Comedy Minus One

 

THANK YOU VERY MUCH (A-minus) - He definitely was an acquired taste at a specific moment in time, and perhaps you had to be there. But Andy Kaufman was a foundational comedian -- albeit one who claims to have never told a joke -- and he remains a fascinating character study. He was a performance artist who took comedy to new levels of irony and discomfort, paving the way for the absurdism that followed, from David Letterman to Tim Robinson.

 

Alex Braverman (the Netflix series "Waffles + Mochi") takes a workmanlike spin through Kaufman's life and career, cut short by cancer at 35 (assuming he didn't fake his death and keep it a secret these past 40 years). The clips are generous, allowing Kaufman's bits to breathe and to be appreciated. Your mileage may vary, but I laughed out loud throughout at Kaufman's greatest hits. (I had totally forgotten about the bit where he reads "The Great Gatsby" word for word, threatening to go from beginning to end in one marathon session.)

Braverman assembles entertaining talking heads, including "Taxi" co-stars Marilu Henner and Danny DeVito; Melanie Chartoff (who relates the infamous "Fridays" feud); longtime friend and co-conspirator Bob Zmuda (who helped Kaufman pull off the Tony Clifton lounge-singer running gag); and some friends and companions. While most tributes are positive, the film does not try to sand down the rough edges of Kaufman's personality, such as his bizarre obsession with wrestling women and the harassment of his "Taxi" co-stars. (Nor does it ignore his box-office bomb "Heartbeeps.")

The film digs deep, going back to the '60s, when Kaufman became not only a follower of the Maharishi, but a leader in the transcendental-meditation movement (until his cutting-edge performances led to his removal as a TM teacher). It humanizes him throughout while giving wide berth to the wild swings of his life and career. It is also fitfully funny at times -- I mean, if you get it.

SATURDAY NIGHT (C-minus) - What a messy, tone-deaf misfire. Jason Reitman locks into a misguided format to tell the story of the debut of "Saturday Night Live" in October 1975. He assembles a fairly talented cast but allows them to do little more than offer impressions of the principals, including producer Lorne Michaels and his cast of Not Ready for Prime Time Players. He also messes with the time line and rewrites history unnecessarily. It comes off about as well as NBC's 2006 Aaron Sorkin clusterfuck "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," which was almost universally mocked as self-important and painfully unfunny.

Reitman's fatal mistake is to restrict himself to the narrative conceit of showing the 90 minutes before the first live broadcast in real time. The structure is flawed in several respects; it not only makes everything seem hysterical like an episode of "I Love Lucy," but also forces him to shoehorn historical nuggets from outside that timeline and pretend that they all took place between 10 and 11:30 p.m. that night. And so we get cast members and writers pitching and name-checking classic bits that would not show up for months, if not years -- Chevy Chase's land-shark banter; Dan Aykroyd's Fred Garvin, male prostitute; Garrett Morris' "I'm Gonna Get Me a Great Big Shotgun and Kill Every Whitey That I See." The worst example is a quick sight-gag reference to a Colon Blow cereal box -- a sketch that would not air until 1989.

The list of things that make no sense seems endless: Why is the cast still rehearsing, even after dress-rehearsal? Why are writers pitching sketches to Lorne 20 minutes before air (such as the bloody Julia Child sketch that didn't materialize until 1978)? Would announcer Don Pardo really not know how to pronounce cast members' names until corrected just minutes before broadcast? Would the seating of the audience not start until 11:20? Why pretend that Michaels handed Weekend Update to Chase at the last minute? Or that Michaels left the building around 10:45 and met Alan Zweibel in a bar and hired him on the spot and had him scribble Weekend Update jokes on cue cards just moments before the show went live? (Zweibel was hired months before the October debut, though he did pen the funniest joke of the debut: "The post office is about to issue a stamp commemorating prostitution in the United States. It’s a 10-cent stamp. But if you want to lick it, it’s a quarter.") Would the fuddy-duddy middle-aged censor be red-lining scripts at that late hour? I'm sure Johnny Carson did not call Michaels during those 90 minutes and bully him like a mob boss would. And Milton Berle certainly was nowhere to be found that night, let alone whipping out his legendary appendage to humiliate Chase in front of Chase's girlfriend. (Berle would host in 1979 and alienate the entire cast and crew -- and drop trou in his dressing room.)

The ridiculous premise and execution is a shame, because "Saturday Night" has some fine writing throughout (by Reitman and Gil Kenan), including Michael O'Donoghue's bitter witticisms, such as a Sorkin-like confrontation with that stuffy old censor. And Gabriel LaBelle knits everything together well as the chronically flustered Michaels, the prim Canadian ringmaster. Other performances are hit and miss -- you get the sense that some of these actors got hired merely for their resemblance to key cast members. Rachel Sennott is strong as writer (and mother hen) Rosie Shuster. Lamorne Morris (no relation) brings depth to Garrett Morris, who seems to be going through both an existential crisis and an early midlife one as the odd man out. Cory Michael Smith and Dylan O'Brien get the cadences right as Chase & Aykroyd, respectively, but Matt Wood whiffs completely as John Belushi (most actors would, I suppose). None of the female cast members stand out (and how could Gilda Radner not), and maybe that's a meta-commentary on how Radner, Jane Curtin and Laraine Newman were considered second-class citizens early on. (George Coe is erased from the record completely.)

Cooper Hoffman ("Licorice Pizza") is off as the sycophantic producer Dick Ebersol, while Willem Dafoe steals scenes as the slimy network talent guru Dave Tebet. Veterans like Tracy Letts (writer Herb Sargent) and Robert Wuhl (director Dave Wilson) make the most of glorified cameos. For some reason, Nicholas Braun plays both Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson and does neither well. Nicholas Podanay sounds just like Billy Crystal -- without being remotely funny. Matthew Rhys does a spot-on impression of George Carlin. Brad Garrett is great, also in a brief turn, as a Catskills comedian butchering Zweibel's jokes in a bar.

If my paragraphs here are bursting at the seams, that's because the film does too. Reitman overstuffs the script and the screen, gleefully placing Easter eggs everywhere, as if his only job was to make middle-aged fanboys point and nod knowingly. That might be enough to placate some diehards. But too often, Reitman is meticulously faithful to a fault when it comes to replicating this distorted moment in time. It is as if he over-studied for an exam and overwrote the essay portion after misunderstanding the question. He thought it would be clever to create a circus atmosphere and break the budget by making sure he included DNA-level replications of Paul Shaffer, Joe Disco and Franken & Davis. 

Some of this might have been solved by ditching that suffocating ticking-clock format and allowing the script to breathe a little, backward and forward in time. As it is, "Saturday Night" is a ridiculous attempt to recapture an era in which a bunch of counter-culture rebels changed the face of television overnight.

BONUS TRACK

Our title track, from Albert Brooks' album "Comedy Minus One," here is "New National Anthem":