I was recently trying to remember if I had ever seen a truly great (as opposed to just good) film about a comedian.  The closest I could come up with was the original Fame but, while that film does feature Barry Miller as an aspiring comedian, he’s only a part of the ensemble.  He’s not the sole focus of the film and his most memorable moment is when he get taunted by Richard Belzer and then bombs on stage.

Why do movies about comedians often seem to fail?  Some of that is because they star people who aren’t necessarily believable as comedians (The Comedian) and they try to cover up that fact by including way too many shots of people laughing uproariously in response (Man of the Year, the HBO television series I’m Dying Up Here).  Another major problem is that comedians themselves tend to be a bit difficult to take when they’re not on stage.  Having to spend 90 to 120 minutes hanging out with a group of emotionally closed-off people who won’t stop trying to be funny can be exhausting.  It’s really not as surprise that many movies  (Lenny, Funny People, Joker) about comedians tend to portray them as being seriously damaged people.  Punchline is an interesting example of a film that managed to feature not only a miscast and not particularly funny star (Sally Field, in this case) but also a group of comedians (led by Tom Hanks) who come across as being a real chore to hang out with.

All of that brings us to 2018’s A Futile And Stupid Gesture, an exhausting biopic about National Lampoon-founder Doug Kenney.  The film establishes itself from the start by featuring a gray-haired Martin Mull as who Doug Kenney would have grown up to be if he hadn’t died mysteriously at the age of 33.  While Mull narrates, Will Forte (who was so brilliant in Nebraska) plays the youngish Kenney.  Meanwhile, a host of 21st century comedy all-stars play the comedy all-stars of the 1970s, with only Joel McHale’s Chevy Chase and Nelson Franklin’s PJ O’Rourke making much of an impressions.  Our narrator mentions that most of the actors don’t look like the characters that they’re playing because this is the type of movie where the fourth wall is repeatedly broken.  A lot of people credit Adam McKay with making it trendy to break the fourth wall.  In reality, it was Michael Winterbottom with 24-Hour Party People.  Either way, it’s one of those things that’s been done so many times that it no longer feels the least bit subversive.  A Futile and Stupid Gesture is so extremely stylized (here comes another fantasy sequence!) that it actually feels more desperate than clever.

A Futile and Stupid Gesture is a tiring film, largely because everyone in the movie is such a quip machine that you get sick of listening to them after the first few minutes.  The film makes the argument that Kenney’s refusal to stop making jokes was because of the trauma of losing his brother when he was younger but that still doesn’t make the film’s version of Kenney any less exhausting as a character.  To be honest, though, just about every character in the film is exhausting.  So many famous lines are uttered that I was ready to throw a show at the television by the time Michael O’Donoghue (Thomas Lennon) said, “I don’t write for felt.”  Between this film and Saturday Night, I’ll be very happy to never see another movie featuring someone playing Michael O’Donoghue.

It’s a shame it’s not a better film because one does get the feeling that the film was coming from a place of love.  Director David Wain has directed some funny movies and he was one of the people behind Children’s Hospital, one of my favorite shows.  I wanted to like this film and I feel a little bit guilty that I didn’t.  But, in the end, it’s hard not to feel that maybe a better tribute to Doug Kenney would have been to have filmed Bored of the Rings.