Robin Hood: Men In Tights

"Why should the people listen to you?"

"Because, unlike some other Robin Hoods, I can speak with an English accent.”

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves came out in 1991 and earned nearly $400 million dollars. Two years later, comedy legend Mel Brooks created Robin Hood: Men in Tights, a wacky musical parody of Prince of Thieves and most other Robin Hood movies.

If you’ve seen the Disney Robin Hood or Prince of Thieves, and are also familiar with the basics of comic parody, you know exactly what to expect from this film. Cary Elwes is a silly Robin Hood. Maid Marian (Amy Yasbeck) wears a chastity belt from the Everlast brand. Prince John is played by Richard Lewis in all of his neurotic glory. Roger Rees is the Sheriff of Rottingham [stet]. Dave Chappelle (I know, I know) plays Achoo, a foreign exchange student. There are numerous cameos from Dom Deluise, Mel Brooks, Tracey Ullman, and more.

My little brother and I loved this movie when it came out. We watched it numerous times, and we would sing the “We’re men, we’re men in tights!” song to each other. When I was not yet a teenager, it was hilarious.

Rewatching it at my current advanced age, I barely laughed. In fact, I spent most of the movie trying to figure out why I wasn’t laughing. I could acknowledge that comedy was happening, but it wasn’t provoking any effect. I began to wonder if this is how sociopaths or AI robot dogs feel when they watch comedy.

These are the most frequent comic techniques I identified in the film:

• Physical comedy: for example, a Big Stick fight between Little John and Robin that became a Little Stick fight.
• Ahistoricism: modern (1990s modern)-day references, like a "maitre d'dungeon”; jokes about how white men can't jump; putting a Club on a horse; using a garage-door opener to close a portcullis.
• Breaking the fourth wall: at one point all the characters check their scripts!
• General cheesiness: my favorite was how happy the actor playing Little John, Eric Allen Kramer, looks during the “Men in Tights” song.
• Comical practical effects: for example, Robin knocking over a whole lineup of knights (really, empty suits of armor) like dominoes.
• Character types straight out of Plautus, especially the female characters.

There are also a few comedy moments that haven't aged well:

• See above, re: female characters.
• The portrayal of Muslim characters, although since this was pre-9/11, we've definitely seen worse.
• The presence of Dave Chappelle (who, annoyingly, when he’s not being cruel to trans people, is very funny).
• The big joke about Rottingham is that he has a language processing disorder.

In an attempt to parse my failure to laugh, my mind began to compare Men in Tights to Saturday Night Live. Are they both the sort of comedy that is funny in the moment but rarely ages well? That is more silly than truly funny? But then I realized that the comparison was flawed. It’s not that the two are inherently similar in content, although there’s the obvious commonality of parody. Rather, my brain generated the comparison because I associate SNL with the 90s, since I stopped watching it around 1998. My sense of what is funny has shifted in the new millennium.

Or perhaps our cultural sense of what is funny has shifted in the last 20 or so years. Maybe it’s the influence of Friends, especially Chandler’s sarcastic line delivery, or the broad diffusion of Joss Whedon’s quippiness. No matter what the cause is, I think comedy has undergone a sea change since this movie was made, and my tastes have followed the current.

Take, for example, the extended scene where the Sheriff of Rottingham tries to hire Don Giovanni (played by Dom Deluise) to “rub out” or even “kill” Robin Hood. The scene is long, much longer than it would be in a film today. It starts as a parody of The Godfather and then morphs into a full-on Brando parody (“I coulda been a contender!”). There’s a lizard prop and sight gags and two sidekicks and a lot of back-and-forth. The characters are confused by one another. That’s part of the joke, but nobody quips. There are punch lines but not punchy lines. There’s not a single ironic aside. It is all, for a lack of a better word, earnest. The only knowingness is on the part of the creator and the audience.

The quality of earnestness is part of the joke of this film: Cary Elwes’s Robin isn’t as smart as he thinks he is. He’s a pompous speechifier, a bad planner, a doofus. (Cary Elwes plays him perfectly.) He’s not a very charming Robin Hood, even though Cary Elwes is a very charming actor. The result is a comedy of silliness, or parody from which there is no relief. That’s a very different vibe than a comedy of irony, in which we get the sense that at least a few characters are in on the joke or self-aware enough to realize there’s something to knowingly quip about.

In the middle of drafting this review, after having written what you just read, I read the newest entry in Phil Christman’s Substack newsletter, in which he did a capsule review of, among other films, The Muppet Movie (1979). His perspective on watching that film in the summer of Deadpool & Wolverine is very similar to my own perspective on Men in Tights in a post-ironic age, although I think he articulates it more clearly:

Only very generous performers can make jokes this bad funny. You have to enter into it with total sincerity, as though no one has ever told this stupid joke before. The film is metatheatrical in every moment (the Muppets always have been), but it’s never knowing. Contrast it with something like Deadpool and Wolverine or whatever—a movie can joke about the fact that it’s a movie without being self-conscious about it. Those seem like the same thing but they’re not. And the movie’s sincerity absorbs all the famous people who show up for two-second cameos, from the comedians of an earlier generation (Milton Berle, Bob Hope) to the hipsters of the late ‘70s (Mel Brooks, Richard Pryor, Madeline Kahn).

The idea of sincerity–which I'd posit as the opposite of the "knowingness" I discussed above–seems like the crucial change we've undergone as a culture. We aren't comfortable with sincerity anymore, or at least mass culture doesn't provide us with much sincerity.

Mel Brooks' perspective is interesting to consider in light of the idea of sincerity as a hallmark of the bygone days of comedy. You can find a few of his zingers about the relationship of comedy to authoritarianism floating around the internet, all of which are relevant to the theme of law and justice that permeate Robin Hood stories. The most widely circulated is one of those quotes you can never find an actual source for:

But he definitely did say something similar in an interview with NPR about The Producers: “Listen, get on a soapbox with Hitler, you're gonna lose—he was a great orator. But if you can make fun of him, if you can have people laugh at him, you win.”

Most Robin Hood movies pretend to be about freedom but are really about restoring a status quo in which justice and law are in alignment with the centrist goals of the culture that produced the movie. Brooks’ willingness to leave no comedy stone unturned messes with that simple restoration of the status quo, because almost (almost!) nobody is really heroic. They're not antiheroes, either. They're just regular folks, who are both sincere and incompetent at the same time.

Sure, We don’t need a Rottingham/Godfather comparison to know the sheriff is a bad guy, but maybe we do need a reminder that nobody who runs a racket of any kind—hurting some people for the enrichment of themselves and their friends, taking power and abusing it in the quest for more—deserves to be mocked. Because “if you can have people laugh at him, you win.”

In the standard Robin Hood narrative, Robin of Loxley is a dispossessed noble elite trying to get back what was rightfully his. We root for Robin because he advocates for the poor, but his primary goal is his own well-being. He supports the disenfranchised only once he has become disenfranchised. In the Disney version, he literally leaves the region in a gilt carriage once he’s got his lands and lady back.

Men in Tights, unlike the other films, doesn’t valorize Robin Hood. As I mentioned above, he’s a doofus. He’s not brave, but heedless. He seeks fame. He doesn’t get most jokes. And he’s running a bit of a racket on his own: the opening credits are a long montage of flaming arrows landing on a village. Eventually, the villagers break the fourth wall to complain that their village always burns down when someone’s filming a Robin Hood movie.

The movie isn’t full of antiheroes, though. As mentioned, it is sincere but not ironic. And there are a few standout characters who mark a return to an improved status quo. Patrick Stewart (going full Scottish) as King Richard returns to fix things by the end of the film. Dave Chappelle's Achoo, who has been the voice of logic throughout the film, becomes the new Sheriff of Rottingham. So order is restored, even though Robin Hood is still a doofus.

Intellectually, the results are a mishmash: why poke fun at Robin Hood but not King Richard? Comically, it does work, since it’s rare to find a comic film that actually deconstructs the status quo; the genre just isn’t built for it.

Emotionally, it didn’t really work for me at my present age or in my current mood. Maybe I struggled with finding anyone to root for other than Achoo. Maybe it was the lack of real underdogs. Or maybe I'm too jaded, too cynical, or really just an AI robot dog masquerading as a human.

For that reason, I’m going to trust all of you to provide a rating: how many Friar Tuckermans out of four?

Current Ranking of Robin Hood Movies:

• Absolute Best: Disney Robin Hood
• Most Anarchic: Robin Hood (2018)
• Funniest?: Men in Tights, I guess

Josie Kafka is a full-time cat servant and part-time rogue demon hunter. (What's a rogue demon?)

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