Caddyshack (1980) Review
8.5/10
A caddy at an exclusive country club wants a college scholarship. That’s the story the script was built on, and by the time the film reached cinemas it was the least interesting thing in it.
The 8.5 is for those sequences. They’re as funny as American comedy gets and have stayed that way for forty-five years. The connective tissue between them is close to nonexistent, and the film keeps cutting to a gopher because somebody in post had to fill the gaps. What saves it from being a collection of outtakes is that the improvisation happened inside a real setting with a real argument. The club is a class system with a dress code, and every one of the comedians is playing his own position in it.
I laugh harder at this movie than at almost any comedy of its era, and I also get restless in it. Whenever Dangerfield, Murray, Knight or Chase is on screen I’m happy, and whenever the film remembers it’s supposed to be about Danny Noonan, I start counting the minutes until one of them comes back.
The Plot Was the First Casualty
Harold Ramis was directing his first film. Douglas Kenney and Brian Doyle-Murray wrote it with him, drawing on Doyle-Murray’s own years caddying, and the original script was a coming of age story about Danny Noonan and the caddies.
What happened on set was that Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield, Ted Knight and Bill Murray were all funnier than the script. Ramis followed the funny. Scenes were extended, invented, or reshaped around whatever was working that day, and the Noonan story kept getting pushed toward the edges.
Murray was on the film for a handful of days and his part barely existed on the page. The scene where Carl narrates his own imagined Masters victory while decapitating flowers was improvised from a couple of lines of direction. It’s the most quoted thing in the film.
The Masters scene is my favorite thing in the picture. Murray takes a couple of lines of direction and a row of flowers and builds a whole sports broadcast out of nothing, and I think it’s the best argument ever made for letting a comedian loose on a set.
By the edit there was no throughline left to protect. Ramis and his editor built the release version out of the strongest material and used the gopher as connective tissue. That’s why the animal appears to be in a different film. It is.
Douglas Kenney had come out of the National Lampoon and had produced Animal House two years earlier, and the working method here was the same one: hire people who are funny, point a camera at them, sort it out later. It produced two enormous hits and it produced two films with almost no second act.
Improvisation produces moments, and structure produces momentum. A film can survive on moments alone if the moments are extraordinary, and Caddyshack is the proof, but it pays for it in every stretch between them. If you’re going to follow the funny, know what you’re trading. What Ramis gave up is the audience’s investment in Danny. That’s why the ending focuses on nobody in particular and the film simply stops.
The transferable lesson is about knowing which element is essential before you start cutting. Ramis correctly identified that nobody was coming for Danny Noonan. He was right, and what the film loses in shape it more than recovers in what it kept.
Four Comedians, Four Registers
The reason the film holds together at all is that the four principals are doing different things and never collide.
Ted Knight plays Judge Smails as a man defending a hierarchy he believes is natural law. He’s the only one playing it entirely straight, and the film depends on him. Without a real snob at the top, everybody else is just clowning in a field. Knight is the one I’d single out. Everybody remembers Dangerfield and Murray, and I think Knight gets far too little credit for giving them a wall to bounce off. His slow boil at Czervik is funnier to me than half the punchlines in the film.
Rodney Dangerfield’s Al Czervik is the invasion. New money, loud clothes, a boat parked in the wrong place, and a stand-up rhythm imported wholesale from the nightclub stage. He’s not really acting and it doesn’t matter, because the character is a man who refuses to modulate.
Chevy Chase plays Ty Webb as pure detachment, a rich man with no stake in anything, and Bill Murray plays Carl as a man operating several rooms away from reality. Four incompatible comic modes, and the club makes them all coherent.
The film also knows better than to put them in a room together. Chase and Murray share a single scene, improvised late in the shoot, and it’s the only time the picture lets two of these tones touch. Keeping them apart is the closest thing the release version has to a structural decision.
The Club Is the Only Structure That Survives
Everything funny in this film is about position. Who may use which door, who may speak to whom, what a caddy is permitted to say to a member, which pool the wrong sort of person has just entered.
That’s why the improvisation didn’t disintegrate. The performers could invent freely because the setting told them what their character wanted and who outranked them. Dangerfield gets laughs by violating rules that the film has established visually in the first ten minutes.
The dress code, the locker room, the caddy shack itself, the members’ dining room: each is a boundary, and the film’s best jokes are all boundary violations. The candy bar in the swimming pool is the purest example. Nothing about it is verbal.
Take the country club away and this material has nowhere to happen. A class comedy needs a class system rendered concretely enough that the audience can see the line being crossed. Golf helps more than it looks. The sport comes with its own etiquette, its own silences and its own dress rules, so the film inherits a whole apparatus of things a person can do wrong without having to invent any of it.
A strong setting is a substitute for a strong plot in comedy, and only in comedy. It supplies what plot normally supplies. That’s a reason for these people to be in the room and a reason for the friction between them.
Build the hierarchy in visual terms before anybody jokes about it. The audience has to know who’s allowed where, and they should learn it by watching instead of being told, so the first violation reads instantly. Then let your characters want things that the hierarchy forbids. Every one of the four leads wants something the club won’t give them, and none of them wants the same thing.
What the Gopher Is Doing There
The gopher is animatronic, it’s not remotely convincing, and it’s in the film because the film needed something to cut to. Warner Bros. wanted more of it after previews. Ramis shot more. It’s easy to treat this as the film’s embarrassment and most people do. I’d put it differently. The gopher is the visible seam, the place where you can see the picture being held together, and it tells you exactly how much of the release version was assembled after the fact.
It also does one job well. The Carl and gopher material gives Murray a scene partner who can’t upstage him. That lets him build his sequences at whatever length he wants. The dynamite finale is nonsense and it’s also the only ending the film could have had. Watch it once with attention to how often the gopher appears immediately before or after a tonal jump. It’s almost always covering a transition the script no longer supported. The one thing it costs the film is a tone. A picture about class friction at a country club doesn’t need a cartoon antagonist, and every minute spent underground is a minute the human material isn’t on screen. I’d cut the gopher in half without a second thought. It’s the one element that makes the film feel cheap, and every time it pops up I’m reminded how much better the human scenes are.
Why the Lines Outlived the Film
Caddyshack cost somewhere between five and six million dollars and made about sixty. That’s a solid return and not an extraordinary one. What’s extraordinary is the afterlife.
Dialogue from this film became common property in a way that very few comedies manage. Golfers quote it on courses, people who have never seen it quote it, and the quoting persists across generations that have no memory of Ted Knight. The mechanism is that the best lines are detachable. Carl’s Dalai Lama story, the Masters narration, Czervik’s insults, all of them work standing alone with no setup, because they were improvised as standalone bits by performers used to working a room. That’s the compensation for the broken structure. A tightly plotted comedy produces lines that need their context. A loosely assembled one built from stand-up instincts produces lines that travel, and traveling turned a modest hit into a permanent one.
Quotability and structure pull against each other. A line that needs three scenes of setup will always be funnier in position and useless outside it. A line that works cold will travel and will do less work for your story. Decide which you’re buying. Neither is wrong. Know that a script optimized for detachable lines will feel episodic, because episodic is what that optimization produces. If you want both, put the detachable lines in the mouths of characters who are peripheral to the plot. Carl and Czervik can say anything because the story doesn’t depend on them, and that freedom is why their material is the material people kept.
Should you watch Caddyshack?
Yes, with the right expectation. This is a record of four very funny people improvising inside a setting that gave them something to push against, and about five of those sequences are permanent. It gets an 8.5 from me because those sequences are as good as screen comedy gets, and it stops short of a 9 because the plot collapses and the gopher gets far more screen time than it earns.
