Thursday, December 28, 2006

Somebody please fix Broken Lizard


I think it was just a few minutes into Super Troopers when I discovered I had hit comedy gold. The Troopers had just busted a group of college kids for "smokin the refer" and they had them in the backseat of the squad car. One of the guys had eaten a bunch of dope and some shrooms (like my slang?) and he was licking the plastic shield separating the backseat from the front. As he was licking the plastic, he uttered a classic line from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory "the snozberries taste like snozberries." I laughed out loud and thought what a great inside joke. If you get it, you get it. And if you didn't get it, Broken Lizard didn't care. That's what I loved about these guys and this movie. It was not broad comedy and I would say it was one of the best comedies in the past decade.

I was so excited about Super Troopers and Broken Lizard. I asked myself, is this the new Monty Python or National Lampoon? Could be. Could be too early to make that call. So when I saw that Broken Lizard was coming out with another movie called Club Dread, I couldn't wait. And so I saw it. And it sucked. It had some moments of brilliance (the live Pac Man scene and the fireside sing-a-long with Paxton) but it certainly did not build on the comedy brilliance of Super Troopers.

And then Jay Chandrasekhar (one of the members of Broken Lizard) directed The Dukes Of Hazard. Ummmmmm, yeah.

And when I saw that Broken Lizard was making a movie called Beerfest, I was a bit skeptical but I thought it seemed like ample territory for them to make me laugh. So I saw it this past week. And it pretty much sucked. I'm sure if I were a Freshman in college and was about eight beers in, I would think it was comedy gold. But I'm a bit older and was sober, so the jokes were too easy and the pacing was awkward. And I couldn't help but long for another Super Troopers.

So listen up Broken Lizard. The lowbrow road is well-traveled by you. Reward us for being in on the joke. In short, work on some new material. Please.

2 comments:

Reel Fanatic said...

Maybe I just have a lot more maturing to do (actually, I'm sure of that), but I thought Beerfest, while not nearly as great as Super Troopers, was still funnier than almost anything else in the multiplexes, and a damn fine flick

PIPER said...

reel fanatic

Don't get me wrong. I love lowbrow comedy just like the next guy (Dumb and Dumber is among my favorite comedies) but I believe there is something called smart/dumb comedies. A Trooper deciding to see how many times he can say Meow to a guy he has pulled over is very juvenile, but I've never seen anything like it in comedy before. It took some thinking to be dumb.