God must be Crazy

David Duneman

Expository Writing

Joe Serio

2/17/13

Move To The Kalahari!

            I must say, when I first started watching “The Gods Must Be Crazy” I thought I was watching a documentary, and I thought I was watching the wrong movie. But I kept watching. Once the film reached the section on describing American civilization in Xi’s perspective I could finally tell it was a comedic film. The laughter first starts as a comparison between the heavenly Kalahari Desert, where Xi and his people live, and the pointlessness of the American civilizations. When an unidentified flying object drops an unidentified hard object, the Coca-Cola bottle, the Kalahari people make good use of it. Slowly but surely the bottle turns the Kalahari people against each other, every person wants to be using the bottle all the time. Before the bottle came, the Kalahari people didn’t know hate, possession, or fighting against each other, but the bottle brought those traits out in them. The bottle represents the evil, useless products people make that we just can’t seem to live without, such as Coca-Cola. I thought the film was going to be based on the compare and contrast humor that was established at the beginning of the movie, but after Xi leaves the Kalahari to throw the bottle off the Earth, the film takes a surprising left turn that seems to give the movie more of a story line to follow. With the entrance of Andrew Steyn, the entrance of the slap-stick humor comes into play as well. Mr. Steyn is a manure collector, as he hilariously tells Kate, and that is just about the funniest job description one could possibly have. This film did the slap-stick style very well. They had that cheerful, cartoonish music that cues you to laugh, and they also have the fast paced movie style that helps make slap-stick what it is. The main slap-stick humor occurs with Andrew’s Jeep that doesn’t have working brakes, so he has to stop it some other way. There’s always a fence in his way while he’s driving, so that he has to get out of the car, open the fence, and by this time the car is already rolling away backwards, and then he has to drive past the fence, get out of the car, close the fence, and then run after his Jeep saying “AyeAyeAyeAyeAye”. This was a very humorous gag that seemed to be prominent throughout the film. The slap-stick style of humor also occurs when Andrew is around women, Kate in particular. As Andrew says, his brain “turns off” when he’s around women, and it’s a “psychological phenomenon”. So Andrew is always tripping up when Kate is around. The two also overlap at one point, when Andrew has to get Kate out of a tree she’s stuck in, whilst he is also trying to get his Jeep out of the river with the electric pulley. He is too busy attending to Kate so his car is pulled almost all the way up the tree, and is hanging off the ground. Andrew had so much misfortune, that he had to get the girl at the end. This was an interesting movie and I would recommend it to anyone.