Saturday Night Lousy

Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo

by D. K. Holm, www.cinemonkey.com

hat Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo is a terrible movie should come as no surprise to anyone who stays through to the end credits and notes that the film was produced by Adam Sandler. That the film is also not only pallid, inept, and witless, but also ultimately tame comes as a surprise, emanating as the film does from several alumni of Saturday Night Live, those performers who were once deemed at the cutting edge of humor in America. SNL feels the energized breath of young competition. Refugee Mike Meyers and the independent Farrelly Brothers and others are more outrageous, more "cutting edge," legitimately funny, and their new world of comedy leaves Saturday Night Live looking as pinched and tired as it really is—just lifeless.

Surely everyone now acknowledges that Saturday Night Live was, and continues to be, the most overrated and overwatched comedy show on television. Of the scores of films featuring members past and present of the show, how many have been truly, lastingly funny, as opposed to transiently amusing on a summer night at a drive in when one is drunk with friends and the screen is less entertaining than the jokes made at it, or the cool breeze that begins to slide with dulsatory calm through the wide open windows.

SNL has never been all that cutting, much less cutting edge. If Bill Murray prove finally to be the premiere comedian to emerge from that troupe, it is because his brand of humor, scorned by his costars while he was on the show, was both pioneering and transcendent, both more immediate and yet also richer and long lasting. He does his best by showing our worst, making Murray a real satirist in an age that usually abhors the moral vacuum of satire.

But that's another story. The key point is that SNL was never as cutting as it was cracked up to be. For one thing, as a skit based show, it neglected jokes in favor of recurrent-character driven humor. One was suppose to laugh simply because one was once again seeing the Bees, or the Church Lady, or the pep squad. These characters rarely if ever did or said anything that was new or funny. They never vocalized jokes. No, it was enough that they simply showed up and did what they did last week or the week before and what they were going to do next week, and the week after that, to the howls of self-induced amusement of millions of perpetually adolescent kids. This audience howled, and dreamed of a day when that same skit, those same characters, would find their way into a real movie. Sometimes they did. Sometimes those films were comedically successful, as was Wayne's World. But all too often—It's Pat, Stuart Saves His Family, Coneheads —the movie version falls flat: rushed, ill-thought out, sloppily photographed and edited, the filmmakers thinking that they could get away with work as sloppy as what the stars did on TV.

Deuce Bigalow is not based on a skit. It is an "original" story that tries to do what the earlier Lost & Found attempted for David Spade: to turn Rob Schneider into a romantic lead. Until now, Schneider has been "the friend," the assistant guy who helps the star (Judge Dredd, Knock Off). But if in the past all comedians wanted to play Hamlet, today they want to get the girl. It is imperative in this culture of sexual braggadocio and joy in the humiliation of others that comedians also be viewed as heroes, not just schmucks. Thus Mr Schneider must somehow be heroic within his ineffectuality.

Mr Schneider plays a loser. No job. Can't get girls. His dad, in an echo of The Last Laugh, is a bathroom attendant. Mr Schneider's job is not far off. He is a fish tank cleaner, reaching into similar muck as his father. Thus we have a fantastic opportunity to exploit what Hollywood happens to think is the nation's favorite brand of humor, cloacal. If they really think that, they have misread the success of There's Something about Mary. In fact, with its jokes at the expense of blindness and amputation, it veers close to the area that Mary treaded, but does so in a much more timid manner. (Another hommage within the film that a colleague reminded me of after a screening was the salute to Nick Nolte inQ&A performed by William Forsyth.)

hat is interesting about Deuce is how tame it is. For example, Mr Schneider plays a character who slips desperately and rather unwillingly into the role of sexual athlete for hire : as a gigolo, Deuce is no ace. But he never actually has any sex with any of his clients. Instead, he ends up giving them much needed therapy, and opening their horizons for social interaction. This is a sweet-tempered notion for a film, but all too indicative of an unwillingness to risk offense, even while making a movie that courts outrage and disgust in small, easy ways.

Yet the SNL monster is tenacious. Despite the public's almost complete lack of interest in most of the movies that derive from the rotating, ever changing troupe's work, Hollywood still keeps entertaining the notion that the next one will be the big hit. Deuce Bigalow is lame, leaden, and all too long. But I doubt if it is the final nail in the coffin of the once fabled SNL. style of humor. Some things don't know how to die.

12/99

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