Caddyshack: It's in the Hole!

Aside from the obvious-like women are soft and pretty and men are lumpy and ugly-the biggest difference between the two sexes is that men never grow up. We get bigger, lumpier, and uglier and we have kids of our own, but we never lose that Jr. High mentality. We also never lose our love for games. Combine the stunted mental growth of males with their love for games and you end up with the wild popularity among men of a film like Caddyshack.

Caddyshack provides all the essentials for great male entertainment: sophomoric humor, memorable lines, nudity and sports-if you consider a game that can be played by men too old to control their own bladders a sport. And speaking of memorable lines, what guy wouldn't love a movie that closes with the words "Hey everybody, we're all gonna get laid!"?

The film takes place at Bushwood Country Club-an exclusive golf club filled with the usual mixture of rich snobs and lowly workers. Among the lowly workers is teenaged caddy Danny Noonan (Michael O'Keefe) hoping to snag the caddy scholarship and willing to carry clubs for the insufferably snobbish Judge Elihu Smails (Ted Knight) in order to do so.

Among a cast of crazy characters is Chevy Chase, doing his best Chevy Chase as Ty Webb, a self described "veg" who can't do anything except put a little white ball in a hole better than most humans. Ty is as wealthy as Smails and the rest, but his behavior is more in line with those who haul clubs all over the course for the rich and powerful. His sage advice to Danny: "Be the ball."

Rodney Dangerfield resurrects his career as the ultra-obnoxious but wealthy Al Czervik who delights in rankling Smails. The loutish construction magnate consistently breaks all the rules of proper country club behavior firing insults at Bushwood's stuffiest members including Mrs. Smails: "Hey baby, you must've been something before electricity."

Requisite nudity is in the capable hands-and various other parts of her anatomy-of Judge Smails' restless niece, the aptly named Lacey Underall played by Cindy Morgan. Lacey is one of those girls who learns early on that her looks will bring her anything she wants as she leaves a trail of fawning men and boys in her wake.

Sarah Holcomb, playing Danny's girlfriend Maggie O'Hooligan, is little more than a footnote to movie history having appeared in just four films, but among them Caddyshack and Animal House, both of which are now comedy classics.

But it's Bill Murray who steals the show as Carl Spackler, the demented greenskeeper who sets about destroying the golf course in quest of a gopher that is destroying the golf course. Possessed with a mind no doubt battered by years of getting "stoned to the bejeezus belt," Carl tells of his experiences caddying for the Dalai Lama ("Big hitter, the Lama."), imagines himself the "Cinderella story" of the Masters Tournament, and lusts for elderly female golfers ("Oh Mrs. Crane, you're a little monkey woman."). All this while putting together a master plan to eliminate that pesky gopher because "the only good varmint poontang is dead varmint poontang."

You'd have a difficult time finding a guy who couldn't recite word-for-word a number of lines from Caddyshack, including this one from Spackler that ranks number 92 on the American Film Institute's 100 Greatest Movie Quotes of All Time:

"Cinderella story. Outta nowhere. A former greenskeeper, now, about to become the Masters champion. It looks like a mirac...It's in the hole! It's in the hole! It's in the hole!"

Throw in puke, booger eating and a candy bar passing for a floating turd and you have all the ingredients for a film that appeals to American males and makes Caddyshack a must in every man's video library.

I don't golf-it's expensive, time-consuming, and elitist. But if golf courses were actually populated by more characters like Spackler, Webb, Czervik and especially Underall and fewer stick-up-the-ass snobs like Judge Smails, I might take up this pastime. Until then, I'll settle for laying back in my recliner, drinking a beer and enjoying Caddyshack.

So I got that goin' for me...which is nice.

Sources:

IMDb The Internet Movie Database

American Film Institute