In praise of brilliant, silly clay creatures

Watching Wallace & Gromit at work is a reminder that fun creativity matters

Every now and then, when I am making some ultra-serious pronouncement about why believers need to notice the spiritual “signals” in mass media or popular culture, someone asks me a logical question.

It usually sounds something like this: “Don’t you ever want to just sit down and watch something just to have FUN?”

The answer, of course, is “Yes.”

That happens all the time. At the same time, I would argue that there is high-grade fun, the kind that may support your family’s commitment to creativity and quality, and then there is everyday fun that is, well, just fun. I mean, I would argue that there are reasons that my family used to watch “The Philadelphia Story” over and over, while something like “You’ve Got Mail” didn’t come off the DVD shelf nearly as often.

All together now, do your best young Jimmy Stewart voice and shout: “C. K. Dexter Haven!”

Now, to get to the “fun” point. I have not seen the new Wallace & Gromit movie, “Vengeance Most Fowl” — yet. But I will, especially since it does feature a return appearance by a fiendish penguin mastermind wearing a red rubber glove on his head.

Fans of the early claymation comedy masterpieces by Nick Park and Aardman Animation will know that this is a reference to the villain in the Alfred Hitchcock-esque short feature “The Wrong Trousers.”

I will always remember the night that I took a copy of that classic — it may even have been on a VHS cassette — over to the home of a friend and faculty colleague of mine (who has a doctorate in film studies). All I will say is that, at one point, the various members of our two families, young and old, were laughing so hard that we had to hit PAUSE and get our breathing back under control.

I emailed several of those folks to ask if anyone remembered the precise moment in that feature that caused this tsunami of tears-in-our-eyes mirth. No one did, but I seem to recall that it involved that red rubber glove and Wallace shouting, “It’s YOU!”

We are talking about 5-star fun.