Gene Wilder | Biography (born 1933)

Gene Wilder
Alleged Comedian

(Born 1933)

The Unfunniest 'Comedian'...EVER!

Jerome Silberman
b. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, 1933

This frizzy-haired, sad-eyed actor has struggled to find and hold an audience after achieving his initial fame. Wilder made his film debut as a hapless kidnap victim in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), then earned an Oscar nomination the next year as the "wet and hysterical" accountant Leo Bloom in The Producers the first of his three films for writer-director Mel Brooks, who helped Wilder develop his comic persona and is therefore largely responsible for producing one of the most irritating personalities to ever appear on the big screen.

The next few years saw Wilder in a variety of films with very long titles (the reasoning behind this, it would seem, was the longer the title the shorter the comedy), playing an Irish romantic in Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx (1970), a pair of mismatched French twins in Start the Revolution Without Me (also 1970), a cagey candymaker in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971), and a sheep-loving psychiatrist in Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) (1972). Wilder had a straight dramatic role, playing a clerk, in a deadeningly dull version of the Ionesco play Rhinoceros (1974, reunited with his Producers costar Zero Mostel and proving his straight work is just about as boring as his comedy), but was in maginally better form for Brooks in two comic hits: as the boozy gunslinger in Blazing Saddles (1973) and the mad doctor in Young Frankenstein (1974); he also earned an Oscar nomination for the latter's hilarious (well, Brooks would describe it as thus) script, co-written with Brooks. Imagine that. The two unfunniest guys in the universe in one room, writing gags and scripts? Cor, laughter must have left the buiding that day.

Wilder then took a cameo in The Little Prince (also 1974). Not a bad career move if you work on the principle that the less seen of Wilder the better. In fact at that stage Wilder should have taken the next step and taken what would have been his best role as The Invisible Man. Mind you, he would have still been as unfunny and hammy for even if you couldn't have seen him you would have known that the Great Buddah of Unfunniness was in the vicinity by the lack of laughter around.

Wilder then struck out on his own, writing and directing as well as starring in The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother (1975, great funny title, not), a totally unsuccessful attempt at crafting comedy in the Brooksian mold. Isn't one Mel Brooks in the world one too many, Mr Wilder?

Wilder co-starred with stand-up comic Richard Pryor, making an interracial Hope-Crosby team of sorts but minus the Hope-Crosby talent, charisma or fun (in fact the complete opposite of Hope-Crosby when you come to think of it), in the 1976 Silver Streak. For some unexplained reason that must rank up there with the greatest mysterious of the world, some people actually paid for tickets and went to the cinema to see the deadly unfunny duo, so with this encouragement (and you know who you are filmgoers; you ought to be ashamed of yourselves!) the two masters of nothing produced three follow-ups of diminishing quality (from rubbish to absolute rubbish): Stir Crazy (1980), See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989), and Another You (1991).

Wilder got one of his least annoying parts, as a rabbi in the Old West, opposite Harrison Ford in the uneven comedy adventure The Frisco Kid (1979). His self-written and directed vehicles, however, have been as awful as you would expect: The World's Greatest Lover (1977, yawn), Sunday Lovers (1980, one melancholy segment of this episodic film and that is one segment too many), The Woman in Red (1984, his best solo comedy but still crap), and the dismal Haunted Honeymoon (1986).

In the 90s, he has inflicted his unfunniness mainly on TV for productions I would tell you about if I could be bothered to look up their names. Oh, some Larry 'Cash' Carter parts for TV spring to mind in the caverns of TV Hell.

A dreadful 'comedian' and 'actor'.

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