This Is Spinal Tap: Stupid and Clever

The movie was not the first high-profile rock parody. Monty Python’s Eric Idle and Python adjunct Neil Innes had created a faux-Beatles band, called the Rutles, for Idle’s series Rutland Weekend Television in 1975, and spun them off into the made-for-TV mockumentary The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash three years later. And if we’re counting untelevised off-Broadway shows, there was also the National Lampoon stage revue Lemmings, from 1973, another Woodstock send-up, this time about a mass-suicide-themed music fest, whose cast included Guest as a fake Bob Dylan singing “Positively Wall Street.” But as far as we know, neither of those projects ever fooled a prominent Britpop front man, and nobody really talks about either of them anymore, except as historical footnotes prefiguring This Is Spinal Tap.

Spinal Tap, on the other hand, is maybe the most quotable and most quoted movie of the eighties, a lingua franca for touring rock musicians and comedy nerds alike, not to mention the template for countless ersatz rockumentaries that followed: faux docs about fake folk singers (Bob Roberts, Guest’s own A Mighty Wind) and fake rappers (CB4) and real actors starting fake rap careers (I’m Still Here) and fake DJs (It’s All Gone Pete Tong) and fake Biebers (Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping) and fake yacht-rock duos (“Gentle and Soft: The Story of the Blue Jean Committee,” from Documentary Now!). Nor did Reiner’s film pioneer the mockumentary format—filmmakers like Jim McBride (David Holzman’s Diary) and Woody Allen (Take the Money and Run) were making doc-style comedies back in the late sixties. But nobody’s stealing from those films when they make mockumentaries today—particularly on television, where the mockumentary format became an easy way for half-hour sitcoms to shed the dated look and feel of multicamera filmed-before-a-studio-audience network junk in favor of loose shaky-cam storytelling. It’s Spinal Tap’s deceptively naturalistic approach that points the way to so much of what would follow—to the backstage casualness of Tanner ’88 and The Larry Sanders Show and Veep, to Arrested Development (which Jason Bateman once described as “The Royal Tenenbaums shot like Cops”), and particularly to hits like The Office, Parks and Recreation, Modern Family, What We Do in the Shadows, and Abbott Elementary—comedies in which the self-consciousness and self-delusion of characters who know they’re being filmed adds a layer to every joke.

I should note—in case he’s reading this; you never know—that Liam Gallagher is not the only iconic rock front man who took This Is Spinal Tap at face value. Although the movie was not a hit, a lot of actual rock stars seem to have watched it soon after it came out, and for the most part, it was a joke they either (a) didn’t get or (b) didn’t appreciate one bit. “I was the only person in the audience that wasn’t laughing,” Ozzy Osbourne told Conan O’Brien in 1997. Like Gallagher, he assumed he was watching a real documentary, but Ozzy made that assumption because he was Ozzy Osbourne, and by 1984 he’d lived nine lives’ worth of madness as over-the-top as anything in the movie. “Those things,” Osbourne said, “actually happened!” Steven Tyler of Aerosmith watched the film on the enthusiastic recommendation of his bandmate and junco partner Joe Perry, and although Tyler had been briefed that he’d be watching a comedy, he was as unamused as Ozzy, if not more so. (“I thought, ‘How dare they? That’s all real, and they’re mocking it,’” Tyler has recalled.) McKean claims the members of Foghat accused the filmmakers of bugging their tour bus. Rock stars are so vain, they all thought this film was about them. Some of what happens to the Tap on tour in Reiner’s film was based on true events. The small-bread/large-cold-cut joke was inspired by Van Halen’s tour-rider ban on brown M&M’s; the band getting lost backstage came from a story the filmmakers had heard about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. (And Black Sabbath really did commission a replica Stonehenge that didn’t work out, but that happened after the film was finished, making it a case of self-parody imitating parody rather than art imitating life.)

But what gives Spinal Tap its pop-cultural staying power is that—unlike All You Need Is Cash, which affectionately tweaks one obvious Beatles biography beat after another—it’s not really spoofing any particular artist, and it’s only circumstantially a parody of early-eighties heavy metal as a genre. It’s really a comedy of manners about musicians in general, and the way they’re indulged, flattered, and babied by the industry types who scuttle to feed near the heat vent of their stardom. You can’t blame Foghat for getting a bit paranoid: the film gets the social aspects of a rock tour so dead-on right that it feels informed by insider knowledge you wouldn’t expect a bunch of comic actors to have. Shaffer (as Artie Fufkin) and Drescher (as publicist Bobbi Flekman) are playing broad caricatures, to be sure. But even as late as the early 2000s, when I started reporting magazine features about rock bands and began spending time backstage and on tour buses, I met plenty of Flekmans, Fufkins, Terry Ladds, Ian Faiths, Jeanine Pettibones, and even the occasional Denis Eton-Hogg—real humans who almost seemed like they’d learned how to behave by watching Spinal Tap and choosing a secondary character to emulate. They talked to each other just like the music-biz people in the film do, with a studied casualness and a breezy cynicism, as if to set themselves apart from the wide-eyed fans clamoring on the other side of the barrier. I was pretty young back then and wide-eyed enough myself that the idea of being in the same room as a famous rock band was still exciting and intimidating. But regardless of where my backstage pass took me, I quickly learned to act as if I’d been there a thousand times before, as if nothing could be more routine, even boring, than watching a greenroom food fight between a couple of Foo Fighters. Nobody in This Is Spinal Tap nails that blasé voice more perfectly than WKRP in Cincinnati’s Howard Hesseman as Terry Ladd, the manager of former Tap opener turned superstar rival Duke Fame, when he tells the band his guy is playing “the Enormodome, or whatever it is . . . It’s fantastic. Sold it out”—like he couldn’t care less, like only a chump would care more, like nothing about this life is anything but a chore, including the conversation he’s engaged in (“We’d love to stand around and chat,” he says, as he leaves Spinal Tap behind to eat their hearts out, “but we gotta sit down in the lobby and wait for the limo”).

Ladd has it easy; he’s managing an artist on the rise. Ian Faith (Tony Hendra), Spinal Tap’s manager, is shepherding a declining band through a star-crossed tour. Another thing the movie perfectly captures is the way any artist manager is often required to all but bend reality in order to reassure his charges that everything’s going fine, whether that’s spinning a canceled show in Boston as no big deal (“I wouldn’t worry about it . . . It’s not a big college town”) or casting a plainly disastrous decision—substituting an information-free black sleeve when the original, misogynistic cover image for Smell the Glove is rejected—as a bold artistic choice (“This is the turning point”). Eventually the band members talk themselves into the idea that he’s right and they’re geniuses, although he’s not and they’re not. This is another thing Spinal Tap gets so, so right, and another way that Derek, David, and Nigel prefigure modern-day docu-comedy protagonists like Michael Scott or Selina Meyer—it understands, in a deep way, the comically dysfunctional professional ecosystems that form around the fragile egos, emotional shortcomings, and irrational enmities of insecure bosses.

I’m going to stand here, figuratively speaking, and argue that one of the greatest strengths of a movie famous for a gag involving a guy stuffing his trousers with a foil-wrapped cucumber is its subtlety. This Is Spinal Tap doesn’t just satirize the pretension and egotism of rock stars; it goes beyond that to show the way those rock stars reflexively mask that egotism behind a veil of sly faux humility. It’s there when DiBergi asks St. Hubbins to sing “All the Way Home,” the first song he and Tufnel wrote together as teenagers back in England, and St. Hubbins responds, “Christ, some black coffee, maybe,” like it’s the very last thing he and his hangover want to do this early in the morning—before he and Tufnel launch right into it without a shred of reluctance, right there at the table in an H. Salt Fish & Chips. It’s in this way that This Is Spinal Tap is in direct, double-feature-worthy conversation with The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese’s 1978 documentary about the Band’s 1976 farewell concert, and specifically with the jivey interview segments with Robbie Robertson and his bandmates that bracket that film’s concert sequences. Reiner’s DiBergi is an amalgam of famous-director signifiers—the safari jacket is a nod to Brian De Palma, the battleship cap is Steven Spielberg-coded—but everything from Marty’s first name to his decision to put himself on camera throughout his own documentary is obviously a joke about Scorsese, who’s similarly conspicuous in the nonconcert parts of The Last Waltz.

Early rock docs like D. A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back and the Maysles brothers and Charlotte Zwerin’s Gimme Shelter applied the high seriousness and sober remove of 1960s Direct Cinema to fly-on-the-hotel-suite-wall studies of rock stars, anthropologizing (often in less-than-flattering ways) a newish class of public figure that hadn’t really existed prior to the ascent of Elvis Presley. The Last Waltz is more stylized and deliberate; Scorsese carefully storyboarded and choreographed the live performances. It’s an undeniable musical and cinematic achievement, but the interview segments mostly provide their subjects with opportunities to sip beers, shoot pool, look cool, and otherwise burnish their own myth. It’s not that the Band didn’t deserve what’s known in reality-TV jargon as the “hero edit.” But what Reiner and co. grasped with Spinal Tap is that the same mythmaking docudramatic approach could just as easily be applied to groups made up of self-important midwits with nothing useful to say about themselves, their music, or the world—guys whose only artistic achievement was being England’s loudest and “most punctual” band. In doing so, Spinal Tap predicts, almost clairvoyantly, the rise of the souvenir-ish, insight-free concert-film-plus-interview authorized rockumentaries that can now be found cluttering up a streaming platform near you. Most rock docs about present-day bands tend to be glowing self-portraits by proxy—like all celebrity “journalism,” they end up painting their subjects as heroic, less because the people creating these films are inept or corrupt or besotted and more because these filmmakers know that a glowing portrait is the only thing their movie’s potential audience is looking for. It’s surprising that, even after Spinal Tap depicted and skewered the clichés of the rock-doc form as deftly as it did, people kept on making this kind of movie unironically—but it’s not that surprising. They kept on making westerns after Blazing Saddles, disaster movies after Airplane!, horror movies after Scream and Scream movies after Scary Movie, and musician biopics after Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Rock and roll never forgets, but the movies seldom remember.

Hang out with the right nerds for long enough, and eventually you’ll pick up Spinal Tap’s key bits by osmosis. Even people who haven’t seen it probably know the thing about the amps that go to eleven, or why someone might say “Hello, Cleveland!” while making their way through a confusingly laid-out building. But what you miss by picking up Spinal Tap references secondhand is the way the actual film firmly grounds even its most quotable, meme-able jokes in character, story, and—dare I say it—pathos. I’d committed chunks of this movie to core memory at a very young age, but when I rewatched it recently for the first time in a while, what struck me was the abiding affection it clearly has for its characters even at their most petulant and delusional. That quality is the biggest thing Spinal Tap shares, aside from a format and several actors, with Guest’s own run of doc-style comedies, from Waiting for Guffman (1996) to Best in Show (2000) to For Your Consideration (2006): they’re mockumentaries that never really mock.

I’d forgotten that when the band talks about the fineness of the line between stupid and clever, they’re speaking with envy of Duke Fame, who has managed to slip his X-rated album cover past the censors because the nude women with bullwhips on the cover are whipping him, not the other way around. I’d forgotten that “Too much fucking perspective,” and the visit to Elvis’s grave that prompts St. Hubbins to say it, comes after he and his bandmates hear an American radio DJ consign them to “the ‘where are they now’ file”—that they’re literally thinking about their own mortality and whether they’ll be remembered. To paraphrase Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lester Bangs in Almost Famous, this movie is about a midlevel band struggling with its own limitations in the harsh face of stardom. The world’s increasing indifference is more humiliating than getting caught packing a cuke by airport security, and when the band flies in its diminutive “Stonehenge” trilith or embarks on a “jazz odyssey” as Spinal Tap Mark II, they’re trying to prove to the world and themselves that there are still more chapters left in their story, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Those of us watching the film today know something these characters don’t and in all likelihood would refuse to accept—that while heavy metal and hard rock circa 1984 still have a few good years of Billboard-chart primacy ahead of them, these genres (and guitar-based rock music in general) are about to peak and then slide into irrelevance.

As I write this, some of the most unflinchingly honest music journalism on the entire internet can be found on an X.com feed called @UnderFaceValue, whose anonymous proprietor regularly tweets out screen grabs of Ticketmaster seat maps showing just how many tickets remain unsold for upcoming Enormodome shows by ostensibly big-name artists from Post Malone and Linkin Park to Justin Timberlake, Pink, and Mariah Carey, along with the occasional alert about when you can cop, say, a last-minute ticket to see Sting play with Billy Joel for fourteen dollars plus fees. Soft ticket sales aren’t necessarily a referendum on an artist’s relevance—they’re usually a referendum on the fact that corporate-arena concert tickets cost way too much. But when rock bands don’t die or break up, they risk working past their own logical end point, outlasting their natural arc. It’s rare that anyone cares as much about your twelfth album as they did about the one that made you famous. This Is Spinal Tap—in which we’re told that the band has fallen from booking 10,000-seat and 15,000-seat arenas to halls that hold 1,200 or 1,500—is about the precise moment when that worm turns, and the temporarily embarrassed way that rock bands pretend to be unbothered by a slide into irrelevance that they secretly suspect might end up being permanent.

For a fictional band, Spinal Tap has enjoyed a long career in the real world, reuniting for several tours in the 1990s and 2000s, two more studio albums, and, most recently, a new Reiner-directed movie, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, which opened in September 2025. The idea of Spinal Tap as a legacy act weathering the ups and downs of forty years on the road must’ve been an irresistible comedic premise, primarily because the original movie portrays the boys as profoundly unprepared for that kind of adversity. Early in the film, when Bruno Kirby’s Frank Sinatra–obsessed limo driver Tommy Pischedda notices a Tap groupie reading Sammy Davis Jr.’s ghostwritten autobiography Yes I Can, he starts telling them his favorite story from the book. Davis, a rising star, emerges from a triumphant night at the Copa at three o’clock in the morning, and spots Sinatra, whose career was then at a low ebb. “He was slowly walking down Broadway with no hat on and his collar up—and not a soul was paying attention to him,” Davis recalls in the book. “This was the man who only a few years ago had tied up traffic all over Times Square . . .  Now . . . nobody gave a damn. God, how could it happen?” Kirby’s character is literally talking to Spinal Tap about the fickleness of fame—and he only gets as far as “Frank’s walking down Broadway by himself” before Nigel closes the glass-partition window, refusing to hear another word—England’s loudest band, obliviously turning down the volume on a cautionary tale.