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One of Austin Powers’ best jokes concerns Dr. Evil’s absurd backstory, which takes aim at a common storytelling pitfall in the spy genre.
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery became a classic largely because of its instantly quotable lines, which became catchphrases almost as soon as the movie opened. But some of the funniest dialogue goes well beyond a mere quip and helps demonstrate why the Austin Powers movies work so well. Michael Myers targeted James Bond as the subject of his satire and, more specifically, the subgenre of the swinging ’60s spy movies that followed in 007’s wake. They provided some choice topics for a send-up, which Myers and Austin Powers took full advantage of.
In particular, Dr. Evil’s backstory stands out not only for its evergreen humor — the speech earns laughs even after multiple screenings — but for the way it gets at some of 007’s most ridiculous tropes. More specifically, it’s a dig at overly elaborate backstories, of which Bond villains are often major offenders. The habit is hard for even good creators to break and can be tempting in pulpier genres like the superspy stories Austin Powers sends up.
The joke plays on several layers. In an effort to connect with his estranged son Scott, Dr. Evil attends a father-son group therapy session at what appears to be a local elementary school. When encouraged to open up about his past, he reveals a truly bizarre story with the details seemingly filled in like a game of Mad Libs. “My childhood was typical,” he muses. “Summers in Rangoon. Luge lessons. In the spring, we’d make meat helmets.” The listeners grow increasingly horrified until the therapist decides that they’re out of time.
The basics lean into Austin Power’s central gag of outlandish espionage finding itself out of place in the then-contemporary 1990s. Instead of revealing the details in a secret lair or mountain fortress, he’s doing it at a neighborhood school with flowers and ladybugs painted on the walls, contrasted with sinister music in the background reminiscent of John Barry’s 007 scores. Myers’ delivery is pitch-perfect as well, getting laughs simply by delivering the speech with terrific timing. But beyond that, the details themselves, and the seemingly non-sequitur way Dr. Evil reveals them, go into a common issue with any story of sufficient pulpiness.
Every fictional character should be unique, with a set of traits that don’t match any other. Relying too heavily on stereotyping reduces them to cardboard cutouts, and professional creatives learn to steer clear of them by adding singular details to each character’s background or personality as needed. Genre-specific stories, such as espionage, have to work at it harder than most since the stories are already reliant on common plots and narrative clichés. In the drive to make distinctive and compelling characters, the details can get out of hand: going from interesting to unnecessarily weird very quickly.
Ian Fleming’s original James Bond novels were often guilty of this, despite the very real spycraft they often described. Diamonds Are Forever, for example, features a ghost town in the Nevada desert named “Spectreville,” which the villain has turned into a private amusement park. The Bond movies picked up on that trend early, and it soon became a staple of the franchise. Every villain from Dr. No on seemed to possess a grab bag of strange or unusual characteristics. Ernst Blofeld’s cat is a good example: an oddity that became so ingrained in the 007 franchise that Austin Powers had a different running gag solely devoted to it. Bond is hardly the only notable character to fall victim to such embellishments — Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter novels, for instance, describe the doctor possessing “maroon” eyes and six fingers on his left hand — but it’s certainly one of the most prominent.
Dr. Evil’s speech simply takes it to a ridiculous extreme. He describes his parents’ life using the strangest and least pertinent details possible, citing his mother’s “webbed feet,” without bothering to connect them into a coherent narrative. The result is a backstory so preposterous that it couldn’t possibly belong to a real human being anywhere at any time. Yet it’s all “true,” and both the therapy group and the audience are left to deal with it. The absurdity makes the joke work, but the fact that it’s disturbing close to actual backstories in far more “serious” movies really makes the satire hit home.
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