By Timothy Hager
Hollywood is plastered with former stand-up comics who transitioned to movie stardom. But movies ABOUT stand-up comedy are rare. Why?
With the Bradley Cooper-directed Is This Thing On? getting great reviews and opening at The Independent Picture House — starring Will Arnett as a middle-aged man who finds purpose as a stand-up comic in New York’s comedy scene — let’s tackle why it’s difficult to make a good movie about stand-up.
(A quick caveat: TV has done a great job at tackling the subject, from Seinfeld to The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel to the recent Baby Reindeer. There have also been some revealing documentaries that explored the art form, such as Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedian. Those don’t count.)
Reason 1: Biopics Don’t Work
Lenny (1974)
While it’s surprising that icons such as Richard Pryor or George Carlin have not had biopics made about their rich lives, it’s also not surprising at all. Audiences go into a movie about Bob Dylan already knowing the music, because music transcends eras. But the best stand-up material has an expiration date — it’s topical and of-the-moment.
What’s Timothée Chalamet going to do as Carlin? Just memorize his act and repeat it, 30 years later, without context and without connection to the time it was written?
That’s a long way of saying, the 1974 biography of Lenny Bruce starring Dustin Hoffman works when Hoffman is Bruce off the stage and slogs when he’s Bruce on stage. It’s easy to translate to an audience why someone was important, harder to translate why they were entertaining. (Not that “entertaining audiences” was Bruce’s focus toward the end of his career — as the legendary free-speech advocate battled both courts and his heroin addiction — but that’s kind of the point.)
Hoffman is brilliant as the demon-battling Bruce. Bob Fosse’s direction — with the rich black-and-white cinematography and the unique, for its time, nonlinear storytelling — puts the actors and their performances first. But as with a lot of movies about stand-up, Bruce’s comedy is not really the point, leaving audiences who don’t know Bruce’s history wondering what the fuss was about.
Reason 2: Stand-Up Is Hard
Punchline (1988)
Tom Hanks is a funny guy. Sally Field has been funny in movies. Neither of those things necessarily prepare you to be a good stand-up comic. Watching an actor performing material they’ve memorized, written by someone else, is like bad karaoke.
Fields stars as married housewife Lilah Krystick who performs at an open mic one night, catching the eye of experienced and edgy comic Steven Gold (Hanks). Lilah enrolls in Steven’s comedy class, eventually becoming his protégé. As her career grows and his stalls, tensions — romantic, professional, otherwise — rise.
(Quick tidbit about Hollywood’s misogyny: Fields would go from playing Hanks’ love interest in Punchline to, six years later, playing his mother in Forrest Gump.)
There’s a lot about Punchline that’s endearing — seeing a young Hanks play against type, watching Fields shine on stage, the incredible supporting cast led by John Goodman — but you never buy Fields (or Hanks, for that matter) as real comics. They are good actors who memorized jokes.
In Is This Thing On?, critics have been applauding Arnett for his comfort and natural ease on stage. Punchline could have used more of that.
Reason 3: Stand-Up Is Short; Movies Are Long
Funny People (2009)
Given that it’s populated with real stand-ups and a cast of “funny people” good at improv, it’s probably not surprising that the best thing about Judd Apatow’s Funny People are the live comedy performances. You buy that Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Aubrey Plaza, Aziz Ansari, etc., are real comics, because they are spontaneously funny for a living.
The problem with Funny People, though, is it just keeps going and going. Comedies should not exceed two hours. (Is This Thing On? comes in at 121 minutes — close enough.) It also takes itself more seriously than it should. Although “funny people are really sad clowns” is a trope rooted in real life, it doesn’t mean it’s fun to watch in a movie.
Apatow, coming off the success of Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, casts Sandler as a former comic turned actor, George Simmons, and Seth Rogen as aspiring comic Ira Wright (basically, versions of themselves). The plot centers around the older Simmons, who has cancer, taking in the younger Wright as a protégé. Then there are subplots about ex-wives and roommates who are TV stars and cancer being cured and on and on and on.
Not surprisingly, the cast is great. The stand up is authentic. The material the actors work with feels written by the characters they play. But the movie never feels like it knows if it’s a comedy or a drama, or a parody of Hollywood, or a movie about stand-up culture.
Apatow set out to make THE movie about stand-up comedy and ended up stalling the genre for years. Even the best stand-up needs to turn a bloated 20-minute set into a tight 15.
Has Bradley Cooper figured out the key to making a good movie about stand-up? Come see for yourself! Tickets to Is This Thing On? are on sale now.