YMMV / It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Sylvester is a little too attached to his mother.
  • The ending gag, where Mrs Marcus slips on a banana peel and everyone, who'd been wallowing in misery and blame, bursts out into laughter, could be seen as everyone finally having suffered Sanity Slippage after having gone through three hours of frantic antics for nothing. It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad world, after all.
  • Also related to the ending gag, Right before, Benjy threw the banana peel right on the floor. Was this intentional given the line before, or an act of carelessness?
  • Barrie Chase (Sylvester's go-go dancing girlfriend) commented in an interview that one possible reason for her character's behavior is that she is rather cataclysmically stoned.
    • There's some merit to this theory. Notice during her Signature Scene, when Sylvester is on the phone with her mother, the "cigarette" that she's holding is between her thumb and index finger, like a joint, as opposed to her index and middle fingers like a cigarette.
• Ending Fatigue: Watching this movie beginning-to-end is a serious commitment. It originally ran over three hours with intermission. Even in the two-and-a-half-hour cut usually screened now, this is a long movie and the climax goes on for a while.
• Harsher in Hindsight: As he's in the hospital, Culpepper says "I'd like to think that sometime, maybe 10 or 20 years from now, there'd be something I could laugh at... Anything." His actor, Spencer Tracy, would pass away just 4 years later in 1967.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Hawthorne's rant about Americans being obsessed with breasts— and then along comes The Benny Hill Show...
  • The cabbie played by Peter Falk rants about how the cops in Santa Rosita are all morons. This was a decade before Falk landed his most famous role as Lieutenant Columbo, a cop who pretends to be a slow-witted moron to lower the culprit's guard while he builds his case under their nose.
  • When Captain Culpeper is on the phone with his wife, she mentions that their daughter wanted to introduce her new boyfriend to them. Spencer Tracy's next (and final) film's plot is just that, with one of the most famous Meet the In-Laws plots in film history (and ironically, that film was also directed by Stanley Kramer).
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "It's a/an [X], [X], [X], [X] World".
  • PIKE SMASH!!!
• Narm Charm: Pike's face when his attempt at hitch-hiking fails.
• One-Scene Wonder: Almost all the celebrity cameos, but special mention to The Three Stooges who appear as firemen. They're onscreen only for a few seconds without any lines, and it's among the movie's funniest moments.
  • A non-celebrity stand-out is dancer Barrie Chase, who plays Sylvester's unnamed girlfriend; she maintains a perfect stone face while go-go dancing in a bikini.
• Parody Displacement: There's at least one entire generation that barely knows this movie exists at all but are intimately familiar with The Simpsons' parody, which serves as the falling action of "Homer the Vigilante".
• Special Effect Failure: The shot before the transition to the hospital scene is intended to be Culpeper being licked by a dog. However, they presumably couldn't get the dog to do it repeatedly so it just repeatedly loop-and-reverses the footage. Even by 60s standards, it's obvious.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Emmeline's talk with the captain. She never wanted to be a part of this huge mess in the first place, is ignored by her husband and mother whenever she tries to speak up (If not being told out right to shut up), she ends up being the first to realize where the money is, offers to share half with the captain with the hopes that with her share she can run away from her family to somewhere nice, only to see the others have found it.
  "It was a nice dream. Lasted almost five minutes."
  • A bigger but more subtle one occurs with the Captain; he's worked on a case for years, his home life is a mess with an indifferent wife and a resentful daughter, and his honest police work has caused issues with the government so that they won't raise his pension. It's no surprise that he ends up snapping and taking the money for himself, and at the All for Nothing ending he is the one who suffers most. In his own words, he will very likely be blamed for the whole fiasco simply because the judge will likely find it easier to blame a cop gone bad rather than a bunch of idiot civilians.
• Values Dissonance: The argument over splitting the money specifically excludes the women as potential recipients of shares until they complain about it, though that could simply be because the dividing of the shares began with a discussion of who went down to the wreck, and those people would in turn divide with the others in their parties, or because they considered each couple to be one unit- which is why Lenny Pike and Mrs. Marcus protest and the whole argument over how to divide the money begins. At the end though, it is mentioned that it was to be divided "Fourteen ways".
  • The infamous scene where Peter Falk is ranting into a payphone and he calls cops "retarded". Today, that's regarded as a slur.
• The Woobie: Pike, Monica, and Emmeline for all the undeserved crap they go through. Culpeper too, though he's a bit of Jerkass Woobie for screwing over everyone else.

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