Funny Names

Rating: Null/10 (8 September 2009)

I can't keep track of who leads what trends in humor. It is too centered on the notion of celebrity for me, and has the negative of separating humor from who provides it. If I focus on Apatow or whoever, I drift from what matters.
Laughter has to be the most puzzling dimension of being human, the most human and the strangest. Almost everything else, you can both experience and talk about, but humor has to simply be experienced. Other than notions of small surprise, one can't did much deeper.
I found this very funny. In terms laughing out loud it ranks the highest in recent memory.
The spine is ordinary, and I believe that is necessary: it is a buddy movie — a guy thing. The story is ordinary: chased by determined bad guys because of "what they know." The advertisement of the kind of humor to expect is also familiar: stoner humor, dumb guys. Other ordinary stereotypes are distributed throughout. Because we know these things so well, there is a ready warehouse of concepts to be easily pulled up as props for jokes.
I think the humor has nothing at all to do with any of these things though. In fact, I'll say that none of the appeal in other dimensions does either. Its all in the writing. The writers could depend on the formula to move the thing from beginning to end and simply focus on the small — chunks of about two or three minutes.
If all you have to worry about is being funny; if you are a talented writer who doesn't have to worry about whether the garment will serve a lifetime, you can focus on each button. Watching this a second time, one can see the texture in the words. This is like early Woody Allen where it would have been just as funny as a book, or a radio show. Its the words. Its the structure of the phrases. Its the pattern of knots in each phrase, one after another.
Consider even the name of the thing. The name is applied to a gourmet pot with care. The chief dope dealer has as his only skill the ability to name the different brands. The consumers (our buddies) talk about the ancestry of the name in a this-begat-that way, of multiple inheritance and reference. See, I've already exceeded the threshold of useful talking about why things are funny. So let's back up: this is stoner movie with no boobs, no sex at all. The only woman in the thing is loved because she "talks funny."
See it. Good, tight writing, all of it locally scoped.
Oh, there is one structural element. It starts with a preface, a historical piece: Army experiments with pot.
This actually happened. Inspired by legends of hashish creating effective "assassins" military leaders thought doped up GIs would become killing machines. A Sgt Rock type general is disgusted by the results and has the experiments closed down. The location is a secret underground laboratory accessible by a disguised hatch in a field.
This same location features in the main story. It is now an underground lab where new strains of pot are developed and grown. This of course includes pineapple express and all the other babies of babies of babies we heard about.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.