Life, horror, and comedy that isn’t funny
I love watching movies while travelling. When you’re locked into an eight to thirteen-hour plane or bus ride it’s easy to lock into watching things that you wouldn’t normally have the patience for.
I was recently in Australia, and thanks to the limited selection on the planes I was taking I was able to catch a bizarre double-feature: Toni Erdmann and Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Both are comedies. Neither is funny.
Of the two, Toni Erdmann is the one that’s not supposed to be funny. It tells the story of a German retiree who is estranged from his daughter, who works for an oil company in Bucharest. When his dog dies he flies to where she works and visits her. It’s awkward and weird. What makes it worse is that Winfried (the dad) is a notorious prankster, often donning a pair of fake teeth and trying to convince people he’s someone else. He is never, not once, funny.
The movie is over three hours long. It is, at times, painful. It’s also profoundly human and kind of beautiful. The movie sits in Winfried’s bad jokes. It stews in the awkwardness, the furtive glances, the deep need of everyone involved to be anywhere else than where they are, and in doing so it reveals just how much effort people put into propriety. It reveals the horror residing just under the social contract by showing someone breaking it, badly.
You can glimpse a similar horror in Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Another hugely popular but critically reviled movie from Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions. The movie has become a punchline of its own by now, synonymous with Wal-Mart bargain bins and dumb comedy. Watching it after years of studiously ignoring it, I was surprised; it was better than I thought it would be. Kevin James is a hugely charismatic actor, and his enormous eyes let a whole host of emotions play across his face. Paul Blart, as a character, is remarkably well-realized as a result, and I was surprised by how much character work actually went into making Blart seem real.
All of the jokes in Paul Blart hinge on one thing: Paul is a nice guy and everyone in the world hates him. His boss shits on him constantly. Bully Steve Rannazzisi rips on him, letting loose the only verbal jokes in the entire movie. Otherwise, all the big laughs come from physical comedy, as Blart is put into headlocks (by a woman haha), slips, falls, and crashes into things.
I stopped watching the movie when Blart gets accidentally drunk and starts hitting on the (woefully out of his league but predictably intrigued) love interest of the movie, Jayma Mays, revealing that he’s not really such a nice guy after all. Tim Batt and Guy Montgomery noted in their Worst Idea of All Time podcast that Sandler’s Grown Ups 2 had a vicious, ugly worldview, where the weak are to be punished at every turn and the only thing separating the bullies from the good guys is... well, that the good guys are the good guys, i.e. the ones the movie is about. Paul Blart: Mall Cop is similar in this regard. We’re supposed to think Paul Blart is a good guy because he’s bullied, but we’re also expected to laugh every time he is bullied. The movie has no idea what’s funny other than being cruel; it assumes we are as cruel as it is.
Both movies, to my mind, reveal the horror of the failed joke. They reveal the pathetic desire of the comic to be laughed at, and the lengths we’ll go not to acknowledge that. Toni Erdmann uses that to tell a story about becoming real, as the father and daughter figure out how to actually relate (hint: the dad isn’t in the right!), while Paul Blart wants you to laugh at the fat man falling down. One reveals the horror implicit in the world, the other wills the world to be horrible.
Toni Erdmann is the anti-comic who knows how to wield discomfort like a scalpel, forcing the audience to examine themselves. Paul Blart is the shock comic who gets mad at the audience for not laughing, who was probably already mad at the audience for... something?
Both show that comedy is never too far from being horror, and that horror is tightly entwined with comedy.
