Category Archives: Sizzlin’ Summer

Sizzlin’ Summer of Side-Splitters 2025: Stuart Saves His Family (1995)

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June 16-22 SNL Week: Saturday Night Live is celebrating 50 years on the air, can NBC last for another 50 years??

How does a character who was in short sketches get to be in a movie? Ask nearly everyone in the 1990s who had a recurring Saturday Night Live character.

Al Franken created and played the character Stuart Smalley, basing it on people he met in Al-Anon as he went through it to support his wife. First appearing on February 9, 1991, Stuart shared on his public access show how he was a member of many 12-step groups. He became popular enough to have a book, I’m Good Enough, I’m Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!: Daily Affirmations by Stuart Smalley. This led Harold Ramis to get with Franken and push for a film.

By the way, in Live From New York—an Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, Franken says that he wanted Mike Myers to play the part, but when they did the read-through, it only worked when he did it, as he wrote it in his voice. Robert Smigel suggested he do the part. He also admitted that he would always be around when Lorne Michaels picked the sketches to make sure Stuart got on.

In the film, Stuart loses his show. He has to come back home for a funeral, facing off with his dysfunctional family of brother Donnie (Vincent D’Onofrio), sister Jodie (Lesley Boone), mom (Shirley Knight), and dad (Harris Yulin). There’s also a battle over where the body will be buried between Dad and his cousins, Ray (Joe Flaherty) and Denise (Robin Duke). By the end, you will be sure of why Stuart has needed all of this therapy, but at least he becomes famous for his self-help and ends up with a good friend, Julia (Laura San Giacomo, always perfect).

Sadly, despite Gene Siskel calling it “smart and hip” and Roger Ebert calling out that “it has more courage than a lot of serious films,” it made under a million at the box office. Stuart would return one more time to the show and cried, yelling, “You didn’t want ‘funny and poignant. You wanted Dumb….and Dumber….and Dumber….and Dumber!” He would also return in 2004 when Al Gore hosted.

This movie’s failure did exactly what Stuart worked to fix. It put Al Franken into a depression. At least it made more than It’s Pat, which grossed $60,000. It’s a sweet film with a good heart and way better than it should be.

Sizzlin’ Summer of Side-Splitters 2025

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Last summer, I did the The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024 posted by Klon. Now, I’m getting ready for his next summer list.

Here’s what Klon has to say:

“Use the hashtag #ssoss25 for your lists. Everyone that completes the challenge gets a free mystery zine!!

Have you ever “lightened up?” I haven’t. I’m a gloomy glower-er but my doctor and my therapist and the kid at the lemonade stand have all told me (within the last 36 hours) to LIGHTEN UP. I dunno, I must be giving off BAD VYBES. The summer is gonna be unyieldingly sizzlin here in the American south so let’s cool off, lighten up, slip on our “tea shades,” loosen our ties, kick off our shoes, have a do-si-do around the ol dancefloor, drop the kids off at the pool and have a few HAR-DEE YUKS whydontwe???

I tried to make the categories pretty broad so that you could have a list you would look forward to completing. At first it was gonna be all boner comedy categories, but I’m sensitive as shit so I figured that wasn’t fair to people with erectile dysfunction. If you have trouble finding stuff you want to see in one category then just make up your own category (except the CHUCK VINCENT category, you’ve gotta watch a Chuck movie).”

Here’s the breakdown:

  • June 16-22 SNL Week: Saturday Night Live is celebrating 50 years on the air, can NBC last for another 50 years??
  • June 23-29 Cat Week: Cats! They’re earth’s funniest creatures (sorry chimps, you’re psychos)
  • June 30- July 6 Puke Week!: Throwing up isn’t very funny, but making your internet friends watch a puke movie is!
  • July 7-13 Teen Movie Hell Week: From the book description on the Bazillion Points website: All-seeing author Mike “McBeardo” McPadden (Heavy Metal Movies) passes righteous judgment over the entire (teen movie) genre, one boobs-and-boner opus at a time. In more than 350 reviews and sidebars, Teen Movie Hell lays the crucible of coming-of-age comedies bare, from party-hearty farces such as The Pom-Pom Girls, Up the Creek, and Fraternity Vacation to the extreme insanity exploding all over King Frat, Screwballs, The Party Animal, and Surf II: The End of the Trilogy.
  • July 14-20  Vanity Project Week: “…it might be said that the specific remedy for vanity is laughter, and that the one failing that is essentially laughter is vanity.” Are these products of passionate and industrious independent filmmakers OR outrageous glimpses into the inner workings of self-obsessed maniacs??
  • July 21-27 Eddie Griffin Week: This motherfucker is funny!
  • July 28 – Aug 3 Screwball Comedy: Just imagine, the Great Depression is raging and you’re getting less than a fin a week at the rubber boiling factory but it only costs two bits to go to the movies all day so let’s watch some quick-talkin dames match wits with some dopey joes!
  • Aug 4-10  Stoner Comedy Week: I don’t gas reefers anymore, but I love it when people in movies do!
  • Aug 11-17 Whoopi Goldberg Week: She’s become a corny tv lady these days, but let’s not forget that at her peak Whoopi was one of the funniest people alive.
  • Aug 18-24 indie comix week: When I was a kid I used to read Mad Magazine and Cracked, so when I got a little older it didn’t take much convincing to pick up Eightball and Hate. I’m an OG in the “complaining about superheroes” game and my scars were anointed on the Comics Journal message board!
  • Aug 25-31 Natasha Lyonne Week: There’s a new season of her weirdo mystery of the week coming out (I can’t remember the name rn, you can look it up) and she’s been steadily delivering chuckles for decades now.
  • Sept 1-7 John Waters Best of the Year Week: To be fair, these movies aren’t ALL funny, but JOHN WATERS is funny. He’s become more of a writer and public commentator these days, but he helps keep the arthouse from taking itself too seriously with his annual top ten lists while celebrating the comically serious.
  • Sept 8-14 Sketchy Comedy Week: “…plotless satires, many of which were only excuses for drug humor or gratuitous nudity sprinkled with the cheapest of gags. The typical form was a channel changing structure which would go from one sketch to the next under the premise that this was just another night at home watching the ol boob tube. The medium is the message, baby!”
  • Sept 15-21 Mockumentary Week: “Ladies and gentleman, by way of introduction, this is a film about trickery – and fraud. About lies. Tell it by the fireside or in a marketplace or in a movie. Almost any story is almost certainly some kind of – lie. But not this time. No, this is a promise. During the next hour, everything you hear from us is really *true* and based on solid facts.”
  • Sept 22-28 Chuck Vincent Week: No one did it like Chuck! He’s the unsung king of Up All Night comedy, a queer director making the straightest romcoms but throwing in muscle studs and drag queens. His films explore the concept of romance from almost every angle – he loved love!

You can see the Letterboxd list here.