Comedy, Crime, Satire

Comedy

The Big Lebowski is first and foremost a comedy: it wants to make its audience laugh, and laugh we do. The Big Lebowski derives its humor from the witty absurdity of its script and the truly crazy nature of its characters. A Vietnam vet bowler who "doesn't roll on Shabbos"? A total slob who laments that "that rug really tied the room together"? An over-the-top bowler who dresses in skin-tight jumpsuits, licks his bowling balls, and threatens his opponents—and calls himself The Jesus? That's the kind of absurd humor that's the Coens' specialty. There is lots of speculation about symbolism in the film (Shmoop's included), but the Coens enjoy throwing random things into their films just to see what happens. They totally deny any deliberate use of symbols; it's all for fun.

While The Big Lebowski is more highbrow fare than something like, let's say, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, it's still got plenty of moments of truly inspired slapstick humor. The scene where The Dude tries to intruder-proof his home only to discover that his door opens the wrong way—slapstick. The scene where Walter takes a crowbar to the wrong car—that's gotta be slapstick.

Crime

Crime films usually involve some kind of high-stakes mystery. Will Brad Pitt and George Clooney successfully rip off this casino? Will Scarface bury his head in a mountain of cocaine? Will the Godfather be disappointed by just one or all of his gangster sons?

There are definitely crime genre elements in The Big Lebowski. There's mistaken identity, a kidnapping, and some very angry German nihilists. The Dude is charged with solving the mystery of who kidnapped Bunny Lebowski and why Jackie Treehorn's thugs had to, well, micturate all over his rug. But the crazy comedic elements permeate the plot and make the criminal plot pretty ridiculous. We're just along for the ride.

Satire

Satire is sort of like comedy's adult sibling: grown up, sophisticated, and capable of getting laughs from people who aren't either tipsy or 12 years old. Satire aims to make fun of human foibles by exposing them as absurd.

The Big Lebowski satirizes gun-crazy conservatives through the character of Walter, whose enthusiasm for the concealed carry of weapons results in him pulling a pistol on a fellow bowler. We also see the super rich ridiculed in the person of Jeff Lebowski, a millionaire who can't even manage his own money, much less his marriage, and whose personal assistant may be a hyper-attentive alien who's just vacationing on earth. He's a holier-than-thou type who's rotten to the core.

But the film doesn't spare left-leaning slackers like The Dude, either. Through his laziness, drug nostalgia, and disdain of "the square community," The Dude is repeatedly skewered as a symbol of the hippie generation from the '60s and '70s. And Maude Lebowski and her arty world are skewered as pretentious and too obscure to even try to understand.

The film also satirizes the film noir mystery genre it tries to emulate. As David Edelstein of The New York Times put it:

The central joke—the raison d'être—of "The Big Lebowski" is a disjunction. The Coens take a disheveled stoner layabout, the former 60's activist the Dude—seen mostly in baggy shorts, sandals, an oversize T-shirt through which his gut is visible, often sucking a joint, mixing a white Russian or lying on his rug with headphones listening to bowling competitions or whale songs—and make him the gumshoe protagonist of a convoluted Raymond Chandler-style Los Angeles mystery-thriller in the tradition of "The Big Sleep." (Source)

Even some specific plot points from other noir films are turned on their head. For example, in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, a character rubs a pencil over a notepad that someone had previously written on to try to see what had been written; he gets information that helps him locate a missing woman. When The Dude sees Treehorn scribble on a notepad and run out of the room, he does the same; it's the first time he's actually taken any initiative to figure out what might have happened to Bunny. And what does he get? A pornographic doodle of a giant Johnson.

And last but not least, there's the satrirical dig at the classic noir voiceover, as the narrator loses his train of thought midway through the intro.