by The Plaid Adder
Comments: plaidder@mindspring.com
Keep in mind that neither of us has ever seen the actual show, since we don't ahve cable; all we knew about it going in was that Kenny always got killed, and that all the main characters looked just like Siubhan's Tiny Trek.
I don't know what it says about me that a song titled "Uncle Fucker" made me laugh until I wept. Nevertheless, the fact remains: despite being obsessed with things I normally would not consider worthy material for good comedy (for instance, fart jokes, profanity, and coming up with as many sodomy-related insults as possible), this movie made me laugh very hard, and I have been trying since Sunday to figure out why.
Part of it, surely, is that there is clearly a lot of intelligence mobilizing all of this sophomoric humor. For instance, there's the fact that the entire plot is a metatextual joke. The film is about a campaign organized by the mothers of South Park against a film from Canada full of, as Kyle's mother puts it, "obscenities and toilet humor." The representation of this film within Bigger, Longer, and Uncut means, of course, that BL&U is also a film full of obscenities and toilet humor against which, no doubt, many a parental campaign was organized. It does what it represents. I love that. The meta experience is augmented by the numerous parodies of musicals that are incorporated into this movie musical, with more subtlety than one usually sees nowadays from, for instance, The Simpsons. The opening number, for instance, parodies the opening of Disney's Beauty and the Beast, just as Satan's big number parodies "Part of Your World" from The Little Mermaid; there's an extended parody of Les Miserables in the "La Resistance" song (especially the Mole's final scene). There are other less specific parodies, like the "Kyle's Mom is a Bitch" song (inspired by the kind of "folk tune" commonly found on children's singalong recordings) and even "Uncle Fucker," whose humor I think has to derive from the combination of gratuitous obscenity with the kind of lyrics and choreography we would normally associate with a production number from "Oklahoma." What makes all that work is that while clearly linked to their sources, all fo these parodies are also original. The composers haven't tried too hard to approximate the original tunes, and the songs do actually advance the plot of the movie that they're in instead of just lampooning the movies from whcih they're borrowed.
Upon mature consideration, I decided that the best example of South Park working its diabolical magic upon us was the musical number "What Would Brian Boitano Do?" Analyzing this scientifically I came up with my Dual Principles of Comedy That Is Actually Funny. What you need, in order for a comedy to be actually funny, is
1) Excess
and
2) The unexpected.
Things that are unexpected are funny because you couldn't have thought of them yourself. This is my problem with a lot of stuff that's supposed to be funny--you can see it all coming a mile away because it's so obviously derivative of formulas we're all familiar with. Who would expect to find a musical number about what Brian Boitano would do in the middle of a movie like this? Or indeed, anywhere? Now, it's possible that because we're not familiar with the show this element was exacerbated; for all I know, these characters wonder what Brian Boitano would do every time theyr'e faced with a difficult situation. Which doesn't change the fact that I don't think anyone but the guys who write this show have ever stopped and asked themselves how Brian Boitano would respond to adveristy.
Similarly, the verses of "What Would Brian Boitano" do progress quickly from a semi-plausible account of his doings in the Olympics through absurdity into the tale of his slaying of the giant evil robot king in the year 3010. This is what I mean by "excess." Comedy should always go beyond the limits implicit in the premise.
The other way in which I define "excess" in this context is "the writers doing something they don't have to do." Here, the best example is the Mole, who is a stock character combining elements of Peter Lorre, POW escape movies, and the rebels from Les Miserables. OK, that explains his haunted look, his strategic expertise, and so on. It doesn't explain his apparently long-term frustration with God, who he hates and taunts with the same language the kids use on each other, or lines like, "Careful? Was my mother careful when she stabbed me in the heart with a coathanger while I was still in the womb?" All that is excess--extra stuff added to complicate a character whom other writers would have been content to leave as a functional and mildly amusing stock figure. It's really more disturbing than funny--to the kids in the film as well as the viewers--but the point is that it shows the writers are working, as opposed to on autopilot.
The one complaint both of us had about the film is, of course, the almost complete absence of women, aside from the crazed and rampaging maternal figures. Sure, you have to give them some credit for the "finding the clitoris" element (even though neither of us would have recognized that glowing red mound speaking with Glinda the Good Witch's voice as a giant clitoris if it hadn't identified itself). But that doesn't change the fact that the only representations of femininity in this film, aside from the usually-silent Wendy and the visions of naked breasts toward which Kenny floats on his way to heaven, are these hysterical and apocalypse-triggering mothers. However, as I said, none of that prevented me from laughing. When you come down to it, really, the thing is that BL&U is a number of things that almost no American comedies are: intelligent, original, unpredictable, and funny. The fact that happens to share some obsessions with the average Adam Sandler vehicle is purely incidental.
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