35 years later, Weekend At Bernie's jokes have taken on a life of their own

35 years ago this week, Weekend At Bernie’s opened its modest theatrical run. The film grossed about $30 million on a $15 million budget, barely turning a profit when accounting for marketing costs. But you’d never know that Weekend At Bernie’s was anything but a massive success based on the way people have talked about it for the past three-and-a-half decades; the film has been name-dropped and outright parodied in the biggest sitcoms on both sides of the millennium and has emerged every once in a while as a political ding. (After a widely-panned debate performance from President Biden last week, the quips from his foes practically wrote themselves). For a movie that was hardly a high-water mark of the Brat Pack era, Weekend At Bernie’s has done an impressive job of staying alive in the pop cultural memory.

A lot of this must have to do with the plot of Weekend At Bernie’s, which is practically a sitcom episode stretched to 90 minutes. Twentysomethings Larry (Andrew McCarthy) and Richard (Jonathan Silverman) work for an insurance firm in New York under their boss Bernie Lomax (Terry Kiser). The boys discover discrepancies in financial reports indicating that someone is scamming the company, so Bernie invites them to his beach house for a titular weekend, nominally as a reward for their good accounting. In actuality, Bernie plans to have them killed to cover up the fact that he is the one scamming the company. Unfortunately for Bernie, his mob connections actually want him dead because he’s gotten so sloppy with his crimes. The boys discover his dead body and for reasons that barely make sense, even in-universe, decide to pretend he’s still alive for the weekend, going so far as to carry him around in front of dozens of other people.

Director Ted Kotcheff is clearly going for farce, a comedic style that unites screwball films like Bringing Up Baby and sitcoms like Frasier. But there is so much going on to bloat Weekend At Bernie’s that it never achieves the fizzy quality of either of these projects. Richard’s early subplot about not having his own apartment, for instance, doesn’t go anywhere important enough to justify its inclusion in the film and ends up as filler. Whatever; critiquing a long-dead film is not the point right now. It’s not the quality of Weekend At Bernie’s that’s remembered and eulogized in sitcoms, but the absurdity of the grotesque premise.

While it would be nearly impossible to compile a complete list of references to Weekend At Bernie’s in TV shows over the past 30 years, tvtropes.org has fortunately already created a decent baseline for us to work from. First, a caveat: Their page of Weekend At Bernie’s references is different from the trope page titled “Of Corpse He’s Alive,” which details the trope of moving around a dead body and pretending it’s alive. This film trope arguably predates Bernie’s by a good 70 years, appearing (in a knocked-on-the-head version) in Charlie Chaplin’s 1918 film A Dog’s Life. But the first Bernie’s-specific joke seems to come from a 1994 episode of Beavis and Butt-Head, where the characters see a commercial for a sixth sequel to Weekend At Bernie’s where the joke is that Bernie is “stiffer than ever.”

The layers to this joke are surprisingly informative to what people thought of the movie at the time, and what people would continue to parody as the years went on. First, the sequel. Weekend At Bernie’s II is infamously bad, both for the obvious reasons—it really, truly strains credulity that this situation could happen twice, to the same guys, with the same dead body—and the batshit ones—Bernie is reanimated into a sort of dancing zombie thanks to some unspecific voodoo magic. Though it seems almost quaint now, the proliferation of sequels in the 1980s and ‘90s was notable enough to be a fairly common joke in contemporary media; see also Back to the Future Part II’s joke about Jaws 19 playing in theaters in 2015. Anything could get multiple sequels, no matter what, with Weekend At Bernie’s (at the time, at least) representing the nadir of this phenomenon.

So how did this not-particularly-profitable movie earn a sequel, and why did it take four years to get it? According to the AFI Catalog, it wasn’t until the success of Weekend At Bernie’s on home video and pay-per-view that the project became viable. This also at least partially explains why it took five years for the first jokes about the film to pop up in sitcoms; the success of the film was somewhat sleepy, with people coming around to view the film months and years later instead of rushing out to see it in the theater. While the original was a mostly breezy summer comedy, the sequel is practically unwatchable, a blatant (and failed) cash grab.

But of course, the Beavis and Butt-Head joke isn’t complete without the sex. Probably the most famous (or, again, infamous) joke in Weekend At Bernie’s is when Bernie’s mistress Tina (Catherine Parks) arrives drunk to his beach house and, offscreen, has what we’re led to believe is absolutely mind-blowing sex with a corpse. The whole sequence is almost too bizarre to be offensive, with the only insult really being to Tina’s intelligence (and maybe to her five basic senses). While the rest of the film feels more akin to something like My Cousin Vinny, what with its mob plot, Bernie’s goes Porky’s-mode for these few minutes, dabbling with ‘80s sex comedy conventions. This is the aspect that How I Met Your Mother later parodied, with Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) hoping to someday pull off a play called the “Weekend At Barney’s,” where a woman will have sex with him despite thinking he’s dead. That conceit is obviously less than wonderful, but regardless, it’s a joke that Beavis and Butt-Head arrived at first.

Maybe Beavis and Butt-Head just had to break the seal, or maybe it really did just take a while for the film to circulate into the wider culture, but jokes about the film, the sequel, and the sex appeal of a dead New York executive were fair game from the mid-90s on. Elaine watches and mocks the film in an episode of Seinfeld; on Friends, it’s the favorite movie of Jennifer Aniston’s Rachel Green. HIMYM, perhaps the preeminent network TV capsule of Gen X pop culture, was particularly obsessed with it, centering two episodes around a Bernie’s joke in the series’ diminishing final seasons. The 2014 Rick And Morty episode “Rixty Minutes” has a bit about a cat lady dying and being Weekend At Bernie’s-ed around by her cats. Yes, a man does have sex with the cat-animated corpse.

At the risk of saying “You couldn’t make Weekend At Bernie’s today!”, it does seem like it would be pretty difficult to replicate a Weekend At Bernie’s scenario today. (Financially speaking—we suppose there’s nothing to stop you from pretending a dead man is still alive.) In 2024, discussion of a film’s box office impact is often relegated to its first weekend. And while there are dissenters like Kevin Costner, who wasn’t banking on his Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 to remake its money in an opening weekend, he is hardly making movies this absurd. The jokes on TV will have you believe that that’s actually a good thing, that movies this dumb are a scourge to film as an art form. Maybe they have a point. But Weekend At Bernie’s has successfully earned a legacy, even if it’s as a comedy to laugh at, if not with. There are certainly worse ways to go.