Funny Cow by Tony Pitts - 9 out of 10

Funny Cow by Tony Pitts
9 out of 10


Funny Cow seems to be the rare sort of motion picture where the dramatic events are just as intense as the comedic scenes.

It reminds this cinephile of Martin Scorsese's King of Comedy, where Rupert Pupkin aka divine Robert De Niro kidnapps Jerry Langford aka Jerry Lewis, although everything else is different, the two films share a common sense of dramatic tension...we laugh, but the situation is as tragic, of not more, as in a horror movie where blood is splashed all over and thus diminishes the impact of the Evil Dead or whatever.

Maxine Peake is outstanding in a very complex, challenging main role of Funny Cow, a comedian that has been abused, beaten as a child and then by her partner, choosing a career where she has to face opposition from sexist, misogynistic men.
Her father, excellent Stephen Graham, is a simple minded, brutish monster who beats the girl who was probably no older than five, when she is not making the cup of tea he had ordered.

After he dies, the mother becomes an alcoholic and only much later, in a conversation with the daughter that will have come to take her on the coast, where she would buy a house for her, would talk about the ways she had neglected, inflicted pain on the abandoned girl...not literally thrown out, but spiritually, psychologically.
Alas, when the heroine is an adult, she finds, perhaps for psychological reasons, because she had been so traumatized that she is confused, she is looking for the wrong type of person,a partner that is just as awful as her late father.

Bob beats her.
When she says she wants to take part in a talent search interview, he threatens he would break her nose if she does.

And when she returns, he does as he had promised.
At the interview, the protagonist is so intimated she does not utter a sound when she is offered the chance.

Nevertheless, she has the chance to listen to Lenny aka wonderful Alun Armstrong and she decides she wants to be a comedian.
Funny would use some of his material, with jokes like...there was a man at the door...do you believe in free speech?
Yes
Then I can use your telephone 

Some are what would be called racist, maybe, only it is the English who is presumable mocked, so if you make jokes on your community, that may be ok.
There was the dyslexic man who worshipped Satan and he fell for Santa.

Confucius said that man who lost watch in toilet has shitty time...
The last said just as the personage commits suicide, with the toilet chain...