There's no denying that certain scenes in The Blues Brothers have a wild, off-the-hip humor, and that the great Aretha Franklin sings a sizzling Think and that the stunt work is spectacular. But this cop-chase-car-crash-let's-be-as-crass-as-we-can farce, where everything in sight is smashed with infantile pleasure, has a rankling edge of desperation to it. That desperation reflects the sorry state of movie comedy right now, which began with the anarchic Animal House and left a trail of forced funnies—Meatballs, 1941, Where the Buffalo Roam, Roadie, Wholly Moses et al. Crude comedy used to release us from our complacencies; now the vulgarity has lost its charm—it has become, ironically, too common. Being irreverent has no bite because young directors feel they have to be irreverent about everything: they don't have a focus, or reason, for their anarchy, and so they begin with a single idea and just toss it...