Grow­ing up, I was never pre­vented (nor deprived) from watch­ing “clas­sic” Hol­ly­wood films, includ­ing those of the cult, hor­ror and Tech­ni­color vari­ety. They were always there, even if some weren’t major box office blowouts, because at least one per­son in my imme­di­ate and extended fam­ily had a VHS copy stashed somewhere.

Movies like The Blues Broth­ers, Ani­mal House and Fast Times at Ridge­mont High showed me how two bum­bling jazz mus­cians, a group of frat boys and premis­cu­ous teens could in the end — despite zany onscreen antics — come together and learn from their expe­ri­ences, despite con­flict and misunderstanding.

On the other end of the movie watch­ing spec­trum hor­ror films like Night­mare on Elm Street, Crit­ters, Ghoulies and Evil Dead II con­vinced me that scary movies could be funny, even if the creepy ghoul or slim-spewing mon­ster wasn’t exactly per­form­ing slapstick.

Then there was The Jerk (1979) with Steve Mar­tin (one of my Dad’s cher­ished movies), a movie that defined — at least to me at that par­tic­u­lar point in time — that a movie could be silly and knee-slapping funny and maybe a bit sentimental.

The movie begins with the fol­low­ing line:

Huh? I am not a bum. I’m a jerk. I once had wealth, power, and the love of a beau­ti­ful woman. Now I only have two things: my friends and… uh… my ther­mos. Huh? My story? Okay…

It’s hard to imag­ine any­thing worth watch­ing would begin like that, but if it stars Steve Mar­tin, there’s no sec­ond guess­ing really, it’s just going to work and not only that but it’ll be funny if not hilarious.

The Jerk tells the story of Navin John­son, born a “poor black child”, who’s actu­ally a very white man who hap­pened to be raised by a South­ern black fam­ily. In fact, the tagline of the film was “From rags to riches… to rags.” and that per­fectly explains the over­all story arch of this movie.

The truth of the mat­ter is Nathan, no mat­ter how hard he tries or thinks oth­er­wise, is not all there men­tally, in fact, he’s six plates short of a full course meal. Yet, this sim­ple minded man can be sym­pa­thized with because not only is naive he’s also an endear­ing indi­vid­ual because of his innocense.

While The Jerk has plenty of hilar­i­ous sequences with our goofy pro­ta­gan­ist, there’s one scene in par­tic­u­lar that just busts me up even to this day. The scene, in which a sniper is try­ing to elim­i­nate Navin, is funny because every time Navin is shot at he’s near a group of cans of some sort and thinks the sniper is shoot­ing at the cans.

Mar­tin (as Navin) exclaims, “He hates the cans! Stay away from the cans!” as he ducks and dives to get away from them. It’s com­pletely nutty and yet fits within the con­text of the story. Why would Navin even con­sider that he’d be a tar­get? It would have to be cans and a man with a deep hatred for them.

This scene, among many, is one of the rea­sons The Jerk has reached cult clas­sic sta­tus and why it remains one of my favorite come­dies of all time, right up there with other clas­sic films that will always remain with me and influ­ence my own per­son­al­ity and out­look on life.