88. Caddyshack

Harold Ramis, 1980

“So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.”

This movie is practically a Bartlett’s Book of Quotes unto itself. Seriously, there are so many brilliant and hilarious lines in this sucker that I can hardly stand it and, of course, you have an all star cast of comedy dishing them out. Bill Murray, Brian Doyle Murray, Chevy Chase (the funny years), Rodney Dangerfield, Ted Knight. If comedy where somehow an olympic sport, this would have been the US team and they would have won the gold, baby (for the sake of completion, USSR would have taken the silver with a team led by Yakov Smirnoff). Everything out of Bill Murray’s mouth is a gem. If you will indulge me for a moment, I would like to relay to you the film’s finest monologue before going on to the meat of this thing. This is, of course, Bill Murray as Carl. “So I jump ship in Hong Kong and make my way over to Tibet, and I get on a s a looper at a course over in the Himalayas. A looper, you know, a caddy, a looper, a jock. So, I tell them I’m a pro jock and who they give me? The Dalai Lama, himself. Twelfth son of the Lama. The flowing robes, the grace, bald. . . striking. So, I’m on the first tee with him. I give him the driver. He hauls off and whacks one - big hitter, the Lama - long, into a ten-thousand foot crevasse, right at the base of this glacier. Do you know what the Lama says? Gunga galunga. . . gunga, gunga-galunga. So we finish the eighteenth and he’s gonna stiff me. And I say, ‘Hey, Lama, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know.’ And he says, ‘Oh, uh, there won’t be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.’ So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.”

Doubtless that piece and many others were improvised (for the record, I also love the exchange about the Smails kid picking his nose and the old Billy Barule). The best bits of comedy here all feel so organic, so much a part of the man delivering the line that I doubt it could be anything else. My sincere guess is that Harold Ramis just let his actors, the skilled ones, not Danny or the Smails kid, riff and picked the best takes. Still, there is one more line that I feel deserves to be singled out and that is the film’s final line, delivered by Rodney Dangerfield as Al Czervik. The misfit golfers stand victorious. Judge Smails and his lot are defeated. Rodney stands triumphant in front of the pro shop, arms in the air. The deck is filled with young people looking on and Rodney shouts, “Hey everybody, we’re all gonna get laid!” Admittedly, this is not a funny line in and of itself, but I think, next to “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” it may be the finest closing line of any film ever made. After all, what other line so perfectly and succinctly captures the very spirit of the film as that. This is an early eighties, light hearted, free wheeling comedy that’s unabashedly filled with sex. What greater triumph could there be for this film in which every character, when not on the course, is trying to do just that? Even Rodney taking over the course pales in comparison to the promise that everyone, down to the greasy kid with the Babylon 5 t-shirt, is gonna get laid. Happy ending? You bet your ass.