When not being funny is supposed to be funny

All I ever heard after I watched and didn't like Wet Hot American Summer was that I was crazy and that I had missed what was so funny about it.

Okay, Kingdom of Comedy Nerds Who Consider This Movie Your Bible, I'll watch your precious Wet Hot American Summer again.

So I did last night.

Nope. It's just not funny.

I'll go you one further. It's not funny because there are not any jokes.

Wet Hot American Summer expects to slide by on an ongoing undercurrent of absurdity, with nary a peak or valley, or a moment specifically constructed to make a person laugh in any traditional sense. While this may be why some people worship it -- and no, worship is not too strong a word -- it's why I'm hoping there's a silent majority that doesn't "get it."

I also wonder if people think that David Wain, who has since morphed into a much more traditional (and therefore more effective) type of joke-slinger (and therefore won me over), has sold out. I mean, the nerve of the guy, deciding it's time to try to actually make people laugh.

I can see all you Wet Hots (that's what we'll call you guys, like Grateful Dead fans are called Deadheads) champing at the bit to get this post over already so you can get to the comments section and tear me a new one. So, I will steal your argument right from behind your lips and tell you why it doesn't work.

"Vance," -- you're still calling me Vance in this argument -- "it's a parody of an unfunny 1980s camp movie, so the very fact that it's unfunny is kind of the point."

No, parodies of unfunny movies are still funny, as long as the people who are writing them are funny. As long as those people can actually write jokes -- you know, bits of a humor that have a beginning, a build-up and a payoff, or simply zing by in a blur of crackling wit.

The scenes in Wet Hot American Summer are not even constructed to end on a joke. They move on to other scenes when they feel like moving on to other scenes, not once they've released us on a laugh. Because if they were waiting for that, this movie would just be one long scene.

Look, I get what this movie is trying to do, and I respect it. And there are moments that work in an almost performance art type of way. But far too much of the time, the direction seems to have been "Okay, react to what this person says in a way that is exaggerated or wildly inappropriate in context." You know, like the campers guffawing at the terrible Borscht belt comedian, and booing the genuinely good performance of the song from Godspell.

And I suppose that's where this film gets its most defining trait: its inconsistency. If there's any one comic mooring this film should have, it should be to do what it starts out to do, which is to establish Janeane Garofalo's camp director as its straight man. Garofalo should serve as the one person who is above the fray, navigating the last day of camp with a clear focus and a solid head on her shoulders. In short, she should be the audience surrogate, the one who looks aghast at all the daffy shenanigans and tries to sort her way through them.

Instead, her character has at least three epsiodes where she becomes just another braying lunatic. There's the trip into town where the group parties so hard they become heroin addicts. There's the return of Joe Lo Truglio to report that the campers have been abandoned on their rafting trip, when she starts running around like a chicken with her head cut off and in fact wipes all the items off a desk in her directionless panic. Then there's her earnest participation in the goofy science experiment designed to change the path of a falling chunk of space station.

Let's take the first of those three incidents. The idea is great. A group of camp counselors jumps at the opportunity to ride into town, not wanting to miss ... Lord knows what, but it's gonna be great. The movie then has the right idea by having them get involved in all sorts of ludicrous activities (including mugging an old woman), and then revealing that the trip only lasted an hour. Yes, this is funny. What's not funny is the execution. We don't let out surprised laughter when they mug the old woman. We don't let out surprised laughter when they buy a bag of cocaine as big as a football. And we don't let out surprised laughter when they lie around a flophouse with needles sticking out of their arms. Because the actual direction of the scene is flaccid. I told my wife, a newcomer to this movie, that this was the type of montage that Leslie Nielsen could (and regularly did) make funny.

"Oh great, Vance. You are comparing one of the most arch, sublime comedies of the 21st century to a guy who bugged out his eyes and made incredibly broad genre parodies."

But at least Leslie Nielsen knew how to play a scene for a laugh. Did every scene in every Nielsen movie end in a laugh? Of course not. Did his career whimper out into ten years of forgettable garbage? Of course it did. But when Nielsen was on, he was on. And his overall success rate is probably higher than the success rate of the "humor" in Wet Hot American Summer -- even with his years of duds thrown in.

Maybe that's too harsh. I mean, there are certainly moments in this movie I respect. The one that probably works best is when the counselors sit around discussing getting back together in ten years from this day, and spend a dozen lines of dialogue just on whether the meeting time should be 9 or 9:30. And it ends with what I would consider the type of punchline I'd like the whole movie to have. "Because I have something at 11."

Something at 11! On a random day ten years from now, which had only just been nominated for consideration as a reunion date 30 seconds earlier! That's funny!

But it still didn't make me laugh. It made me smile.

There was one single image from Wet Hot American Summer that I carried with me through the nearly 14 years since I first saw it, as the defining image of what didn't work about it. During this viewing, I was kind of waiting for the scene to arrive, to see if it was really as much a thud as I thought it was the first time. I imagined this single scene would be a litmus test to whether I found the whole movie salvageable or not.

And there it came: Ken Marino, driving down the road in that van, singing happily to himself and fully paying attention to where he was driving, but then suddenly hitting a tree, out of nowhere.

"See, it's funny because it's so ridiculous! It's supposed to be contrived! Where did that tree come from??"

But as with everything in Wet Hot American Summer, I feel like I'm looking at this joke sideways. It just doesn't land because the timing, because the delivery, because something is off.

So I'm sorry, Wet Hots, my second viewing of this movie also totaled itself against that tree. Not only will a third not be forthcoming, but I won't be watching the upcoming Netflix show based on it, either.

I'm just glad that David Wain figured out how to make movies like Wanderlust and They Came Together, and no more like this one.

Too much parody vs. too little parody

Fulfilling a promise I made to a recently deceased Leslie Nielsen, I finally watched my copy of Dracula: Dead and Loving It on Sunday afternoon.

You know, it wasn't that bad. I understand the impulse to rake Mel Brooks and Nielsen over the coals for this movie, but to be honest, Nielsen made a dozen movies that were worse than this. (You have no idea how many movies he made in the late 1990s and early 2000s that you've never heard of.) Brooks may not have made that many that were worse, but he certainly made one or two.

However, I freely admit that my limited affection for Dracula: Dead and Loving It may just be relative, when you compare it to what passes for parody in these here modern times of ours.

Yes, I am going to shit on Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer yet again on my blog.

Friedberg and Seltzer, the writer-directors of such landfill as Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans and Vampires Suck, are irritating because of their many sins of commission. A movie like Dracula: Dead and Loving It is notable for its omissions, not its commissions.

Put differently: Epic Movie tries way too hard, while Dracula doesn't try hard enough. And in this case, I vastly prefer the latter sin.

When you think of Mel Brooks, you may think of a guy who is terminally goofy, willing to try anything for a laugh. But he's really quite restrained compared to Friedberg and Seltzer. Brooks at least confines his jokes, relatively speaking, to the context of his plot. There may be the occasional anachronism in his movies, sure, but it's nothing compared to Alice in Wonderland showing up in the middle of a vampire movie. (Which happens in Vampires Suck. Friedberg and Seltzer have done far worse, but that one is fresh in my memory from an unfortunate recent viewing.)

You might say that anachronisms are the raison d'etre for Seltzer and Friedberg, the more off-the-wall, the better. This gets old, fast. But it's what they have to do, since they're determined to end every single shot on a joke. (Note: calling it "what they have to do" is not, for a moment, endorsing anything about their method.)

And that's what I really noticed as I was watching Dracula: Dead and Loving It: Some scenes just ended, without what appeared to be a joke. To some people, that's the very definition of why it isn't a good movie. To me, it brought relief -- relief that the movie takes itself seriously enough not to strain for humor when it just isn't there.

I guess the fact that I noticed it means that they were doing something wrong. And I'm not going to try to tell you that Dracula is in the same league as The Naked Gun (if we're looking at Nielsen movies) or Blazing Saddles (if we're looking at Brooks movies). But it is in the same league as Naked Gun 33 1/3 (Nielsen) or High Anxiety (Brooks) -- which is to say, not great, but worth a watch.

What I like most about Brooks' approach relative to the approach of the Two-Headed Monster (I will refer to them as such from here on out) is that Brooks' approach doesn't date itself. If the Two-Headed Monster had been making Dracula: Dead and Loving It, it would have come across less as a parody of Bram Stoker's famous novel, and more as a parody of the pop culture landscape circa 1995. Which would make it really fun to watch in 2011.

But since the humor in Dracula was almost entirely driven by the scenario, I was able to laugh at it, from time to time, in 2011. Sure, it's not high comedy when Lucy (Lysette Anthony) closes her balcony door, and a bat with Nielsen's head slams face first into a pane of glass. But at least the humor flows organically from the situation.

I did not laugh at the bat-into-the-glass gag, but I did laugh at the following jokes:

1) When Dracula (Nielsen) removes his goofy heart-shaped hairdo, revealing it to be just a "hair hat";

2) When Harker (Steven Weber) gets repeatedly doused by sprays of blood from Lucy's corpse, as he drives a stake through her chest. The sprays of blood alone are funny, but Weber's line deliveries during this scene are priceless;

3) When Renfield (Peter MacNicol) eats all manner of bugs while at a dinner with Dr. Seward (Harvey Korman). I think Peter MacNicol may have been born to play Renfield;

4) When Van Helsing (Brooks) and Dracula have a battle to see who can get in the last word, each prolonging the conversation by throwing down one last Yiddish word as an exclamation point. This bit has a funny payoff in the film's final shot;

5) When the sun melts Dracula at the end, leaving only a bat-shaped pile of ashes on the floor. Renfield gathers the ashes into a neat little pile and draws a smiley face in it. "There, master, you're starting to look like your old self again."

And those are just the times I can remember.

When you legitimately laugh (or "LOL") during a movie at least five times, that means it was worth watching.

I haven't legitimately laughed five times in all the movies I've seen by the Two-Headed Monster -- combined.

I'm glad I got a laugh or two (or five) from Dracula: Dead and Loving It, if only because it's nice to come across a Nielsen movie I hadn't seen that's better than Wrongfully Accused or 2001: A Space Travesty. (I saved you the trouble and saw both, thank you very much.) Seeing his smiling face in the "In Memoriam" section at the Oscars just whetted my appetite for this unique funnyman, all of whose best work I thought I'd already seen.

No, Dracula is not among his best -- but it didn't make me cringe either, and that's a small victory worth applauding.

One of those weird coincidences

Yesterday morning, I wrote my Sunday morning post over a cup of coffee, around 9:30 a.m. It was about winning a bunch of not-so-great movies in a poker game on Friday night, and I'd chosen Dracula: Dead and Loving It as the poster art to accompany the post. In other words, a movie in which Leslie Nielsen plays a vampire, a dead man who is loving life as a dead man.

Just a couple hours later, Leslie Nielsen was a dead man.

In fact, all I know is that one of Nielsen's relatives announced it on a Florida radio station at 5:30 p.m. local time. He could have been dying at any point in the hours preceding that, perhaps even as I was writing my post. He didn't die from a pair of sharp incisors to the neck, but from pneumonia. He was 84.

I'd like to think that the first event didn't have anything to do with the second.

But what a weird coincidence, right? Anyone who glanced at my blog last night would have thought a poster of one of Nielsen's lesser movies (I won't say "worst" because I haven't seen it yet, and because there would be many contenders for that dishonor) was what I'd chosen to eulogize him. They might have been confused by the title "Poker haul," but if they hadn't read any further, they would have assumed it was one of the many Nielsen remembrances that have been appearing on the film blogosphere. This piece being one of them, I guess.

Nope. Just a random decision to choose a 15-year-old movie in which Nielsen is dead -- probably the only movie where he's ever died or been dead, at least after Airplane! turned him into a full-time comedic actor -- as the art to accompany my post. I mean, it wasn't completely random -- the movie came up in the poker game, and that was really the random part, considering how soon he was going to die. But it was random for me to choose that poster out of the 11 movies I came home with that night. It was the first one that landed in the pot during poker, which is why I chose it, but I did think for a moment how American Pie Presents Band Camp or Killer Klowns from Out of Space would have been a more perfect example of the kitsch on display.

Well, it is indeed a sad morning, as Nielsen was one of our great deadpan comics. I'm not going to remember him in the form of listing his top five performances, because probably at least four of those were in Airplane! or Naked Gun movies. Actually, now that I look, he wasn't in Airplane II -- which could be one of the chief reasons we consider it inferior to the original. The truth is, Nielsen was a guy who appeared in a couple great parodies and then about 20 that ranged from mildly amusing to truly awful. He's considered one of our great comedic talents because he was so great in Airplane! and the original Naked Gun, not because he had a particularly brilliant comedy career in total. Most of the time, it was the scripts who let Nielsen down, not Nielsen who let us down.

So instead of writing some kind of cliched remembrance that you can read numerous other places, I'll instead commit to watching Dracula: Dead and Loving It as soon as I can. I'm sure it won't be great, but I'm sure it will make me smile a couple times.

After all, Leslie Nielsen was pretty damn good at making us smile.