This is the End is a funny movie, much funnier than I expected, full of honest laughs (like real giggles, not smiles or snorts) and clever meta-fiction, where all the characters play joke versions of themselves, with fictionalization levels ranging from the slightly-heightened reality of Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm to the outrageous against-type of Neil Patrick Harris in Harold and Kumar. But don’t worry, Seth Rogen still smokes weed, yo! There’s also sociopathic cokehead Michael Cera, pretentious James Franco, fruity Jonah Hill, misanthropic Jay Baruchel, and Danny McBride and Craig Robinson, whose characters can best be described as Danny McBridly and Craig Robinsonish, respectively. If judged only by the cumulative length and volume of laughs, This is the End is the funniest movie of the year. I’m not so sure comedy can be judged like a big dick contest, but we’ll get to that.

Comedy is so personal and weirdly subjective, which isn’t surprising when you think about it: a lot of us choose our friends and the people we date on the basis of a shared sense of humor, so evaluating comedy is such a sub-rational, intuitive process, that describing it is almost as elusive as explaining personal attraction. Almost like love at first sight, with a joke-driven comedy, you can usually tell within the first five minutes whether you’re going to like it or not. A really bad joke basically makes you think I could never be friends with someone who thought that was funny, and vice versa. It’s why bad comedy makes you angry in a way schmaltzy drama can’t. From the very first joke in The Hangover III I knew, this is going to be a long, painful movie, and it was. This is the End was basically the opposite experience. The setups offered just the right amount of foreplay, the timing was just “off” enough to maintain surprise, and the explanation felt natural – not too much, not too little, like a Goldilocks porridge of jizz jokes. When I say “it was on my wavelength,” it’s not just a nebulous figure of speech. It’s like I was picking up the signal at just the rate that they were sending out, like the vibrations of the universe and shit. This is my attempt to explain the sub-explainable: it was funny.

This is the End is at its best in the opening scenes, when we’re being introduced to all the characters. Seth Rogen picks up his less-famous Canadian high school buddy Jay Baruchel from the airport. Baruchel plays a sort of composite of himself and real-life Rogen high school pal and co writer/director Evan Goldberg (Baruchel and Rogen actually met in LA). They get back to Rogen’s strangely over-styled house, and instead of hanging out playing videogames like Jay wants, Seth drags him to a super LA party at James Franco’s house, “on the same street as Channing Tatum.” In addition to all the digs and parodies of all the characters’ real-life personas that I won’t spoil for you (Michael Cera’s persona outdoes even NPH in Harold and Kumar), there’s a deep truth to the way Jay Baruchel’s character tries and fails to relate to all the motor-mouthed extroverts around him. There’s a scene where he’s standing in the midst of a crowd looking confused as all the actors (and Rihanna) crowd around Craig Robinson’s keyboard for a communal sing along. The confused “who the hell are these people?” look on his face as everyone else sings without reservation illustrates the writer/performer dynamic beautifully. Any writer who’s spent time with the drama crowd can relate. They’re just so big and energetic, and you want to join in, but it’s exhausting.

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It’s just the principals on this week’s Frotcast, though I do have an interview with Buck Angel, live on tape from SXSW after the premiere of the documentary about him, Mr. Angel. We also play the full clip of my stand up set in LA from a few weeks back, with pauses and commentary from the frot crew, of course. Ben finally saw Queen of Versailles, so we talked about that, and finished things off with a discussion of comedy movies. Specifically, if a comedy that was amazing when it came out but now seems dated, is that a quality inherent to the movie, or is it just a victim of its own success, where the jokes only seem stale now because everyone tried to rip them off and ran them into the ground. Discuss.

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Sorry about my face and giant head.

Here’s a fun little video that’s been making the rounds among my stand-up comedian friends: comedian Jake Weisman, performing at the Hell Yes Fest in New Orleans over the weekend, finds himself dealing with your typical drunk jackass who thinks he’s helping entertain the audience by interjecting dumb comments in the middle of Weisman’s set ups (you’d be amazed at how common it is for drunk people to talk to the the guy on stage as if it’s a private conversation between just them two – I mentioned this phenomenon in my Dave Chappelle story a while back). It starts about 4:40 into the video, and rather than trying to power through his bits over the top of Drunk Jackass, Weisman wisely sits down and prods the guy who wants all the attention onto the stage.

Shockingly, the drunk guy is obnoxious and not funny, and is very bad at taking direction. Weisman starts literally, physically wrestling with Drunk J, and at that point, even the heckler-humiliation bit is starting to go south, when all of a sudden, at 6:55 of the video, a bag of cocaine falls out of DJ’s pocket. Weisman points out that this is the first time he’s seen cocaine (and you call yourself a comedian?!) and tries to convince DJ that’s he’s going to go to jail. The guy eventually leaves, and it’d be nice to think that he’d learned a lesson, but I doubt it. If it was me, I would’ve done what my grandpappy did to teach me a lesson when I got into his coke stash: he made me snort the whole bag.

In any case, well done, Jake Weisman, you win the award for heckler-shaming. Though I have to admit, that little shrug the kid gives when Weisman hands him his cocaine is pretty classic. “Eh, he found my cocaine, whaddyagonna do?”

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This is part one of my interview with Klown stars Frank Hvam (center, with glasses) and Casper Christensen (top, chin clefting). Klown (read Laremy’s review) opens in New York, Austin, and Los Angeles, and on VOD everywhere, Friday, July 27th. Check back next week for part two. Subscribe to the Frotcast to hear the audio.

Every (Comedy) Scene Has a Story

As my Danish sources tell me, Casper Christensen was part of the original group that introduced stand-up comedy to Denmark in the late eighties, a small and somewhat insular crowd surrounding one bar in Copenhagen. Hvam formed part of a second wave in the mid nineties, at least partly as a reaction to the original group. They’ve been working together since around the late nineties, and you wouldn’t think there’d be any of that initial friction left, having been worn down by success and the passage of almost a decade and a half, but, surprisingly, as I found out, you’d be wrong. I didn’t know any of this going in, but being a stand-up comedian in a second-tier city myself (i.e., any city other than New York or LA, in my case San Francisco), I was curious as to how one gets his start as a comic in a place with an even smaller scene (or in this case, no scene). I figured Frank and Casper might have an interesting angle, and I got all of that, plus a fairly contentious discussion of “kicking up.” Basically, it refers to whose balls you can bust. Most of us are probably familiar (whether we’re aware of it or not) with the concept that it’s better (or for the comedian’s purpose, funnier) to tear down those above you, status/position in society-wise, than it is to hold down those below you. Apparently in Danish, this concept is known as “kicking up.”  A particular event in Frank and Casper’s past had “kicking up” implications, and as I found out, they’d interpreted it quite differently.

The occasion for the interview was the US release of their film, Klown, based on the TV show of the same name, which ran for six seasons (the movie itself was completed two years ago). While the setting wasn’t much different than from a usual studio-thrown junket (apart from the fact that we were sitting in a karaoke room above a bowling alley in Austin and that FilmDrunk was invited), I don’t think it’s going too far to say that I not only got a really intense interview, I’m pretty sure I witnessed, like, an actual moment. Real life rarely has sign posts like fiction, marking epiphanies and milestones with symbolic events where people suddenly learn a lesson or evolve, but I could swear I actually watched Frank and Casper discover something about themselves before my very eyes. And you know I wouldn’t lie to you about something like that because I’m too f**king lazy. It’s possible they could’ve been putting me on, but I doubt it, because I’ve been told Scandinavians turn into gnomes if they lie.

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Dave Chappelle hasn’t been involved with any TV or movie projects in a couple years, but he has been staying busy performing semi-secret stand-up shows across the country (which sell out almost instantly), and from the looks of it, tearing phone books in half. When I saw him perform a few months back, he seemed to be going onstage without much if any prepared material, with a plan to just improvise and riff for the better part of two hours (a plan which worked, mostly, and was impressive as hell). The downside of that style is that if you get side tracked, the set can go south in a hurry. Which is what sounds like happened at a recent charity event in Miami, where Dave reportedly “told one joke and then stood onstage and sighed for 45 minutes” when an audience member wouldn’t stop filming him. Not exactly helping the audience’s case was CNN reporter Roland Martin, who live-tweeted the event. Which Dave knew, because he’d taken to checking his cell phone during the set. Aw, just like my girlfriend does during sex. “Ugh, so bored rite now lol. #finishalready”

Here’s the twitter chronicle, as compiled by Vulture:

This Dave Chappelle set is bizarre. He’s spent more time going back & forth with one audience member, & pretty much stopped telling jokes

One woman just yelled, “Can you tell a joke so we can enjoy ourselves!” He got texted four times during his show and actually checked them

I’m jut not understanding what threw him off. He’s complained about folks videotaping his set, yelling out loud. I don’t get it

“This crowd is serious as hell,” he says. Dave, we’re trying to figure out what we’ve listened to for the last 25 minutes.

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