While Meet the Fockers and Meet the Parents are not the early 
30’s comedic masterpieces created by such artists as Charlie 
Chaplin or the Marx brothers, it does offer a great range of 
fast-moving, irreverent style of comedy that appeals to a great 
audience. 

Ben Stiller has been in the film industry for a long time, 
notably on shows such as Saturday Night Live but he first made 
his mark and became the household name that he is because of the 
Farrely smash hit "There’s Something about Mary."

It was this American slapstick that exploited all the comic 
possibilities of love and every imaginable way to complicate the 
situations. 

In the same veins as "Something About Mary," Meet the Fockers and 
Meet the Parents overflow with conflict because of they abide by 
one ultimate filmmaking rule which is "Murphy’s Law" which might 
have been a more fitting title for the films if the current ones 
were not already so explosively funny.

The film’s commercial’s success, despite the coolness of the 
critics has been mainly clownery just like in another recent Ben 
Stiller film entitled Dodgeball. In this film, the two characters 
fall, curse and whatever you can imagine to get a laugh out of 
the audience. But sometimes, one could start wondering if our 
good people in the audience are laughing because they are 
genuinely amused, or if these are nervous laughs not to be 
thought of as uptight. 

"I’ll admit, some of the jokes in those films definitely push the 
envelope and in other circumstances, I might have actually find 
it offensive. But in that environment, I feel almost compelled to 
laugh with the rest of them." Says James Cromptom of Irvine, CA 
who took his daughter to see Ben Stiller in Meet the Fockers.

It seems that today’s audiences and filmmakers are longing for 
those early slapstick comedies of Buster Keaton and Charlie 
Chaplin but they are substituting the slapstick with slap in the 
face comedy. "I feel that the film industry has pulled a veil 
over the moviegoer’s eyes that it’s ok to laugh at other people’s 
expense. I think that when some comedians are out of funny 
material they resort to vulgarity as their last hope to get a 
laugh from the audience." Says Nerin Stempel, mother of two.
 
Machiavelli Hangman is another film that has started to give 
some red lights to parents because of its raunchy material. It 
recounts the life of a shoe shiner and takes him through ins and 
outs of the gangster underworld. While the premise may sound 
interesting, the early word on the independent film is that it 
is a combination of Meet the Fockers, There’s Something about 
Mary and Napoleon Dynamite on steroids. 
 
Many families are protesting against the film, but producers are 
defending Machiavelli Hangman as a good humored comedy that will 
find its audience. 

Pepsi Brophy is a movie reviewer. This week's movie 
is the soon-to-be-realeased Machiavelli Hangman: 
http://www.hangmanmovie.com