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Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), Lester invited Spanish peasants to live
and set up shop right on the sets, and he allowed fruits and vegetables to
rot on the stands to attract insects (Malamud, 206). The graffiti style of
the letters in the preliminary titles of the film suggests the more ordinary
aspects and rhythms of everyday Roman life. Also, as a dramatic parallel,
the director deliberately presents scenes of plebeian Romans going about
their mundane business during the opening musical number “Comedy
Tonight.” In the final frames of the film, images of classical Roman art are
slowly covered up by cartoon flies, evoking the gritty, seedy aspects of
Roman culture, rather than the marbled luxury and imperial grandeur on
display in earlier epic films about ancient Rome. A Funny Thing endeavors
to represent non-patrician, “real” Roman life during the time of the late
Republic, and as such Lester’s film provides “essential reference material
for a full appreciation of the extent of epic stylization” (Elley, 88). Just
three years later, Federico Fellini’s Fellini Satyricon (1969) would exaggerate
the notion of colorful vulgarity and grotesque realism in its bizarre,
and even esoteric, portrayal of ancient Rome.
Several sequences in the film aim to lampoon certain typical events and
tableaus familiar from the lavish Roman spectacles of the 1950s and early
1960s, although given A Funny Thing’s more domestic setting and its
reference to the specific literary genre of Roman comedy, no one epic film
receives exclusive caricature. All the standard Roman epic scenes – decadent
banquets, military triumphs, gladiator fights – are present in A Funny
Thing, but in keeping with Lester’s desire to offer a more “realistic” glimpse
into ancient Rome, the settings are unadorned and even visibly degraded.
Lester intentionally sabotages these mock-epic scenes with his comic
genius, infusing them with verbal and visual mischief, physical pratfalls,
unsubtle jokes (“a sit-down orgy for forty”), and incongruous music that
parodies the soaring strains of epic scores (Malamud, 204). Thorne’s
musical arrangement in A Funny Thing includes some deliberate echoes of
the heavy brass fanfares and tinkling boudoir strains in Alex North’s score
for Spartacus (1960) (Sinyard, 43). At the end of the film, second-unit
director Bob Simmons puts the entire cast in a fleet of chariots, and sends
them off in a wild, high-speed chariot race around the city of Rome, in an
obvious parody of famous chariot chase scenes in earlier epic films, complete
with the requisite whipping and wheel shearing, as in the exciting
races between Marcus Vinicius and the Praetorian Guard in Quo Vadis
(1951), between Messala and Judah in Ben-Hur (1959), or between
Commodus and Livius in The Fall of the Roman Empire. Simmons prolongs
the chariot chase sequence for maximal comic effect with a lengthy
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM (1966) 171