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I may have given the impression that I think a movie has to be funny to be entertaining, or entertaining to be good, which is absolutely not true. There was certainly very little funny in 3 1/2 hours of "Schindler's List" and I don't really consider watching innocent Jews being tortured and killed and treated like animals "entertainment" either (in fact, I usually label both "List" and "Saving Private Ryan" as "anti-entertainment" -- you weren't supposed to be "entertained" [as such] by it, you were supposed to be horrified and eventually uplifted by it).
However, I do think a good movie has to hold one's interest and captivate, at least in correlation to the subject matter. If one doesn't think Andy Kaufman's routine was funny, and the entire first 90 minutes of his biopic is dedicated to his routine, then one probably won't find the first 90 minutes of his biopic to be very entertaining. Maybe you did get the "depth" idea from me, though I never said anything about it, because there are a lot of other comedies that work on other levels throughout so that even people who don't the type of sense of humor that picture demands will still get a great deal of enjoyment out of it. The last two years, for example, we had "Life is Beautiful," and "The Full Monty." "LIB's" comedy was generally too silly (Chaplan-ish) for my taste, and I just plain out wasn't into "FM's" off-beat British stuff. But I still thought they were great films, and they both offered me a lot more than just a string of comedic sequences (which, for the most part, weren't my cup of tea) and great acting performances, with a great deal of interesting, captivating nobility factors interwoven between the humor.
As importantly, each had a traditional introduction-dilemma-climax-solution-type plot. Nazis take Jewish father and son off to concentration camp and father does what he can to make sure son isn't horrified by their ordeal. A number of unemployed men can't get jobs and concoct a crazy scheme to make money by stripping but run into trouble along the way. What happens in "MOTM"? We see Andy Kaufman do a lot of bizarre stuff in an attempt to be a big star. Then suddenly one day, out of the blue, he gets cancer and dies. That's pretty much it. The "dillema" doesn't really show up until the end of the movie, by which point people who REALLY dislike what they saw in the first 90 minutes thinks he deserves it!
This is not to say I believe every movie must fit into the "dilemma" formula in order to be good -- to ME. What the hell was "Clerks" but a comedic movie about nothing? But I found the comedic antics in "Clerks" to be funny, so it entertained me. I can certainly imagine that a person who doesn't find the type of humor in that movie to be funny wouldn't have a positive word to say about it at all! (The big difference between the two is that apparently a lot more people find the humor in "Clerks" to be funny than the humor in "Man on the Moon." Somehow I doubt that a "Clerks" sketch would be voted off SNL as Kaufman was.)
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