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I’m not beating the “didn’t finish the Sunday Dispatch” allegations…
I write the Fran Magazine Sunday Dispatches between Friday afternoon and Saturday night, depending, a feature that reveals that I don’t get up to all to much most weekends. I have been in a somewhat endless push and pull with the notion of “working on weekends”: I have friends who literally log off from Friday at 5pm and log back on Monday at 8am, and I have friends who regularly do work all weekend, turning the conventional five day work week into a seven day work week where you only wind up working like four hours a day. The latter is where I’ve made my peace, though occasionally I resent my inability to fully disengage.
When it comes to the Sunday Dispatch, however, a feature I’m sure you’re now aware is for paid subscribers only, I often go back and forth throughout the week and make additions and addendums and this past week was a week in which there was a lot I meant to say and then didn’t say because I half-forgot I was writing it until Sunday morning. So when it came to the movie portion of the Dispatch, well, let’s pick up where we left off.
The state of the “indie comedy”
I wrote the following about Graham Mason’s Inspector Ike which I watched last week:
It is tempting, I guess, because I have enough tenuous ties to the “alt comedy community” to say “aw!” and move on, but I do feel much less affectionately towards it than I would have if I saw it a few years ago. In terms of indie filmmaking and low budget work, I think there’s an unparalleled production design and sensibility.
This is, like, the most loaded two-sentence thing I’ve written in recent memory, in part because I did not want to say what I actually want to say, and I intended to use this as a placeholder while I figured out what I wanted to say, and any longtime Fran Magazine reader knows that I’m basically saying nothing here outside of “great gowns, beautiful gowns.” For a long time I was completely disengaged from comedy, let alone comedy criticism, because of a fake disease that we’ll called “oomfism” — I am too close on a number of levels to myriad microbudget and indie projects of late, and live in fake fear of my dislike or distaste resulting in, idk, me not getting to do minutes on someone’s showcase? This ignores, obviously, that I have not actively done comedy in four years and have no intention to do it ever again, and that anyone I know who is close to this already knows how I feel. I just hate going on the record, even though I believe a large issue with comedy criticism right now is that no one wants to go on the record, because everyone just wants to be working! I’m empathetic as someone who would love nothing more than an opportunity to be working, but smiles and nods can only go so far, and ultimately, at Fran Magazine, I hope to write things that are true.
That said, I totally recommend you watch Inspector Ike: it’s light and occasionally funny, and for those who are invested in “the future of filmmaking,” it feels necessary to keep up with the world of microbudget genre works. I could certainly stand to do more of this in the comedy and horror realms, though I think my brave era more or less extends to both (due to personal experience and being afraid, respectively). Inspector Ike stars Ikechukwu Ufomadu as the titular Ike, a character of his own creation, a Columbo-type detective, eager to cook and do recipe development while solving some of New York’s most arch crimes. He’s flanked by two other police officers, deputies Hawthorne (the always funny Ana Fabrega) and Dinardo (Anthony Oberbeck).
The three of them are on the hunt to solve a murder case in the New York experimental theater world — a great opportunity for the movie to present “weird art” as vehicle for joke. We learn the murderer before Ike and co.: Harry (Matt Barats of Cash Cow fame) is a sneering, jealous understudy who offs his competition Chip (John Early of Now More Than Ever fame), though there are a handful of twists and turns with the various “wife characters” before it all comes together in a big reveal.
There are two questions that are compelling to me with regards to a film like Inspector Ike:
Does the film work as a comedy?
Is the movie funny?
These are different, in my mind, in part because we have a lot of very unfunny comedies these days, whether they are arch or dramatic or whatever the hell The Bear is. Inspector Ike is a successful pastiche, taking on tropes from old-timey police and detective shows, and presenting a sort of sanitized vision of an otherwise nasty industry. The murderer is motivated by flamboyant ego; Ike is motivated by an amiable sense of justice. It is a functional work with all the neatness of comedy, excelling on its adept production design and color grading and what I can only call “really impressive thrifting” in terms of its costuming and styling. It is more of a complete thing than it is “way too long of a sketch”—but perhaps it does not really transcend “sample television pilot” into “indie movie.”
The second question has left me puzzled for almost a week. Is the movie funny? I keep dancing around it whenever I try to determine an answer: Ufomadu is funny — the character of Ike is very funny — I’m never not laughing at Ana Fabrega’s peculiar delivery. I think the notion of it is funny — as Max Read of Read Max wrote, it’s striving to be a sort of Wet Hot American Summer for a different genre of program, and that’s funny, but — it does not execute funny, it is not joke-rich or joke-dense. It is slight — eighty minutes! — in a way that does it no justice. By its final third I was holding out waiting to see what the funniest characters in the film would do next rather than how the movie itself was going to end. I wondered about the nature of an eponymous film in which its title character feels short-changed: if only all those other people weren’t in the way.
Now More Than Ever…
As I also more or less alluded to in the Sunday Dispatch, I watched and loved John Early’s new comedy special Now More Than Ever — part cabaret, part Last Waltz pastiche, part standup. I think Early is one of the most consistent, funny, and innovative comedians, with an undeniably energetic presence. I’ve long admired his work alongside Kate Berlant, the tireless silliness of their collaborations. I don’t watch a ton of comedy specials anymore — it’s hard to say whether it’s because they don’t hold my attention or because I just don’t care. The only other one I’ve seen this year of any note is the Mulaney special, which I found compelling, if not kind of a bizarre, strange failure. More like going to a Moth storyslam, maybe, than standup comedy — for all he claims to have changed, he is still reliant on an imitation of joke-telling than the jokes themselves.
But the Early special’s style mirrors its own self-importance, the bending archness and hyperbole of it all. So much comedy I’ve seen — much of it debut — has overstuffed itself to the point of indulgence. A lot of that, I think somewhat understandably, is the people at the helm of these projects believing they’re not going to get this chance again. I suspect this is one of many issues that plagued something like Bros: Eichner’s desire to get it all out in one big thing that lands with an inarticulate thud. Early, on the other hand, is equal parts indulgent — the singing! the interstitials! the sheer style of it — and economic. He knows he can only do so much, and he packs as much in as possible. That the interstitials serve the style, that it all amounts to a cohesive and often cinematic vision makes the work feel that much more complete.
It’s easier, I suppose, to have one person doing one thing serving a singular vision. It’s a bit harder in something like Inspector Ike — multiple people, multiple tropes, multiple layered jokes. What gets lost, I fear, is its overall vision, the complete entity, with myriad jockeying at any given time for someone to be the funniest person on-screen. All the wonderful production design and its low budget excellence cannot compete with its overlong scenes and significant stretches of unfunniness — where what we are meant to be watching is more like a reel than a scene, an independent entity in lieu of a vision.
Not to clamor on about “no solidarity in comedy,” but I do think the drive towards standup in lieu of sketch (or improv) in the past decade has made for a generation of performers who only know how to be the funniest guy on stage. A few months after I moved to New York I went to see some friends do a show, and was loosely dismayed to see the host of the show do a solid eight minutes between each guest for truly no apparent reason other than eating up time. The lack of time ceded, the ignoring of the light in the back of the room, as they say, is now apparent across cinema and television — the dreaded 35 minute sitcom episode, and so on. I don’t think this is a distinctly generational problem — the two and a half hour movies of Paul Feig, for instance, didn’t help — but it is increasingly apparent when the television show or film exists to serve the people in it, rather than the other way around.
This is possibly why a show like The Other Two — I STILL HAVE NOT WATCHED MOST OF S3 — holds a place in my heart: the rare, joke-forward vehicle. Not just a sitcom that is funny, but a sitcom that exists to serve its core jokes. It’s one thing to have Ken Marino in a show, but it’s another to curb his quirked-up comedic persona to the conceit of the show rather than let him do “a Ken Marino thing.”
Enjoy what is somehow still the song of the summer, and don’t get me in trouble with the Brooklyn alt-comedy scene more than I already am.
Fran Magazine maintains its position on The Other Two even after THR piece, btw...
Season Three is inventive and hilarious.