Waiting For Guffman Leans More Toward Tragedy Than Comedy

Waiting For Guffman is a film by Christopher Guest about a director, named Corky St, Clair, with too much confidence in his abilities and too little actual directing talent trying to get the best performance out of a cast of untalented amateur actors in a poorly written musical. Somehow, Corky and the actors believe that this play will be their big break into the acting scene and seek to impress a talent scout scheduled to attend their opening night.

Over the course of the preparations for the play, a lot goes wrong. Bad acting, people dropping out last minute, and, in one final stroke of bad luck, the talent scout's flight is delayed, and he never even watches the show.Over the course of the film, Corky and the actors are so sure that their show will be a hit and open up a new chapter of their lives, but in the end, their dreams are dashed.

The cast goes back to their lives before the play: waiting tables, retirement, and, in Corky's case, running unlicensed film memorabilia shops. Using Aristotle's definitions of comedy and tragedy, the cast rose up, in classic comedy style, to one successful performance before a surprisingly receptive audience and then fell back to where they started which, considering where they started, is a tragic ending to their story.

The only ray of hope for the cast at the end of the film is seen in the final moments of the film when the individual cast members discuss what they are doing with their lives after the play. Luckily for them (and for the viewer) all of them seem to have moved on from their dreams of performing.