After finding out how many people were reading this blog my first thought was, “maybe I should tone down what I write a little bit, I thought only my friends were reading this stuff I’ve been posting”. Well all of those thoughts ceased on Saturday. I was at the pool and somehow a few of us there started talking about the funniest movies we had seen recently, mine being “The Hangover”. Great quotes.. That’s how I rate a movie..by how much I quote it in weeks to come..If you saw it, I bet some of you thought it was sick…your WRONG..but I’ll get to that. Then this lady, probably in her mid thirties, started telling us about a movie she had recently seen. It involved a lot of famous comedians telling one joke. I will not state the name of the movie because you will do what I did and go straight to Blockbuster and rent it. The lady said she had never laughed so hard at a movie in her life, and that we would not be able to breathe while watching it.
Well me being be, I take a shower, get in the car, go to Blockbuster and rent this “movie”. Before I get into this let me preface my background, I have been to 9 bachelor parties, 3 Mardi Gras, Bourbon Street around 20 times, and Beale Street around 50 times. I lived in an all male dorm for a year where nastiness was the norm. I lived in a Fraternity House for a year where you could expect to see anything when you opened a closed door. What could be seen on the tvs in every room was illegal in most states I believe, and things said never had a filter. None of that, and I mean none of it, prepared me for this movie.
Within the first five minutes I literally gagged,and there were no graphics it was just words were doing this to me. What was said was so vile, so nasty, so unthinkable that even Charles Manson would have had to go read Ecclesiastes after hearing two minutes of it. Jeffry Dahmer would of cried for his nanny. Hannibal Lecter would of said “Hello Clarice..I think I’ll take the cyanide now and just end it.” I gave it time and more time, but I was not laughing…neither was the person watching it with me. After 20 minutes with our jaws on the floor and trying not to puke, he looked at me and said “do you really want to watch this?”. To which I replied “Hell no. I think we should burn this so that no one at the store ever has to be put through what we just went through”. I returned the movie and seriously considered seeing an exorcist about what I had seen. I also vowed to try and drown the lady who told me to rent it the next time I saw her. If she really found that funny, she needs to be shot..repeatedly..
It made me start to wonder what makes something funny? For me I think it is the unexpected, like in movies like Borat and Jackass. The unexpected is funny until it is so unexpected it just freaks you out. Like the movie in question. A guy slipping and falling…. funny..That guy being paralyzed from the fall..not funny.. A fart joke..funny…talking about a bowel movement in detail for 10 minutes..not funny..in fact disgusting. I think its great when people are funny, and I like for people to push limits. However, I refuse to respect entertainment, if you can call it that, to which its only asset is shock value. It won’t last.