Meet the %&*#@! Fokkers

SO I'm a little more than dissapointed. I conjured the last entry expecting I would be flamed and fragged and called a communist faggot hairdresser for maligning the great Christian USA, but the only comment I got was a rather nice one provided by someone who was probably only commenting in the return-the-favor sense, since I left a couple of comments on a couple of her posts. (And there's the whole alienation factor right there.) I figure that after I got flamed a couple of times I could back out and explain that I meant people like Bill O'Reilly and Pat Robertson, in that while I understand that they care deeply about Christmas, I am not convinced that they care about Christ, except as a hook for their cheapo rabble-rousing.

But that's not what I wanted to write about this morning. This morning the subject is: comedy. Specifically, two relatively recent examples of the form that I have been force-feeding myself over the course of the last month or so: Meet the Fokkers and Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.

Both are films that, on theatrical release, got cringe-inducing reviews that still acknowledged the good intentions that abounded in them: Burgundy had the tone of a bachelor's party stretched out to the length of a summer vacation, while Fokkers clearly marked a chance for veteran actors to trade licks using Ben Stiller as a fulcrum. We steered clear of the flicks when they hit the theaters, and discussed only briefly the notion of renting them on DVD when they came out in that medium, but now that they are on the movie channels, and we have all the movie channels, I have been able to discover the following similarities between them:

• Both have, at their core, the notion that these people doing these characters opposite each other will be funny, and to that end they should be given free range.
• Bits can be strung together by narrative, so long as the bits cleave to the key attributes of the characters and/or the conflicts between them.
• Anything that was (possibly) funny for five minutes will be funny for ten minutes, and even funnier if referenced two scenes later.

These are reasonable assumptions. They must be, otherwise we wouildn't have two of these movies, and very likely dozens of others, that adhere to them. The result, however, in these two cases are as follows:

• Neither film can be taken head-on. (Or at least I can't do it. I can only watch in five-to-fifteen minute segements, and I usually require some kind of nearby diversion, or else I'll turn the damned things off.)
• Neither film can be taken "seriously" (which is to say that you have to watch them as examples of comic actors acting comically, not actual actors protraying actual characters, or else you'll never make it).
• Both films can be appreciated for their elements, but only if you can forgive a lack of coalescence (which is to say: the whole is less than the sum of its parts).

The result, for me, is that I have caught glimpses of the genius that never blossoms in both films, which have genuinely funny bits but none that actually make me laugh, except for laughing at myself for being enough of a mook to take this crap seriously. Except that I find myself compelled to examine them, in large part because of that old saw (of Twain's) about dissecting humor and frogs. In these cases, I figure what the hell; the frogs are already dead.