In Praise of “The Naked Gun”

There is something pure about this sort of inanity.

What’s the first thing you remember that made you laugh your ever-loving ass off? There is a certain kind of laughter that, when you are young, that can feel revolutionary, something so funny, so I can’t believe this exists, that it can open up the entire universe. If the world can produce something this funny, what else is it capable of?

This is that first thing for me.

People talk about formative, and pivotal, cultural experiences from their youth all the time, but they’re usually something serious. The book that made you feel seen for the first time, the movie that transported you to another plane of existence, the TV show that made you feel less alone. The great film I Saw the TV Glow is explicitly about this, about a TV show that two lonely outcast friends bond over so intensely that they find it inextricable from their actually growing up experience; it begins to feel as real as their actual lives, and ends up, when they get older, more prevalent in their memories than experiences that…