Sober Sunday Reflections on...the Ben Stiller Effect

I don’t know what it is with me and Ben Stiller movies—but the first time I see them, I am unable to appreciate them. No, I don’t have a shitty sense of humor—I get the jokes and, eventually (it usually takes about 5 years) I decide that they’re brilliant. It just, for whatever reason, always takes me at least 5 years to finally appreciate a Ben Stiller movie. 

I did this with The Cable Guy. I did it with Zoolander. And, most recently, I did it with Tropic Thunder. At the time I watched these movies, I got the jokes—I understood what was being satirized (self-obsessive models, TV-obsessed creep-oids, and hokey Hollywood archetypes)—but something just didn’t jive with me—and I use “jive” because I think it’s more accurate than saying the movies didn’t “click”—they definitely clicked, but the timing was off, as it always is when I watch a Ben Stiller movie. 

Anytime I hear tale of a new Ben Stiller movie (as ridiculous as this sounds), I always get excited. I don’t have a comedy hard-on for Ben Stiller, per se, but I like him well-enough and hearing descriptions of his movies always entice me because they are always big-idea movies and, often, he is poking fun at things I, myself, like to poke fun at.

Case in point: in high school, I noticed that anytime a well-respected white-guy actor played a retarded person in a movie, they usually got an Oscar. In my head, I thought up a fake-trailer for a fake-move called “Oscar.” In addition to the retard-thing, the trailer would be pumped full of every Oscar-baiting cliché imaginable: from the multi-racial, multi-generational ensemble trope (Crash, Magnolia, Traffic etc.) to the white-people-learning-to-accept-black people trope (Remember the Titans, A Time to Kill, Driving Miss Daisy, and, most recently, The Blind Side—though this wasn’t released when I was in high school). The trailer would end with who-the-fuck-ever H-town hunk-boy playing the retard staring straight into the camera and saying something moronic that’s supposed to also double as profound followed by one of those twinkling title cards that flashes the name of the movie (“Oscar”),. The title is read out-loud by one of those sun-tinged honey-voiced grandpa trailer-voices guys while an orchestra crescendos into a Tinkerbell fart just as the moving shimmer settles upon the “r” in “Oscar.”

 I tried searching for a Google Images picture that would convey me having a million-dollar idea and, instead, came up with this: source material for Ben Stiller's characterization of Simple Jack

Having this fake-trailer in my head made me feel uneasy—because I knew it was a good idea, but I also knew it was an obvious idea and someone—someone like Ben Stiller—would do it before me, which is a ridiculous head-fantasy since I live in bum-fuck Indiana, have no access to the kind of equipment, cameras, editing tools, etc. to realize this fake-trailer idea and people like Ben Stiller do. Plus: it’s silly and borderline narcissistic of me to get all upset because I have an idea that someone who can actually execute the idea might “steal” from me—meanwhile, all I can do is talk about how I had the idea before them (which no one wants to hear, ever) and they’re the one who gets to reap all the laughs. But that’s exactly what happened with Tropic Thunder—I saw the trailer and the “You never go full-retard” line and I was equally intrigued and embittered—intrigued because the joke addressed the piss-poor “Oscar” satire in my head and embittered because Ben Stiller came to the same conclusion as me and actually did something with it, for which he’d get recognition and I would not. 

I know that sounds crazy but I’m digging deep to excavate this feeling. Maybe “embittered” is too strong of a word. There was no ill-will felt towards Ben Stiller on my part. And I wasn’t really “hurt”—it just tapped into something juvenile (obviously) in me—something I hadn’t felt since I was a kid and we used to play games in class where one kid had to shout out the answer to some lesson-specific question before the other kid. I felt like Ben Stiller beat me to the punch, which is pathetic because he’s Ben Stiller and, if you’ve seen Tropic Thunder, you can see he took thepremise, which we both came to independently, and completely blew me and my simple on-the-nose Oscar-fluff satire out of the comedy water with his own fake-movie-fake-trailer for Simple Jack. 

Either way, I don’t bring this up because it stills bothers me. I may be pathetic but I’m not that pathetic. I just wanted to illustrate how seeing the trailer for Tropic Thunder generated a deep belly-level of excitement in me: finally, a comedy that appealed (specifically) to my sensibilities--“specifically” because it appealed specifically to a comedic-premise I’d thought up independently of the punch-line I saw realized in the Tropic Thunder trailer: the “full-retard” thing. 

I think Vonnegut said something like: “A joke is a riddle. It works because it confuses the brain. You set up the premise, establish the riddle, and while your audience scrambles to figure out the answer, you’ve already delivered the punch-line and the confusion is alleviated instantly.” This is pretty much what happened to me when I saw the Tropic Thunder trailer: I was already well-aware of the premise, had a good idea of what the punch-line might be, but I couldn’t predict how it would be executed exactly, with Robert Downey Jr. in blackface, doing a horribly-offensive gruff black-man voice, telling Ben Stiller: “You never go full-retard.” Seeing it play out was surreal—it went from a joke I thought was funny in my head to a joke put in a major movie that a lot of people were going to see—I can only the describe the feeling as something like seeing video footage of one of your dreams. You have a very personal entitlement to your dreams—or anything that goes on in your head—so seeing that dream outside of your head is jarring. 

Again, I digress.

"Again, I digress" personified

The point of this article is not that I’m a genius—comedic or otherwise. I’m not. In fact, the Oscar idea was probably my only decently funny idea I’ve ever had in the past 10 years—and it wasn’t even that good to begin with—well, not as good as what Ben Stiller did with the same idea in Tropic Thunder. The point is: when I read about, see a trailer, whatever for a new Ben Stiller movie it usually appeals to me because, like all comedy that resonates with people, it touches on, pulls out and puts into words, something very inside my own head, thus: giving form to floating concepts and pushing them to their ironic limit.

So, why is it that whenever I come across news of a new Ben Stiller movie which I’m excited about it takes me well-after its initial release and my first time watching it to appreciate it? 

That, I don’t know. I call it the Ben Stiller Effect—because it only happens with Ben Stiller’s movies.  The first time I watched Tropic Thunder, I don’t think I laughed once—but I got all the jokes. Revisiting the movie recently, there were more than a handful of times where I felt like I was being sucker-punched in the funny-gut (ironically: “funny gut” is also the loose translation of Vonnegut, which really wasn’t a deliberate effort on my part to go back to Vonnegut) because the laughs came out of me almost as a reflex—I believe they’re called belly-laughs and the fact that I experienced a handful of them is quite a feat considering that when I think something is funny, I rarely laugh and, furthermore, when it comes to funny movies, it takes a lot to get a belly-laugh out of me. But that’s exactly what happened. I can’t explain it—I don’t feel like much has changed (about me or how I interpret the world) since my first viewing. It just “jived” better with me the second time—like The Cable Guy, which I remember being disappointed by when I was a Jim Carrey-loving kid but when I revisited years later thought was a brilliant if not prophetic satire of our pop-culture-obsessed—well,…culture (myself-included).

That being said, there is one exception to the Ben Stiller Effect. Back in high school (the last time in my life I was able to make meaningful memories, apparently…) I bought the  Ben Stiller Show on DVD. I watched it once and hardly laughed at all—though I still recognized what was being poked fun at in each sketch (mostly early 90’s pop culture: U2, 90210, those very sexy Calvin Klein ads, etc.). Years later, I revisited it. But there was no “jiving” effect—I still didn’t think it was funny. I think I revisited it once more before revisiting it again at the beginning of this year—and neither time did it finally “jive” with me, which is unfortunate because I really want to like the Ben Stiller Show—I would have gotten rid of my copy long ago if not for the simple fact that some of my favorite belly-laugh-inducing comedians are on the show or wrote for the show—these people include: Bob Odenkirk, Andy Dick, Ben Stiller, David Cross, Judd Apatow (who, I believe, was the show’s producer) and many more. Of course, in rock circles, when too many awesome people get together, its well known that the results are always mediocre (Wild Flag anyone?)--this is called the Supergroup Principle: you pack too many idiosyncratic and awesome voices together and it always comes out shit. I hate to admit it but it seems like the same thing happened with the Ben Stiller Show: too many people who were funny in their own right (look at the cast, for fuck's sake) trying to unify for one project that just didn't gel. 

Pictured: the Traveling Wilburys of comedy

The same thing kind of happened with the State: you could see the rift in who starred in what sketches, which was oddly defined by: the Jews (Michael Ian Black, David Wain, and Michael Showalter) writing and starring in their own sketches; the Reno 911 crowd (Kerry Kinney-Silver, Thomas Lennon, Ben Garant) all writing and starring in their own very Python-esque sketches and the two Italians (Joe Lo Truglio and Ken Marino) split evenly as supporting stars in either group's sketches. The end-result never felt very cohesive, since each group had its own sensibilities--you could see hints of the things each group would go on to do later (the Jews with Stella and the Reno 911 group with Reno 911).

Unlike the Ben Stiller Show, however, the State was (and still is) very funny. I’m still holding out though, hoping that one day I will be able to appreciate the Ben Stiller Show, like I've come to eventually appreciate all of Ben Stiller's projects—but, after four re-visits, things are looking dire.