But hey, misery loves comedy.
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation is the third – and funniest – installment of Vacation movies to come out in the 1980s. The comedy from filmmaker John Hughes follows the madcap formula set by the previous Vacation films except in this film, the Grisswolds stay home and the annoying relatives vacation at their house. If The Breakfast Club was Hughes’s most angst-filled and teen-centered comedy, Christmas Vacation was his most slapstick and familial.
You gotta’ love Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase). If he risks giving his daughter hypothermia, picking out the “perfect Christmas tree” in the forest, it’s only because he wants to create memories for his family. Sure his good-hearted efforts always blow up like exploding sewage against a deep blue sky on Christmas night. But God love this sentimental fool – this most classic of goofball dads. He’s got a heart as big as the North Pole.
He relishes the 25,000 twinkling lights on his house. True, he causes a temporary power outage in Chicago, but you know, he put a lot of work into it. (Christmas Vacation took place in suburban Chicago, as did all Hughes’s films.)
If you don’t that, maybe you’re like Grizwold’s Grinch-like next door neighbors Todd and Margo Chester, played respectively by Nicholas Guest and Julia Louis-Dreyfus (prior to her work as Elaine on Seinfeld). They’re a cold, self-loving, Regan era, pretentious and most bah-humbug couple who disdain Griswold and his incorruptible Christmas cheer. (He accidently sends a Christmas tree flying through their window.)
Then there are the relatives – a comic mélange of older actors playing grandparents, aunts and uncles. (Of these veteran actors and actresses, only Doris Roberts is still living.) There’s the senile old aunt who puts her cat in a gift box and says the pledge of allegiance, when asked to say grace at dinner and the uncle who wears a rug on his head and falls asleep with a lit cigar in his mouth.
But the all out craziest character – can anyone who’s seen this movie not agree? – is Cousin Eddie. Randy Quaid truly brought something inside himself to this role. His mansplainin’ body language, trailer-chawed voice and commanding leisure suit scream Cousin Eddie.
We’ve all had a Cousin Eddie in our lives. In Christmas Vacation, he is the relative from the boughs of hell, the hick who shows up unannounced; parking a dilapidated RV that looks like it came from a survivalist camp next to your house. He and his family plan to stay a month. Oh and the family includes a Rottweiler -bloodhound mix named Snots who likes to get in the trash and go to town on your leg.
The interplay between Clark and Cousin Eddie makes for some of the funniest dialogue in a movie. The physical and situational comedy is complemented by great writing from John Hughes.
Examples:
"They had to replace my metal plate with a plastic one. Every time Catherine would rev up the microwave, I’d piss my pants and forget who I was for about half an hour.”
“You couldn’t hear a dump truck driving through a nitroglycerin plant.”
“Shall I get you some eggnog, something to eat, drive you to the middle of nowhere, and leave you for dead?”
Cousin Eddie’s financial woes coincide with Clark’s own troubles. He’s counting on his Christmas bonus, but finds out at the last minute that his boss, Frank Shirley, played by Brian Doyle-Murray (Bill’s brother) hasn’t given bonuses this year. He’s a nicely comic bad guy, serving as a Scrooge-like character. With Christmas gone to pot, Clark gone a little psychotic (the scene of him punching the plastic Santa in his lawn may be the biggest belly laugh scenes of the movie) and a police car scene reminiscent of The Blues Brothers, the film reaches a comic pinnacle big as the polar express. The comic scenes in the last quarter of Christmas Vacation have been successfully copied in other films.
Released Dec. 1, 1989, Christmas Vacation capped off a decade in which its screenwriter John Hughes was king. A year later, Hughes’s other wonderful Christmas movie – his last truly great movie – Home Alone would be released. There would be a bit more film dabbling, but for all intents and purposes, he was retired. He died in 2009, another vestige of my youth gone.
In an otherwise lackluster decade of yuppie-like plasticity, Hughes wrote with truth, revealing in his teen movies, a feeling of empathy like no one had seen before in the genre. Yet, one also sensed a warm spot for family. He was a little like Clark Griswold. This artist who captured the zeitgeist of the ‘80s teenager so pleasantly, also kept within him a never gone nostalgia for his own 1950s’ and ‘60s childhood and adolescence.
Christmas Vacation was based on a story he wrote entitled Christmas ’59. The original Vacation movie was based on a story he wrote called Vacation ’58 – both of them written for the magazine National Lampoon – the same satirical outfit where comic geniuses like Chase and fellow Saturday Night Live alums Gilda Radner and John Belushi got their start.
In this story, Hughes tapped into something from his own life and yours. Life is too damned serious as we’ve been reminded again this holiday season, so get all the laughs in while you can. Surrounded by your idiosyncratic relatives, watching Christmas Vacation, you can’t go wrong.
One last thing
The older actors and actresses in Christmas Vacation came with impressive credentials, appearing in various films and stage productions over the decades. I was particularly interested to learn that Mae Questel, who played senile Aunt Bethany, was the voice of Betty Boop and Olive Oyl, Popeye's girlfriend, in cartoons dating as far back as 1931. Having seen her as an old lady, it was also neat to learn what a dish she was in her young days. Check her out in this musical number with Rudy Vallee, who was like the Elvis of the flapper set.
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