Today is Red Nose day and it’s fairly new to us Americans so let’s give it a brief overview. Red Nose Day aims to end child poverty by raising money and awareness for kids in the U.S. and around the world. The non-profit Comic Relief, which uses comedy to raise money for disadvantaged people, launched Red Nose Day in the United Kingdom in 1988. Since then, the day has raised more than $1 billion globally. Red Nose Day launched in the U.S. in 2015 and has since raised $60 million. That money has benefited children and young people in all 50 states, as well as 25 countries.
Now let’s talk about Patch Adams because every single time I see a red nose like this I always conjure up an image of Robin Williams wearing a big red nose in that movie. What was so wrong with this film? At guy I respect a ton, Roger Ebert loathed this film. Here’s part of his review in 1998.
“Patch Adams” made me want to spray the screen with Lysol. This movie is shameless. It’s not merely a tearjerker. It extracts tears individually by liposuction, without anesthesia. It is allegedly based on the life of a real man named Patch Adams, who I have seen on television, where he looks like Salvador Dali’s seedy kid brother. If all of these things really happened to him, they should have abandoned Robin Williams and brought in Jerry Lewis for the telethon.
And that’s just the beginning. The gist of the review is that the movie tries to be a tearjerker but doesn’t earn its tears. Ebert thinks that Patch is simply “annoying” in the movie and that it goes way over the top to promote laughter as being the best medicine.
I supposed there’s some merit to that but I also think that people were extremely “scared” of this film and didn’t want to see the real issues at hand which were suicide, death, mortality, risk, love, and plenty of other serious themes that perhaps got dropped in Patch’s humor? I don’t know. I personally felt the film did a great job of tackling serious subjects and in no way were they simply saying that laughter is the best cure but there’s no doubt that it helps. Maybe people should watch the film again since it’s 20 years old now? I don’t know. I always liked it.
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