Deconstructing is easy, comedy is hard

It hasn’t been cool lately for a comedy to be too well-constructed. Granted, traditional comedy structuring does seem to be the faded domain of Bob Hope and ’70s sitcoms, but trust me when I say that it hasn’t gone away.

The Apatow comedies are built around tried-and-true structures, but then they’re embellished with insurgent overlays like sex among middle-school kids and Seth Rogen’s full-frontal. There is another movement in comedy that aims to deconstruct the formulas entirely. Seinfeld and Letterman have had their influence on the TV front, and Kevin Smith (among others) has done his part cinematically. A new generation of comedic artistes is too busy mocking anything that smells like a traditional set-up to ever deign to do anything “straight” themselves. But there is a cautionary tale here: Funny is not as easy as it looks.

A case in point is Andrew Fleming’s Hamlet 2. If you’ve seen the trailer, you might be as anticipatory as I was. And here’s the good news: the “Rock Me, Sexy Jesus” sequence is a flat-out riot. I laughed at the proceedings as well as Fleming’s commentary on the proceedings (in the form of enlightened and outraged audience members watching the play-within-a-film). But Hamlet 2 is six minutes in search of a movie. The rest of the mishaps here are so self-conscious in their attempts to demonstrate hipness beyond normal comedy that they skirt comedy altogether.
Steve Coogan, in a woefully unwritten and unsympathetic central role, plays a hapless drama teacher of such monumental cluelessness and narcissism as to make him the uninvited guest at this party from five minutes in. The thuds of the smugly “lame” narrative might please one or two bitter film school misanthropes, but the rest of us are out of luck. This film even manages what I thought was impossible: making the superhumanly talented Catherine Keener unfunny, and painfully so. This

is all rather baffling, coming from Andrew Fleming, whose early directing trifecta of Threesome, The Craft and Dick made me feel safe under his aegis.

The problem with deconstructing a genre (in this case, the Dangerous Minds naïve-teacher-with-gang-kids formula mixed with High School Musical — which must already be a send-up, mustn’t it?) is that unless you respect the rules of character and story while you’re doing it, you are left with a Saturday Night Live  skit, not a movie. And, as I said before, the big Jesus-y musical number works beautifully. But no scene is an island, and the skit is awash in a sea of woes.

Contrast that with Tropic Thunder, the other anticipated comedy of this late-summer season. Ben Stiller, up through the ranks of both TV sketch and big-budget film comedy, has concocted an intermittently uproarious satire that also holds its own in narrative and character. From its opening psych-out hilarity through to a very cerebral sequence between Stiller and Robert Downey Jr. about persona (“I know who I am! I am a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude!”), the laughs are deep and generous. There are occasional lulls, and one bit with Matthew McConaughey does seem to violate the laws of Stiller’s universe, but you can rest easy in this film knowing there is an actual theme at work here.

I was one of the few film reviewers working in 1996 who liked The Cable Guy, one of Ben Stiller’s early directorial efforts. Zoolander was an acceptable — albeit one-joke — comedy, but Tropic Thunder heralds Stiller’s coming into his own. There is an audacity to the humor — particularly how far he and the amazing Downey Jr. are willing to take the race issue — that should satisfy any comedy anarchist. But those of us who don’t want to sit through two hours that don’t add up to anything will be appeased also. The familiar satiric terrain of the film industry’s self-involvement is trod here, but it’s given a fresh coat of charm with a fish-out-of-water plot that is cunningly unfolded with a plot-out-of-water wink. And the fact that (SPOILER ALERT) Steve Coogan is blown up early on is wonderful recompense for those of us who suffer the slings and arrows of his Hamlet 2 work.

I hope Tropic Thunder gives new cred to comedy that winks instead of sneers at convention. Satire is a dish best served on a well-crafted plate. The flimsy paper of Hamlet 2’s plate left me with grease stains on my pants, as well as my opinion of the director. Those are a bitch to get out.            

Scott Patrick Wagner’s blog, “Multiple Personality” can be found at blog.scottpatrickwagner.com.