...when its just a big joke. I think Tim and Eric try to see how much $hit they can get away with at our expense. I think this one was let's do our regular routine,dress it up as art,and then watch critics and pretentious jerk offs wonder what it was all about. When really its just me and my buddies running around town acting like jackasses and saying and doing stuff we wish we could get away with in real life. That's it.
shareI'm not so sure it's JUST a big joke and the typical jackassery. Eric was totally unchanged while Tim was more purposeful and seemed to actually be acting. So, I'm not conviced it's typical T&E style satire through someone else's lens.
shareNo it's not. The jokes on you.
shareI think it's cynical just to look at like a big scam or a joke being played on "pretentious" audiences. In one sense, it is exactly what you've described it to be, but on the other hand, when you have a movie called "The Comedy" about a bunch of people acting like jackasses and yet it goes to great lengths NOT to provoke laughter, to instead make every moment drop with a thud, then I think that inherently creates an intriguing dynamic. And I don't think it's pretentious at all for people to find that interesting and thought provoking.
shareI'm convinced this is Tim and Eric playing a joke on the audience. This is anti-humor to the extreme. They have done this before, but they kicked it up several notches.
My wife and I are huge Tim and Eric fans (we saw them live a few times--along with Neil Hamburger who is in this). When the movie was over, we busted out laughing because we realized we've been had.
I would never put it past these guys to do this.
But what is the scam here? How are people being "had"? The movie is what it is. It's not funny, the characters are reprehensible, and people are inclined to dwell on these facts just as they would after witnessing a car wreck.
Telling us that the film-makers were trying to "pull" something on the audience, and that you're too smart to be taken in by it, is irrelevant here. The end product is what it is. For instance, if someone dropped a little piece of trivia on me and told me that Beethoven's 9th symphony was actually a big joke he had secretly pulled on the public, a way of parodying what he thought was their awful taste in music, would that mean that the feeling that are evoked when I hear the "Ode to Joy" are a total fraud? Of course not! It would make me sad that such a beautiful piece had been composed under such a negative pretext, but the music is the music, and that's what ultimately counts. And here, the movie is the movie. You take it for what it is, not for what anyone was trying to "pull" by making it.
You're setting yourself up for a counter straw man argument by comparing "The Comedy" to Beethoven's 9th. I see what you're saying, but it's difficult to think of Beethoven's mind and the minds behind "The Comedy" in the same vein.
Erik Satie might be a better pick, tho! Simplistic harmonies, elements of humor, repetitive tunes that expressed satire with titles that parodied the pretentious, but no less significant or disqualified from high art.
Yes, it occurred to me when I was writing that that someone could pick at my comparing the movie to Beethoven. People get funny like that about comparisons. I'm not trying to say that movie is on a par with the 9th Symphony or of the same style or of the same quality or even remotely in the same spirit. In fact, if anything, it feels profane to mention the two in the same paragraph.
However, I was just trying to say that there is a point where a movie or a work or art takes on a life of its own, apart from whatever the deliberate intentions were involved in creating it. I could have picked anything really. It was just that the 9th Symphony was just the first thing to pop into my head for some reason.
I'm a huge Tim & Eric fan, too, but you're wrong and you're missing out on a great film. If anything, the goal would be to make you feel uncomfortable, not pull a "prank" on you.
share[deleted]
I was under the impression that this wasn't a Tim & Eric film, just one they were (brilliantly) cast in. If they were the minds behind this then there may have been something to that theory.
share[deleted]
This wasn't written by them. This is an actual film.
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"Love means never having to say you're ugly." - the Abominable Dr. Phibes