AllMovie

Wayne's World marked the big-screen emergence of one of the silliest comic sensibilities of the 1990s, Saturday Night Live's Mike Myers. Myers co-wrote the film, and while Wayne's World shares the absurd, nonsensical punning of a comedy such as Airplane! (1980), it has an irreverence and good nature all its own. Director Penelope Spheeris gives sequences time to develop -- unlike the standard rapid-fire approach in most comedies -- and as a result, the bits gain a loose, bizarre, and almost self-referential quality that intensifies the laughs. This kind of mocking, joke-within-a-joke style would become Myers' trademark. In the lead role, the comedian is vulnerable enough to make his character's foibles endearing, and his squirmy, gleeful charm is both believable and funny.