This is the End: An Exercise in Familiarity

This is the End is a good comedy. If you’ve seen one of its trailers and thought to yourself, “Hey, that looks like a movie that would make me laugh,” then you should go see it. You won’t be disappointed, I promise you. It isn’t an envelope pushing movie, but it isn’t a misfire either. If you find yourself already drawn to the comedy voices of Seth Rogen, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson et al., you’re going to receive your money’s worth of funny riffs, improvised insults, and lovable depravity. It is a movie of people you probably already like doing variations on the routines you like them for. It’s intimately familiar, but, as will be explicated later, that familiarity is a double-edged sword.

The plot of the movie is relatively unimportant, which isn’t an criticism but a statement of fact. There’s a party at James Franco’s house. All your favorite Apatow-ian comedians show up (yes, yes, I know Judd Apatow didn’t direct This is the End, but the key actors in the movie, whom are also the biggest comedic actors in Hollywood today, are so connected to his films that, for my dollar, Apatow-ian is a decent catch-all name for the style of comedy popular now). Catastrophic events start to happen. There’s panic. There’s gory death. There are dick jokes. The apocalyptic setup provides an easy-to-work-within framework for isolating the team of funny men, giving them a space within which to to brandish their beloved brand of keep-the-camera-rolling humor without having to worry about advancing the plot. These comedians thrive on irreverent conversation, and the whole Rapture idea creates an excuse to have extended bits of nothing but funny dialogue. Really, what else is there to do besides chat if you’re trapped inside James Franco’s house during the End of Days?

As emphasized in the trailers, the actors in This is the End are playing hyperbolic versions of themselves (or at least hyperbolic versions of their publicly perceived personas), relying on the same comedic tropes they’ve employed to great acclaim in previous roles. Simply put, these guys know what works. Danny McBride is loud, mean, and sarcastic; Seth Rogen is goofy, affable, and stoned; James Franco is pretentious and smug; Craig Robinson oscillates between tough and scared; Jonah Hill is nice-yet-not-nice; Jay Baruchel is there. If there is some sort of quasi-meta purpose behind James Franco playing “James Franco,” the reasoning doesn’t really come through. Much like an author writing a book where the main character shares its name with said author, having actors play themselves often comes across as a Postmodernism 101 idea, a technique that has the potential to produce excellence but is more likely to fall flat. However, This is the End doesn’t seem concerned with using this concept to create commentary or subvert expectations, a fact that is either a missed opportunity or a blessing depending on your stance on self-referentiality.

Yet due to the whole advertising campaign emphasizing how the actors are playing themselves, the decision to structure the film in this way can’t be ignored simply because the film doesn’t do anything “deep” with the idea. Even if there isn’t an artsy intellectual intention behind having Seth Rogen be “Seth Rogen,” that doesn’t mean the idea isn’t central to audiences’ experience of the film. In fact, using self-referentiality as a marketing strategy says a great deal about how fans and audience members view comedy in this day and age. It plays right into their expectations of familiarity, capitalizing on their preference towards having their jokes come from recognized and accustomed-to source.

Let’s step back for a minute. About a week ago, as allergies ravaged my sinuses and depleted my enjoyment of the outdoors, I watched a slew of my favorite childhood comedies for the first time in ages. When I was growing up, I was a huge fan of films like The Naked Gun and Airplane!–really the whole Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker oeuvre, actually–and their use of a-joke-a-minute dialogue and silly slapstick humor never ceased to entertain me. Upon re-watching these movies last week, I was struck by how radically different they felt compared to modern comedies, how less reliant they were on familiar faces spouting familiar things. The movies were like joke books come to life; the actors seemed interchangeable and, in a way, irrelevant. This noticeable transition in mainstream comedy is, to me, fascinating. Of course, it is always a bit tenuous to claim stark demarcations in style because there will always be exceptions on each side of the line, but that doesn’t mean the differences aren’t valid or interesting or instructive.

To wit: One of the oft-praised techniques used in modern Apatow-ian comedies is the reliance on improvisation. As anyone with even a tiny experience in theater knows, improvisation is entirely dependent on the talent of the improvisers. There is no script; there is no safety net. A lot of what makes good improv, well, good, is that the actors have to sell every line and every response with full gusto; since there are no pre-written jokes of astounding cleverness, all the humor has to emanate purely from the actors and their ethos. Having a month or a year to craft the perfect joke seems blatantly far easier than having to extemporaneously create a less-than-perfect joke on the spot. The fact the people such as Rogen, McBride, and Hill are able to excel at such a comedy style speaks volumes about their virtuosic talents.

However, this idea of comedy-from-actor as opposed to comedy-from-script can be problematic in that it creates an environment where audiences laugh not because a line is legitimately funny but because of familiarization with the person saying the line. You can notice an analogue to this phenomenon by watching stand-up specials of A-list comedians. Because of the comedic clout of the performer, the audience will laugh at even the set-up lines or the throwaway introductions. Due to being familiar with the comic, the audience is expecting something funny and is ergo more likely to find humor in non-funny things. Think back to high school and ask yourself if the “funny guy” in your graduating class was really always saying hilarious things, or were some the laughs he earned simply due to him being perceived as The Funny Guy?

With this in mind, go re-watch the trailer for This is the End. Consider Danny McBride’s (or, if you will, “Danny McBride’s”) line, “James Franco didn’t suck any dick last night? Now I know y’all are trippin’.” When I watched this trailer with my friends for the first time, we all cracked up at this jibe. Upon reflecting on it, though, I’m not sure it is inherently funny. Would the joke work if an unknown actor was speaking to a cast of other unknown actors, poking fun at a character that happened to be named, say, Harold: “Harold didn’t suck any dicks last night?” Without the pre-associations of McBride’s brand of incredulous snark with always-funny humor and, more importantly, of James Franco’s persona with deviant, questionable, weird-in-the-name-of-art decisions, the jokes simply isn’t as good. Similarly, is watching Michael Cera be impaled in the trailer funny because death by impaling is always funny, or because “Michael Cera” is the guy who suffers?

This epitomizes the big distinction between the -ian comedies of now and the Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker films of yesteryear. Modern comedies are reliant on a level of familiaization with the actors on the part of the audience. Directors can eschew funny-on-the-page jokes in favor of improvised jokes by using improvisers that are already known and liked. (I’ve always felt movies like Knocked Up, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and Pineapple Express, though hilarious on the initial viewing, lacked replay value, and I think their reliance on our pre-acceptance of the actors as credibly funny is what contributes to this problem. Even though the delivery of the jokes are often superb, the jokes themselves aren’t necessarily that exceptional.) Leslie Nielson (RIP), who always played a version of Leslie Nielson, is the obvious exception to this differentiation, but I don’t think that invalidates the observation as a whole. Is all this to say movies like Airplane! are objectively “funnier” than current comedies? Not at all. What people find funny is subjective and personal and complex. However, I think the differences between the mainstream comedies of the 1980’s and the mainstream comedies of now are distinct and worth noting.

The idea of having the actors play themselves in This is the End, then, seems more like an ingenious and subtle marketing strategy than anything else. It’s like the studio is saying to the public, “Hey, we know you loved Seth Rogen as the pot-smoking schlub in Knocked Up and Pineapple Express, so we’re just going to avoid all pretense and have him play the exact character he’s typecast as because, well, you all like it.” (This is reinforced by one of the opening lines of the film, where a random guy in an airport asks Rogen why he always plays the same characters.) This doesn’t mean that the movie is void of well-crafted, well-planned, well-written jokes, but rather that it doesn’t sell itself that way. Perhaps that’s painfully obvious to some of you, but I find it interesting.

(Is it fair to extrapolate the structural and stylistic differences between The Naked Gun and This is the End outwards to a comment about society as a whole? Eh, probably not. I do think the contemporary aesthetic of constant improvisation contributes to the DIY attitude of comedy in the age of YouTube, where theoretically anyone of any (marginal) talent can “go viral” with the right video, and I think this attitude is a bit troubling for those that appreciate clever and clearly labored-over jokes, but that isn’t really relevant to a focused discussion of This is the End. Personally, I’m a bit disheartened at how many fellow young people think creating quality comedy is as simple as just grabbing a camera an ad-libbing with their bros, deluded by the illusion that such a form of comedy is easy because people like “everyman” Seth Rogen make it appear effortless, but that opinion could be entirely do to jealousy stemming from how bad of an improviser I was back in the day.)

Perhaps This is the End should’ve been called This is a Continuation. Again, this may sound like a snarky slight against the film, but I don’t mean it that way. Unbridled originality doesn’t always equal quality; sometimes it is far better to adhered to the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” mantra. This is the End is laugh-out-loud funny in parts. There are some great cameos, a hilarious exorcism sequence, and Franco and McBride engage in one of the funniest arguments about ejaculation that you’ll ever see. If you think you’ll like this movie, you will. Just don’t be surprised, though, if you experience the sensation that you’ve seen it before, that you’re re-watching an old favorite even if you’re watching This is the End for the first time. That induced feeling of familiarity is calculated and intentional.