The Laughing Man

Kartal Tibet's 1989 film is one of the attempts to move Kemal Sunal outside his comic template. Yusuf Şaplak is an ordinary man whose only difference is that he cannot stop laughing, and an idealistic young doctor decides to cure him. Framing laughter as an affliction, even a burden, plays directly against what audiences expect of Sunal: the more the man laughs, the less funny the film becomes. The idea carries a distant echo of Victor Hugo's novel The Man Who Laughs, though the film is not a literary adaptation and goes its own way. The technical limits of a production from Yeşilçam's final years are obvious and the script cannot carry the idea all the way; the effort to widen Sunal's range is still worth noting. Who it's for: viewers curious about Kemal Sunal's non-comic experiments and about late-1980s Yeşilçam production. Who it's not for: anyone expecting the usual Sunal comedy, or who will count the script's failure to deliver on its premise as a defect.