Lindsay Johns

Trading Places at 30 – one of the funniest films of all time

For my generation at least, this is clearly a classic and a touchstone

Eddie Murphy, Jamie Lee Curtis and Dan Aykroyd in Trading Places Photo: Paramount / The Kobal Collection

Next month marks the 30th anniversary of the release of what is, in my opinion, one of the funniest films of all time: Trading Places.

Starring comedic demigods Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd, together with Jamie Lee Curtis and Denholm Elliot, this 1983 critical and commercial success is an amusing and trenchant satire on race, class, money and the whole American dream. When a destitute street hustler Billy Ray Valentine (Murphy) unknowingly swaps places with pampered, prissy Wall Street commodities broker Louis Winthorpe III (Ackroyd) and takes over his privileged life as part of a one-dollar bet — a nurture versus nature scientific experiment conducted by the fabulously wealthy yet morally repugnant Duke brothers for whom Winthorpe works — the results are both hilarious and deeply moving.

Directed by John Landis and set in Philadelphia and New York over the Christmas and New Year period, the film has a very specific race- and class-based plot, but at the same time its humour is universal and relevant to all. Both in America and in Britain, Trading Places has become, for my generation, a cultural touchstone, a cinematic monument to jocular genius that we should celebrate.

Whether it’s immortal lines such as the one proffered by Billy Ray when boasting of his martial arts prowess in jail: ‘Karate men bruise on the inside!’; the sight of an atrociously blacked-up Dan Ackroyd as the Rastafarian Lionel Joseph, with his lilting, faux-Jamaican patois spoken amid thick clouds of ganja smoke; or Eddie Murphy as Nenge Mboko, an exchange student from Cameroon, wishing fellow passengers on the train ‘Merry New Year!’ in that stentorian, baritone voice, comedic gems abound.

Yet amid the humour there is much wisdom. In advice culled straight from the Delphic oracle and Polonius’ advice to Laertes, Coleman the valet says to Billy Ray on the eve of his first day working for the Dukes: ‘Just be yourself, sir.

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