When good comedians go bad

There are plenty of other terrific, or at least just amusing, comics who have either sold out (intentionally or otherwise) or been cast in movies that don't make the most of their gifts. Adam Sandler has sometimes been an interesting and charming actor, but he's made his fortune in movies that coast on genuinely dumb gags. Robin Williams, an enormously gifted stand-up comic, didn't do himself any favors when he stuck that enema bulb on his nose. And while Jim Carrey -- whose "incognito" appearance at the MTV Movie Awards a few years back, as a Foghat-loving hippie dude, remains one of my favorite TV surprise appearances -- is fairly forgettable in "Fun With Dick and Jane," at least movies like "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" suggest that we can't always be sure what to expect of him.

And just for a moment, let's talk about the grandpappy of great modern comics gone bad: Woody Allen. Many moviegoers and critics often speak fondly of Allen's comedies, as if they were cute little doodles he drew in the margins of his notebooks at school, but reserve their biggest pots of incense for his dramas -- "serious" pictures like the ponderous "Crimes and Misdemeanors" and that baffling critics' darling "Match Point."

As much as we all claim to enjoy comedies, we're often unwilling to take a comic actor seriously until he or she tackles "serious" work, an expectation that comics themselves are only too keenly aware of. But they know as well as anyone that great comedy -- and even just minor comedy -- often harbors serious themes. Mike Myers (a wonderful comic actor who needs to take a break from doing cartoon voices and give us a real comedy) has often quoted Henri Bergson's claim that comedy is basically the recognition of your own mortality. You can't get much more serious than that.

So why is it that even a late-era Allen comic masterpiece -- like the unnervingly funny 1993 "Manhattan Murder Mystery," which is also about the sometimes aggravating comfort of middle-aged love -- is treated as a trifle, while "Match Point," with its dunderheaded moralism, is lauded as a return to form? Allen's movies -- both "Match Point" and his indefensibly stinky comedies, like "Melinda and Melinda" and "Anything Else" -- have aggravated me in recent years. But watching Allen on the 2002 Oscars, in a stand-up performance that was charming, light and sly, I felt all my old love for him flooding back. Where had he been hiding all this brilliance for so many years? And why? As hard as some of us have been on Allen -- and as far as we know, no one has been holding a gun to his head as he makes one crappy movie after another -- it's troubling to think that he undervalues everything that made him great in the first place. What he thinks an audience expects of him has become inseparable from what he expects of himself.

Maybe we've come to expect too much from comic actors like Martin, so much that his failures stand out far more baldly than his successes do. Two of the biggest comedy hits of last year, "Wedding Crashers" and "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" were also hits with critics. These were script-driven pictures rather than movies boasting big-name comic stars. (Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson are well known and well liked among audiences, but they've never been considered big-name draws. And even though Steve Carrell may have been known to fans of "The Daily Show" and the American version of "The Office," "Virgin" seemed to come out of nowhere. I remember seeing posters for it a month before its release and wondering, "What the heck is that?") These are also movies in which the basic premises -- a 40-year-old guy who's never had sex; a pair of best buddies who freeload off other people's parties for fun -- provided a broad enough canvas for a range of good jokes, instead of just matching up a star with a famous (and beloved) character and hoping for the best.

Steve Martin can obviously afford to have a flop or two. But who wants to pay good money to sit through one, when we know he's capable of giving us more? My all-time favorite Martin bit, if I had to choose one, may be his lovelorn magician, the Great Flydini (an act Martin brought, memorably, to Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show" in the last week of its run). Flydini draws an array of objects -- a string of brightly colored scarves, a few eggs, a glass of wine -- from the fly of his pants. When he draws on a cigarette, smoke emerges, in gentle puffs, from his trousers; when a curvy cutie struts by, a lush bouquet pops out. But the woman rejects him, and so for the finale, a Pavarotti puppet emerges from between the zipper teeth, singing an aria of lost love and betrayal, an echo of the pained expression Martin wears on his face.

The Great Flydini, an act that spans just a few minutes, envelops the essence of comedy and tragedy; it also tangles with complicated notions of male bravado and insecurity. To give up on Steve Martin forever is to betray the promise of the Great Flydini. No matter how bad "The Pink Panther" is, we have to hope Martin has some surprises down his pants yet.

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