Not enough people went to see Funny Farm, one of Chevy Chase’s best comedies
Chase made more popular comedies than this 1988 summer release, but few as funny

Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: Against all odds, the event-movie movie season is in full swing, so it’s time once again to look back on unsung summer blockbusters—the flops, the critical bombs, or the merely forgotten Hollywood spectacles that deserve to be rescued from the trash bin of movie history.
Funny Farm (1988)
In retrospect, the summer of 1988 looks like a turning point for Chevy Chase’s big-screen career. After spending the first half of the ’80s starring in big comedy hits like Vacation and Fletch, Chase had to face an unusually strong line-up of summer comedies in ’88 in all shapes, sizes, and styles: Coming To America, A Fish Called Wanda, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Midnight Run, and Married To The Mob had all hit theaters by the end of August. Meanwhile, Chase’s big summer movie, Funny Farm, was kneecapped by opening the same weekend as Big, and the weekend before Crocodile Dundee II. The next year, Chase put out two sequels; Christmas Vacation became a perennial, but it would be the last gasp of his peak ’80s popularity.
It’s easy enough to see why Funny Farm underperformed in the face of all that competition. The idea of New York sportswriter Andy Farmer (Chase) decamping for the country to write his novel, only to find himself ill-prepared for life in small-town Redbud, Vermont, sounds a bit like off-brand Clark Griswold. It’s also easy to imagine audiences confusing Funny Farm with the Dan Aykroyd/John Candy camping comedy The Great Outdoors, released mere weeks later—and perhaps opting for neither, though Outdoors made a bit more money. Funny Farm’s reputation may have improved marginally in the years since, but it’s still under-recognized as one of Chase’s very best movies. (For what it’s worth, both Siskel and Ebert were on board with this notion.)
A lot of city-to-country comic narratives involve slick big-city types becoming frustrated by and then endeared to a charming, communal small town—you know, the Doc Hollywood program. Andy and his wife Elizabeth (Madolyn Smith) aren’t clueless about the differences between city and country life. They’re just weak and human enough to be momentarily defeated by Redbud’s maddening quirks. Funny Farm, based on a novel by Jay Cronley (who also wrote the source material for Quick Change, another under-appreciated career highlight from an SNL alum), is especially clever in playing up how those quirks start to approach acts of aggression. A few outright cross into it, as with the Farmers’ mailman, who chucks their mail out of a speeding truck while cackling madly. (By way of explanation, the sheriff notes that the Farmers’ house is five miles off from his regular route, meaning that he’s “pretty liquored up” by that point in the day.)