laughing so hard i nearly fell on the floor. Again. (While recognizing that it was just awful of him to say those things, and that my laughing made me complicit in the awfulness and....)

Oh. He got me.

I recently watched it for the first time in 26 years, and i wondered what my reaction was going to be this time. It was pretty much the falling-off-the-futon-laughing thing, except the futon is now a rocking chair. Eddie still says the F word 230 times (per IMDB and Wikipedia), and it's still offensive. And it's still funny.