Metacritic reviews

A madcap gem.

Yet Waiting for Guffman is never mean-spirited. Its weird warmth is perfectly embodied by Guest himself, whose flamboyant, stagestruck choreographer, Corky St. Clair, could have (in less ingenious hands) been a cruel, gay-bashing caricature, but instead becomes a hallucinatory Everyman.

The movie is, from start to finish, a hoot... Both a savvy satire of smalltown boosterism and an affectionate salute to the performing spirit. [10 Feb 1987, p.66]

Thirty minutes into Waiting for Guffman, my stomach hurt from laughing.

The don't quite do for "Oklahoma!" what they did for heavy metal, but they come close. [31 Jan 1997, p.C6]

I saw this movie in a room full of San Francisco movie critics, and I haven't heard that much laughter since, well, the piano duet in "Island of Dr. Moreau" (which you must admit, was pretty funny.)

The movie doesn't bludgeon us with gags. It proceeds with a certain comic relentlessness from setup to payoff, and its deliberation is part of the fun.

Such a funny mess that it keeps you laughing even when you realize it's not much better directed than a cable-access talk show.

Nowhere near as funny as "Spinal Tap," but fans of this kind of deadpan humor are guaranteed to get a few chuckles out of this one. All of the actors are marvelously horrible, and in this movie, bad equals good.

The result isn't very funny: There are clever bits, sure, but they're embedded in long, painfully obvious sequences built around one-shot gags.