Something Streaming This Way Comes: "Can You Hear the Laughter? - The Story of Freddie Prinze"
In 2021, if you see the name “Freddie Prinze,” you expect to see it followed by a “Jr.,” and that’s not so unreasonable. After all, Freddie Prinze, Jr. has been a working actor since 1995, whereas his father has been gone since 1977.
For those who were around during the ‘70s, however, it’s hard not to think of Jr. without thinking of his dad, who - in less than a four-year period - achieved the following:
Made his TV debut on Jack Paar Tonight
Delivered a set on The Tonight Show which was successful enough to inspire Johnny Carson to call him over to the couch afterwards
Scored his own prime-time sitcom (Chico and the Man)
Released a comedy album (Looking Good)
Was a celebrity contestant on The $25,000 Pyramid and The Hollywood Squares
Appeared on several installments of The Dean Martin’s Celebrity Roasts
Starred in a TV movie (The Million Dollar Rip-Off)
Guest-starred on a Bob Hope special
What did he achieve after his death? A made-for-TV bio-pic with a title that’s as laughable as any joke in Prinze’s repetoire…but not ha-ha funny.
Having never seen this before it turned up on YouTube, I thought, “Oh, man, if this is even half as terrible as its title, I know I’m going to regret my decision to give it a shot,” but I was legitimately surprised - and pleasantly so - to find that it’s actually a solid, well-constructed look back at Prinze’s short but substantial career featuring a tremendous turn by Ira Angustain, best known for playing Ricardo “Go-Go” Gomez on The White Shadow, as Prinze.
Yes, it has the requisite laughs that a bio-pic about a comedian necessarily contains, but it manages to consistently succeed with its dramatic beats…or at least the ones that aren’t underscored by overwhelming music cues. That said, it’s easier to accept that sort of thing once you take into consideration when the film was made and the fact that it was a TV movie. As far as the accuracy of everything portrayed within, it’s based on a Playboy magazine article entitled "Good Night Sweet Prinze" by Peter S. Greenberg, but it was made without the input of Prinze’s mother or widow, so it’s clearly not the whole story.
Still, for a TV movie made only two years after Prinze’s death, Can You Hear the Laughter? is far better than it has any right to be, so if you’re a comedy fan and you’ve wanted to know more about this legend, you might want to give it a look.
Oh, and after you’ve watched it, you’re almost certainly going to want to check out the real deal, so give this a look: it’s his HBO On Location special, and to make it a little more poignant, this copy was clearly recorded off HBO in the immediate wake of Prinze’s death because…
Well, you’ll see.