This may be a purely personal prejudice, but I do not often find 
big-scale physical humor very funny. When squad cars crash into each 
other and careen out of control, as they do in nine out of 10 modern 
Hollywood comedies, I stare at the screen in stupefied silence. What is 
the audience laughing at? The creative bankruptcy of filmmakers who 
have to turn to stunt experts when their own ideas run out? 
         I do, on the other hand, laugh loudly at comedies where 
eccentric people behave in obsessive and eccentric ways and other, 
equally eccentric, people do everything they can to offend and upset 
the first batch. In "A Fish Called Wanda," for example, a character 
played by Kevin Kline is very particular about one thing: "Don't you 
ever call me stupid!" He is then inevitably called stupid on a number 
of occasions, leading to the payoff when his girlfriend explains to him 
in great detail why and how he is stupid and lists some of the stupid 
things he believes ("The London Underground is not a political 
movement"). 
         I also like it when people have great and overwhelming 
passions - passions that rule their lives and are so outsized they seem 
like comic exaggerations - and then their passions are deliberately 
tweaked. In "A Fish Called Wanda," for example, Michael Palin is 
desperately in love with a tank of tropical fish, and so Kline, who is 
equally desperate about discovering the whereabouts of some stolen 
jewels, eats the fish, one at a time, in an attempt to force Palin to 
talk. (The fact that Kline also stuffs French fries up Palin's nose 
gives the scene a nice sort of fish-and-chips symmetry.) 
         Another thing I like is when people are appealed to on the 
basis of their most gross and shameful instincts, and surrender 
immediately. When Jamie Lee Curtis wants to seduce an uptight British 
barrister (John Cleese), for example, she simply wears a low-cut dress 
and blinks her big eyes at him and tells him he is irresistible. This 
illustrates a universal law of human nature, which is that every man, 
no matter how resistible, believes that when a woman in a low-cut dress 
tells him such things she must certainly be saying the truth. 
      "A Fish Called Wanda" is the funniest movie I have seen in a long 
time; it goes on the list with "The Producers," `This is Spinal Tap" 
and the early Inspector Clouseau movies. 
         One of its strengths is its meanspiritedness. Hollywood may be 
  able to make comedies about mean people (usually portrayed as the 
  heroes), but only in England are the sins of vanity, greed and lust 
  treated with the comic richness they deserve. "A Fish Called Wanda" is 
sort of a mid-Atlantic production, with flawless teamwork between its 
two American stars (Curtis and Kline) and its British Monty Python 
veterans (Cleese and Palin). But it is not a compromise; this is 
essentially a late-1950s-style British comedy in which the Americans 
turn up to do and say all of the things that would be appalling to the 
British characters. 
         The movie was directed by Charles Crichton, who co-wrote it 
with Cleese. Crichton is a veteran of the legendary Ealing Studio, 
where he directed perhaps its best comedy, "The Lavender Hill Mob." He 
understands why it is usually funnier to not say something, and let the 
audience know what is not being said, than to simply blurt it out and 
hope for a quick laugh. He is a specialist at providing his characters 
with venal, selfish, shameful traits and then embarrassing them. And he 
is a master at the humiliating moment of public unmasking, as when 
Cleese the barrister, in court, accidentally calls Curtis "darling." 
        The movie involves an odd, ill-matched team of jewel thieves 
led by Tom Georgeson, a weaselly thief who is locked up in prison along 
with the secret of the jewels. On the outside, Palin, Kline and Curtis 
plot with and against each other, and a great deal depends on Curtis' 
attempts to seduce several key defense secrets out of Cleese. 
         The film has one hilarious sequence after another. For classic 
farce, nothing tops the scene in Cleese's study, where Cleese's wife 
almost interrupts Curtis in mid-seduction. Curtis and Kline slip behind 
the draperies while the mortified Cleese tries to explain a bottle of 
Champagne and a silver locket. The timing in this scene is as good as 
anything since the Marx Brothers. 
         And then there is the matter of the three murdered dogs. One 
friend of mine already says she won't see "A Fish Called Wanda" because 
she has heard that dogs die in it (she is never, of course, reluctant 
to attend movies where people die). I tried to explain to her that the 
death of a pet is, of course, a tragic thing. But when the object is to 
inspire a heart attack in a little old lady who is a key prosecution 
witness, and when her little darling is crushed by a falling safe, 
well, you've just got to make a few sacrifices in the name of comedy.