Fumarama

Kristin Chenoweth was on the season finale of Ugly Betty as a dental hygenist obsessed with romantic comedies. I am not entirely fluent with Kristin Chenoweth's body of work, but it seems to me that Ugly Betty's campy humor is where her skills lie. She is most famous for Broadway musicals, a genre in which campy humor reigns supreme.

This is another reason why Studio 60 (now cancelled) was such a bad show. Sorkin based his main female character, Harriet, on Chenoweth, but then seemed to miss Chenoweth's brand of humor entirely. He completely failed to capture this absurd, over the top spirit that Chenoweth brings to her characters. It is just funny that Sorkin created a show with one of his ex girlfriends as the inspiration for the main character and it seems fairly obvious that this show is one that his ex would never ever act on.

I was at the Museum of Television and Radio today and watched one of those Steve Martin on SNL retrospectives. Among the skits shown was one with Dan Aykroyd called "Two Wild and Crazy Brothers" about the Festrunk brothers, a pair of horny, clueless brothers from Czechoslavakia. Why has there not been more comments about how similar the characters in this skit are to Borat? I mean they have the exact same accent and the same manner of speech. Also, the same sort of objectification of women and similar jokes about poverty in the homeland.

Here are passages from the transcript:

Georg Festrunk: And here is a thing I will tell you: that two swinging foxes have the hots-on for us, and are coming here tonight to let us hold on to their big American breasts!

Yortuk Festrunk: [ pours some drinks ] Why not? There's nothing preventing them. After all, there is no other pair of Czech brothers who cruise and swing so successfuly in tight slacks!

Georg Festrunk: [ sips his drink and toasts Yortuk ] We are.. two wild and crazy guys!

Yortuk Festrunk: [ walks into the living room ] Oh, no.. our bachelor pad certainly is messed around. Soon, will be the foxes. Where is the portable floor vacuum that we brought with us from Czechoslavakia?

Georg Festrunk: Wait here now, and you'll find out! [ he wheels out the oversized industrial floor vacuum - Yortuk sucks up everything lying on their coffee table ] This floor vacuum is such a wonderful household convenience that we've wanted for many years!

Yortuk Festrunk: Yes! Usually, in Czechoslavakia, only high party officials of the Communist Party can get them right away!

Also

Georg Festrunk: Slap my hand, black soul man! [ extends his hand, Cliff slaps it ]
Cliff: [ extends his hand for a slap back, but Georg is mesmorized staring at his own slapped hand ] Uh, hi Georg, hi Yortuk. Hey, man, I was invited to this really hot party tonight. Do you guys wanna go?
Yortuk Festrunk: No way! That's your funeral! [ laughs ]
Georg Festrunk: Don't come crawling to us. Two hot fashion models from the fox bar will be here soon to give themselves to the Festrunk Brothers!
Cliff: [ perplexed ] You.. got two ladies coming here tonight? I don't believe it.
Georg Festrunk: We cruised for them in our tight slacks which give us great bulges!

See, what is most striking is the similarities in the diction. Words like great bulges, or black soul man, are of the same type of words that Borat uses. So did Sasha Baron Cohen intend to pay homage to this old skit? Or are all these characters referring to some earlier comedic character I am not familiar with?

There is a problem with visual entertainment about "great writers." If said brilliant writer is going to share her writing, the writing does indeed have to be brilliant. I can't remember which episode exactly, but I remember at some point is the college episodes of Dawson's Creek, Joey now wanted to be a writer (she wanted to be an artist first, remember? I wish the show had stuck with that), and so one of the episodes is narrarated as if she is writing it, and I remember getting kind of uncomfortable. "Wow, Joey Potter is actually awful. Are all her writing profs seduced by pretty?"

This was of-course also one of the biggest problems with Studio 60. All these writers were supposed to be so unbelievably funny. And Sorkin insisted on spending an absurd amount of time telling us how funny they were. And sadly, their skits were so very terrible.

So Stranger than Fiction (there are spoilers stop reading here if you don't want to know), the plot is that this guy one day wakes up to have his life narrarated by a British author. The author only writes tragedies, and in one line of the narration she says "little did he know..." that the fact that his watch stopped working and he had to get the time from a stranger "would lead to his imminent death." The watch was ineffectively trying to tell him that his love interest was across the street. Anyway, the knowledge of his imminent death drives the story since he changes his life, and tries to find the writer. Eventually, he does and she gives him the ending. Basically, his watch is set so that he always gets to the bus stop right in time to catch the bus, but because the stranger gave him the wrong time, his watch was a few minutes fast. Thus, he is at the bus stop in advance and is there when a boy rides his bike in front of the bus. He runs in front of the bus to save the boy and dies. Except the British author can no longer kill him because Harold has read the book and was willing to sacrifice himself for literature. So instead, Harold is just severely injured. The movies ends with a passage narrated from Emma Thompson's book about we are all connected or something. I can't remember. As my friend pointed out, it was really terrible writing.

But it was not the bad narration at the end that bothered me, my god, you should hear the narration on One Tree Hill (even I don't watch that show). It was the structure of the story within the story. The moment that drives the whole story, the one that leads to his imminent death...in terms of the movie plot it is perfect, since it is the catalyst for everything else. But for the underlying story...the fact that his watch goes nuts does not drive the author's story. It is this innocuous moment, as she says herself. Yes, he is a man obsessed with exact numbers, and yes his watch was trying to tell him something about his love interest, but for a moment to be followed by a line like this drove his imminent death, something far more important to the story of Howard Crick has to be happening at the moment. In the underlying novel (unlike the movie), the watch is not the catalyst for change. The watch does not set off the series of events that lead to his death. It just ends up killing him. Anyway, my point is that the fact that his watch kills him is not sufficiently ironic to merit it being a particularly interesting ending to the book. The movie failed not in writing necessarily, but in actually having its writer/protagonist write a good story.

Hypothetically, say I had a friend who did not really like Borat, would you consider that person a total sourpuss? Everyone I know saw it in the theater, and everyone just raved and raved about it. These are people whose tastes I respect. Even my parents liked it. I was just very surprised when the dvd ended and I was kind of like "oh."

I had this conversation with a classmate. (former classmate? I am no longer a student. So strange.) Anyway, he was arguing that when telling funny stories you always tell the story in the first person regardless of whether or not it happened to you, and you always claim the story is completely true regardless of how much you are exagerating. And I understand that this is what people do, but I kind of feel like it is cheating humor. There are two levels of funny. There are things that are funny because they are just funny, and then there are things that are funny because the person laughing believes it really happened. I mean this is true for interesting too. Apparently, James Frey first tried to sell his books to publishers as a work of fiction and it was universally rejected. He then decided to call it a memoir and suddenly he was published and on Oprah. Or the fact that Christopher Hitchens was rude to me at a party isn't funny in itself, it is only funny if you believe that a drunken Hitchens told me to move away from the alcohol so he could have more. He actually didn't said move, he said, well, are you going to get up for me? (god, I was pissed. But I was shy and I just moved).

I mean I imagine there are lots of people who might just find the characters inherently funny. But so much of the pleasure i got out of Ali G was the "oh my god, he just asked Boutros Boutros Ghali if Disneyland will ever become part of the UN. That is really funny." But I know this is true. I know he actually asked Ghali these questions. Anyway, when I was watching Borat I felt like it was all pretty set up. I mean I think that Pamela Anderson running away from him and he chasing after her is incredibly funny if Pamela Anderson had no idea what was going on and honestly thought a crazy man was going to force her to marry him. But if this was Pamela Anderson acting, just the concept in itself of some wierd man's obsession with Anderson and her running away fictionalized is kind of lame. Or like the sexist drunken fratboys: funny if he just happened to come across said frat boys and this is what happened. But not funny if he interviewed dozens of different groups of guys and this was just the best interview. I mean some portion of American males get drunk and don't respect women, I know that already, finding a random representative group just was not that funny. Or all the random American people he got to say kind of racist or homophobic things, how many people do you think he interviewed who did no such thing? Who thought his statements about Jews were appalling?

That being said there were some brilliant moments for all the reasons I loved Ali G. The whole singing the national anthem in front of a crowd of people was great. I found the interview with Alan Keyes pretty funny. Actually everything surrounding the gay pride parade. The parade even saved the part at the beginning in which he tried to kiss random New Yorks and they yelled at him. I initially thought that part was really lame, mostly because if a random man followed by a camera crew tried to kiss me on the street, I would not be pleased. But he made up for it with the juxtaposition.

Also, there was Romanian! I have never heard Romanian in the movies before.