There were three distinct stages in my consideration of the sui generis Cinerama feature from 1963, “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World.” The movie’s gimmick was that it collected more comedians and comic actors in a single Hollywood production than has ever been featured before, which meant, naturally, that it had to be the funniest movie ever….or so we were told.

I first saw IAMMMMW at Boston’s Cinerama Theater when I was 12. It was the first of the new, improved, seamless Cinerama features, which meant it was inferior to the original format, which wrapped around the audience. There were few effects in the movie that took advantage of the giant screen, either. But like all boys under 20 or so, I thought IAMMMMW was very amusing and a lot of fun. Girls didn’t get it, for the most part, and that has never changed. It’s physical comedy and slapstick throughout, and often cruel slapstick. This is a real male-female divide that appears to be timeless.

I was also, even back then, an omnivore of popular culture. Seeing so many familiar comedy icons of the era (and the previous one) in one movie was a thrill; of course, that was one of the main goals of the film. Sid Caeser, Milton Berle, Jimmy Durante, Jonathan Winters, Phil Silvers, Buddy Hackett, Mickey Rooney and more, with well-conceived cameos by the likes of Jack Benny, Jerry Lewis and Don Knotts—in the waning period of Hollywood all-star cast spectaculars, the idea of doing one with comedians was irresistible.

I saw the movie a second time in my thirties, and was shocked how different my reaction to it was. To be fair, I recalled many of the sequences that would have been funnier as a surprise, but the film seemed over-long, abrasive and, most surprisingly, sad. The subplot in which Spencer Tracy plays an aging police captain who becomes disillusioned with his professional and family life to the extent that he tries to steal the money that has set off an insane race among the assorted loonies is more tragedy than comedy, and, oddly, Tracy didn’t play any of his role for laughs. Grace, my wife, hated the movie in 1963 and hated it just as much when I made her watch it again with me.

Well, Grace is gone, and when the movie popped up two days ago on Paramount Plus when I was bored, I decided to watch it again, if I could stand it. I was shocked again, but for a different reason. Not only did I enjoy the film, I realized it was both a fascinating ethics movie and a cultural treasure.

First, the cultural part: the movie was released in 1963, right before the assassination of President Kennedy officially ended the cultural Fifties and sent us down the long, dark (but exciting!) tunnel into the chaotic Sixties. I could teach a course about the evolving attitudes and values of American culture around IAMMMMW. The men have complete dominion over the women in the film who are, with the exception of the loud, menacing stereotypical monster mother-in-law played by Ethel Merman, submissive and weak. There is only one female comedienne in the whole, three hour movie, Zasu Pitts, who is barely visible as the operator in the police station. There are two dutiful wives (Dorothy Provine and Edie Adams), both of whom are dragged along into the wild chase and repeated criminal activity by their husbands, with the women occasionally protesting or urging their husbands to be careful. Early in the film, a police secretary played by now-forgotten starlet Madlyn Rhue is ordered by Spencer Tracy to make coffee, and the score switches into seductive music as we see her walking from behind as Tracy and other cops ogle. It’s completely gratuitous, cheap and not funny, but movies and TV shows had such sequences all the time in that era: nobody criticized it or thought anything was wrong with it.

Even though the movie is full of crowd scenes and workplaces, only three blacks appear, and only two who would fit the description of “comedian.” One of them is, tellingly, Nick Stewart, the Steppin Fetchit look-alike who played slow talking, slow walking, slow thinking “Lightnin'” on TV’s “The Amos ‘n’ Andy Show.” The other is Jack Benny’s radio and TV show sidekick, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, who plays a cab driver. There were no star black comedians in mainstream movies in 1963: that was the year Bill Cosby put out his first comedy album.

The movie delivers on its mission of presenting an astounding spectrum of the stars who made America laugh before, during and after World War II, and each one is worthy of a seminar. Milton Berle and Sid Caesar were stars of two comedy-variety shows that made TV a cultural force. There is Stan Freberg, just sitting in the background on one scene, saying nothing: he revolutionized advertising, comedy records and satire. Mickey Rooney, of course, is a cultural chapter all by himself, with many links to the movie’s star, Spencer Tracy: they made “Boy’s Town” a phenomenon when Rooney was a teen; Mickey played “Young Tom Edison” while Spencer played the man in one of the great biopics. Ethel Merman made relatively few movies, but was still near her peak in 1963, as big a Broadway star and Tracy was a movie star. Jerry Lewis, who was also at peak popularity in 1963, does a remarkable human cartoon bit as a crazy driver: if you have forgotten the kind of energy he generated when he wasn’t an old, angry has-been hanging on too long, that brief cameo is a revelation.

There’s Buster Keaton…the Three Stooges…Joe E. Brown…there’s Jim Backus, the voice of “Mister Magoo”…Carl Reiner, after “Your Show of Shows” and at the beginning of “The Dick Van Dyke Show”…and Doodles Weaver, the demented genius of Spike Jones’ “City Slickers” (and Sigourney Weaver’s uncle!)…Jesse White, the Maytag repair man, Edward Everett Horton, and Sterling Holloway, later famous as the voice of Winnie the Pooh. The whole movie is literally kicked off by Jimmy Durante as the old crook who tells a group of drive-by witnesses to his fatal car crash where he’s hidden $350,000, and who kicks a bucket in his death spasm. George Burns, Judy Garland, Bob Hope, Ernie Kovacs, Stan Laurel, Groucho Marx, Jackie Mason, Red Skelton and Ed Wynn were supposed to be in the movie as well, but for various reasons (Kovacs died) were not.

So many memories; so much 0ur culture has virtually forgotten. All of the stars, co-stars, bit players and cameos in IAMMMMW are dead and irreplaceable, all but Barrie Chase, later Fred Astaire’s dancing partner in several TV specials, who is the lone survivor. She plays a frozen-faced Twist partner to typically wild and weird Dick Shawn, a few years before he entered comedy Valhalla for his indescribable portrayal of actor LSD, who plays Adolf Hitler in “The Producers'” “Springtime for Hitler.”

Yikes, this is already too long, just like the movie. I’m going to have to discuss the ethics issues raised by the movie in Part II…