So I saw the Groundlings show Enter the Sunday on, uh, Sunday night, and can I just say... HILARIOUS. The Sunday company is technically a step down from the official Groundlings company, but honestly, these guys were great anyway. There were some really amazing sketches (a couple of them would've easily fit right into any SNL lineup - "The Re-Enactors," which was about these two dudes cast in an E! True Hollywood Story reenactment clip of Charles in Charge, "Audition," which flawlessly combined abysmal tap-dancing and ill-fitting metallic spandex, "Snacks," which featured this really hot, hilarious guy and was about this really hot hilarious guy attempting to steal snacks at a company meeting (way funnier than it sounds, trust me), and "Anomalies of the Unknown," which absolutely defies description so I will leave you with these two choice phrases: SASQUATCH! and DEFALCO BROTHERS DISCOUNT CAR STEREOS! - among them). Big kudos to Nick Paonessa, Taran Killam, and Jennifer Smedley, all of whom made me laugh like a crazy person.
Also, ricocheting offa that, can I rant for a moment?
People who dismiss comedy and comedy fans as being "unintelligent" or "dumb" and who cling to films like, IDK, Atonement or Garden State, are getting on my last nerve. Friggin' a, you guys. I find that so sincerely irritating. For one thing, I'm of the opinion that it's way harder to write great comedy than great drama (and this is coming from someone who has attempted both). There are so many ways to tell a story about love and war and death and tuberculosis, though not all of them work very well (I'm looking at you, Moulin Rouge - a movie which I will always dislike, no matter how many moony teenage girls tell me I should revere it), but within comedy, you're kinda limited - not by the boundaries of reality, like with most dramas, but by what people before you have done. It's okay for a filmmaker to blatantly rip off Shakespeare or Chaucer or Proust, but if something you're writing veers too close to a Monty Python or Mr. Show piece, it just looks transparent rather than artsy.
I don't begrudge great dramatic writers or performers (I would pay $10 plus popcorn to watch Laura Linney eat a cheese sandwich on film - get Daniel Day-Lewis in there with a piece of pizza and I'd probably see it twice), but enjoying dramas doesn't make one any more intelligent than someone who really just loves comedy! Ugh. This is all really in response to an argument I had the other day (which prompted me to go watch Season 1 of UCB, peppered with some Arrested Development and Human Giant just for good measure) with this really pretentious girl who was talking about how comedies are all so "low-brow" and how she "doesn't even like to watch films that are set before 1900," which I just find so obnoxious... but that's another story. Yeah, comedy can be gloriously low-brow, but you really have to be smart to excel at writing it. Thank you, Dane Cook and Larry the Cable Guy, for perpetuating the stereotype that all comedians are boorish d-bags. Y'all make people like Tina and the guys from Stella and all the marvelous people who've come out of Second City and UCB and Groundlings and iO look super lame.
So in conclusion: Films that are willfully obtuse to the point of just seeming silly, i.e. Synedoche, New York, and movies that attempt to be highbrow for Middle America, like The Other Boleyn Girl, sorta prove that drama =/= class; also, while Judd Apatow and Ben Stiller may not have mantels stacked three-deep with Oscars, you know what they do have? Money. Gobs and gobs of it. (I want to make a pun about Will Arnett also having Gobs of money, but my brain isn't really in top form at the moment, so fill in your own here: ________________________.) People like to laugh, and there's more to creating good comedy than meets the eye. Also, I'm a mega-nerd. Geez. I swear I'm more fun than this in real life, I just needed to get this rant off my chest.
No comments:
Post a Comment