Product: Funny People
Rating: 1.0
Unfunny People
After screening about twenty minutes of this thing on my 60-inch plasma, I realized the TV had been irretrievably compromised by having this filth routed through it, so I had to lay my TV gently on the den floor and then smother it with a pillow.This movie should have been entitled Revolting People Who Are Not in the Least Bit Funny. The movie is pathologically unfunny. It is so unfunny, it is very hard to tell where the humor is supposed to lie. Instead, the movie is a bleak yarn about stand-up comedians whose material is... supposed to be funny, apparently, judging by title and by the tittering of the comedy audiences in the movie, who constitute a kind of living laugh track. But I cannot begin to fathom what is supposed to be funny about this material. "If the guy from MySpace (big MySpace logo in background, clearly a product placement) and the guy from Craigslist got in a fight, I wonder who'd win." This is one of the "jokes" in the movie that is supposed to be funny. Then James Taylor features in the movie as a kind of commercial for himself, to no purpose whatsoever. The only way I could make sense of this movie is as an anti-comedy: a movie that is supposed to be funny only because it is so completely unfunny. However, this subtle type of humor is rarely intentionally perpetrated. But if you want some genuine anti-comedy stand up material, here it is:(COMEDIAN GETS UP ON STAGE, COMES TENTATIVELY TO MICROPHONE) "Uhh... hi. The um, the scheduled comedian is stuck in traffic and he sent me over here to fill in for him till he gets here." (LOOKS NERVOUS, CONSULTS PIECE OF PAPER, SAYS TREMULOUSLY) "So uhhh... he emailed me some of his material and I'll ask you to bear with me while I get through it the best I can... (SQUINTS) But it's kind of hard to read. My printer is low on toner. I don't know if you've noticed, but Brother printers seem to eat toner. For a couple years I had an Epson, which somehow lasted a lot longer on a single toner cartridge... though I might have been using it on the low-toner setting... I'm not quite sure. You know how you can set the printer, through the computer, to be in toner-saver mode? I think I might have done that with that other one... I don't know why I've never bothered to do that with the printer I have now but umm... Anyway, let's get started on some of this material and hopefully we can work through about half of it before Joe gets here. But (CONSULTS WATCH) since I've been talking I see about five minutes have elapsed and so I'd better go through the material at about one and a half times normal speed in order to catch up... but then, that might not be very funny... on the other hand it might make it funnier... show of hands, who out there thinks that speeding things up makes them funnier? C'mon now... okay, one... two... three... only three people? Okay, well, I guess I could ask now who DOESN'T think speeding things up makes them funnier... but then I already know the answer, don't I? I mean I could just subtract three from the total number of people in the room... but then I suppose some people might not have an opinion one way or the other and so that approach might not work. (CELL PHONE RINGS) Oh... could you... could you excuse me a moment? I've GOTTA get this... Hello? (LOWERS VOICE TO AN ANGUISHED, HISSING WHISPER) Where ARE you?! ... You're, you're goddam right I'm filling in for you, I'm onstage right now. That's right. Right now. I am standing in front of the audience. How's it going?! Well it's not going too well. Because they're not laughing."Apatow's movie, on the other hand, completely fails to accomplish anything in the humor or anti-humor department. Instead it just makes you grim, grimmer than a holocaust documentary. Grimmer than Grey Gardens.