It doesn’t make sense, but Austin Powers is somehow still very funny

By the time Austin Powers in Goldmember came out in 2002, I was begging for the franchise to die. If I had to hear one more person say “Yeah, baby, yeah” or “Oh behave” I was going to throw myself into the sea.

Every catchphrase and premise that worked in the first movie had been run so deeply into the ground I was starting to wonder if Austin Powers had ever been funny in the first place.

I was wrong. The Austin Powers movies are hilarious.

Revisiting the trilogy now, 25 years after the release of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, I couldn’t imagine laughing at any of these movies. My current tastes in comedy tend towards weirder TV series such as I Think You Should Leave or Toast of London and Austin Powers still had an aura of staleness around it. A parody of ’60s spy movies that spawned cynical sequels? I don’t think so.

Well, I was wrong. These movies are hilarious.

The first one is the best by far (I had forgotten how great the soundtrack is) but they’re all pretty good, stuffed with jokes that still play well (and plenty that do not).

Honestly, I’m not sure how this is even possible and you should know that I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea. But there’s no denying it – when Austin Powers first says, “Yeah, baby, yeah” and “Oh behave”, it’s funny.

Watched with fresh eyes, it’s clear that these are simply very strange catchphrases for a “British spy” to have. They come out of nowhere and make no sense and it’s kind of wonderful.

Mike Myers’ mugging and bumbling (“Allow myself to introduce… myself”) is charming. His overconfidence in his horny-making ability is bizarre and outrageous, especially as he lowers himself into a hot tub while holding his nipples – and then farts.

Dr Evil has lots of great lines (“We’re not so different you and I”) and the story he tells of his childhood in group therapy is incredible (“In the spring we would make meat helmets”).

And then there is what might be the greatest movie toilet joke of all time, rivalling Frank Drebin’s extended, mic’d up urination scene in Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad. I remembered it. I knew it was coming. And it still destroyed me.

The sequels – Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and Goldmember – suffer from the franchise laziness of the era. Repeated jokes and scenarios, weak cultural references, product placement, forced emotionality. But there are still a good number of laughs. The silhouette bits in both are incredibly weird, gross and amazing.

I never could have imagined laughing at the Austin Powers films when I revisited the trilogy.

The third movie isn’t all that inspired, but it’s still fun. And Tom Cruise is in it. So is Gwyneth Paltrow. And Steven Spielberg. It’s stilted and a bit cheap, but also delightful somehow.

Of course, if you’re going to rewatch comedies from the ’90s – or maybe even from five years ago – in addition to jokes that aren’t interesting or surprising from a current perspective, you’re also going to run into a bunch of casual sexism and racism.

In the first movie, Vanessa (Elizabeth Hurley) is an accomplished agent who’s appropriately dismissive of Austin’s over-the-top brand of flirtation, but it isn’t long before she’s falling madly in love with him and I didn’t buy it for one second. In the sequels, Felicity Shagwell (Heather Graham) and Foxy Cleopatra (Beyonce[?!]) aren’t given too much to do other than look good and fall for Austin.

But when rewatching an old comedy, you have to give it some room to be a product of its time. Well, you don’t have to. But it’ll help.

It’ll also help if you ignore Will Ferrell in brownface as Mustafa. Austin too. And the decidedly unwelcome Asian stereotyping that pops up from time to time.

Austin punching Basil Exposition’s mother because she’s “mannish” isn’t great. Fat Bastard has that fantastic Myers Scottish accent, but the fat jokes are mean. The humiliation of Mini-Me (Verne Troyer) is uncomfortable. But he is also a tremendous fighter.

This stuff certainly doesn’t hold up, but the movies still manage to be a good time and that is thanks to Myers, who had an incredible run in the ’90s with the Wayne’s Worlds, So I Married an Axe Murderer and the first two Austin Powers movies.

For whatever reason, Myers hasn’t returned to that form in the current century (unless you count the Shrek movies and holiday TV specials, which I don’t). But as time goes on, we remember the good stuff and forget about misfires like The Cat in the Hat and The Love Guru.

’90s Mike Myers looms especially large given the almost total absence of comedy films being released in theatres today. If you want to watch a funny movie, you’re doing it at home. And as much as there are new comedies that I love – and God knows the theatre-going experience can be a mixed bag – keeping comedies on streaming platforms makes it seem as though the culture doesn’t value them. It makes them seem small.

So for me, enjoying the Austin Powers movies has nothing to do with nostalgia for the ’90s. I wouldn’t want to do that decade over again (unless I could make a lot of different choices). But I wish we still had big comedies with big laughs.

Or, as Austin Powers would say, “We need more big comedies with big laughs.”

(It’s a lesser-known catchphrase. From the DVD Extras.)

Nick Bhasin is a writer in Sydney. His debut novel I Look Forward to Hearing from You will be published by Penguin Random House Australia in June.

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