Looking for the big W
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Jonathan Winters as Lennie Pike in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)
Over the weekend I finished watching It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World with my kids. First time for them, zillionth time for me. The movie has grown up and aged with me the way a lot of other comedies haven’t, and part of the reason has to be the density of its jokes—slapstick, sight gags, visual puns (Jimmy Durante literally kicking the bucket), comedy of manners, observational humor, wordplay, banter, innuendo, shock, celebrity cameos, pop culture allusions, over-the-top situational comedy… every trick in the book. My kids were delighted by all the slapstick, especially Mickey Rooney and Buddy Hackett’s airplane antics and every time Ethel Merman got knocked upside down.
But the older I get the more I appreciate the film’s generous leavening of pure irony. The film is shot through with it from the start, the most fundamental irony being the situation itself—a small group of people witness an accident and, by doing the right thing and stopping to help, become privy to a secret (there’s $350,000 buried under “a big W” in Santa Rosita State Park) that sets them all at each other’s throats and precipitates the entire manic, frantic, madcap race to find stolen money. It’s as if the Good Samaritan stopped to help the victim of bandits and ended up taking off to Jericho to find Achan’s buried treasure.
This irony is neatly bookended by one character: Dorothy Provine’s Emmaline Finch. Emmaline firmly opposes going after from the beginning and spends most of the movie fed up with her feckless, incompetent husband (Milton Berle), her domineering mother (Ethel Merman), her idiot brother (Dick Shawn), and everyone else she meets and talks to along the way, including the most seemingly decent of the original group, trucker Lennie Pike (Jonathan Winters). She oozes disgust toward all of them and their low, vulgar, unethical, and illegal quest.
Until, that is the entire bunch arrives at Santa Rosita State Park. At first she refuses even to get out of the (stolen) truck they arrived in, but eventually leaves to find a water fountain to freshen up—and spots “the big W.”
Within minutes, she has told a complete stranger (Spencer Tracy’s Police Captain Culpeper, undercover) what is buried there and has hatched a plan to split the money with him and run away by herself. Emmaline’s standoffishness, it turns out, has always been more about maintaining a certain moral posture against everyone else than about actually doing the right thing. Everyone is a crook when the opportunity presents itself. There is none righteous.
Of course, Emmaline’s plotting is short-lived. Almost immediately, Pike finds one Otto Meyer (Phil Silvers), a schemer who had abandoned him in the desert to go after the money himself, and chases him, intending to settle the score. It’s in the middle of this sub-sub-sub-pursuit that Pike runs through the palm trees that form the big W, and he has his big epiphany.
That’s the irony that got me thinking about all of this: the two people who find the big W—Emmaline, stewing in her own self-righteousness, and Pike, furiously chasing his betrayer—are the ones who aren’t actively looking for it at the time. Sometimes, when you’re looking for something, you have to give up on it to find it.
Some kind of deep spiritual truth? I don’t know. It is first and foremost finely crafted irony. But like all good humor, it resonates with life and existence—that is, it rings true—as does the movie’s larger, climactic irony: all the men who wind up on a fire escape ten stories up, wrestling each other for the suitcase containing the stolen cash, lose what they’re striving so desperately to keep.
