Review: InAPPropriate Comedy

The premise is a tablet containing the most offensive Apps in the world, including “Flirty Harry”, “The Amazing Racist”, a porno movie review show, and so on.

 

I can’t believe I’m going to type this, but…from the man who brought you the “ShamWOW” and the “Schticky” (Seriously, who would ever buy the ‘Little Schticky’? I’ve never understood that) comes one of the worst sketch comedy movies you’ll ever see. This 2013 so-called comedy comes from the one and only Vince Offer, who serves as director, co-writer and bit player in this desperately unfunny film about raunchy ‘Apps’, that are really just a bunch of TV show parody ideas, so the ‘App’ thing seemed rather unnecessary and arbitrary to me. It should’ve been about a YouTube channel or something, though I’m not exactly a big technology guy, so maybe there are Apps something like these ones. Or at least make these a bunch of sketches found on just one App, that would make much more sense to me.

 

Not one of these ideas is remotely funny, unless the idea of Academy Award winner Adrien Brody playing a gruff but gay cop in something called “Flirty Harry” is your idea of humour (‘Go ahead, make me gay’). If it is, I think I can safely say that you have astoundingly low standards, just like Offer and co-writers Ken Pringle and Ari Shaffir. Shaffir deserves to be singled out as the star of one of the least funny sketches in a film full of them, something called “The Amazing Racist”. It’s not remotely funny because there’s zero truth or plausibility to it. I get that all the Apps are meant to be offensive, and thus they’re all unlikely to be plausible, but it wasn’t that this was meant to be a show that I found implausible. I just found the character itself completely implausible and I couldn’t discern the supposed gag. Shaffir is clearly Jewish, for starters, and unless I missed it, I don’t think the character was necessarily meant to be. So when he asks a Jewish girl how her hair gets so curly and we see that he has curlier hair than she does, WTF? It just doesn’t make sense, even within its own App world. The sketch, much like the film as a whole isn’t anti-PC, it’s just deliberately being offensive as though that in and of itself is a joke. It’s not.

 

There comes a point in “The Amazing Racist” where it stops being about laughing at how wrong this guy is and you’re encouraged to find his racism funny. That makes it racist humour, not anti-PC humour but actual racist humour which is entirely different. I believe PC goes too far sometimes, but it’s still a necessity in my book. Some speech is genuinely bad and not all speech deserves to be heard. I don’t always buy the Libertarian line that you should let everyone talk and let them hang themselves with their own words instead. That said, I’m against banning films, so maybe I do buy into it a little bit, and at least with films I have a right of reply to such offensive material. The cheap abortion sketch later in the film is even more racist, and indeed African-Americans are depicted horribly on the whole in this film. Even most of the “Candid Camera”-style ‘victims’ of “The Amazing Racist” (which, unlike say Sacha Baron Cohen’s stuff- which I still don’t like- are clearly scripted and fake) end up mostly conforming to stereotypes too, with pretty much every African-American person in the film painted as foul-mouthed and/or a gangbanger stereotype. But this is a film that opens with a parody of “127 Hours”. In 2013. So the bar is set shockingly low from the outset. That said, at least the “127 Hours” parody could, if written to be funny, have worked a few years ago. “The Amazing Racist” wouldn’t be funny in any year.

 

And don’t even get me started on the Marilyn Monroe “Seven Year Itch” parody with ankle bracelet-sporting Lindsay Lohan, and Mr. Offer as an up-skirt pervert. The bulk of that gag (which at least involves the use of an App, unlike the rest of the film) comes from what, 1955? And then we get to Rob “Big Stan” Schneider and Michelle Rodriguez as a couple of porno reviewers. The sketch gets off a ShamWow reference, but is otherwise awful. Rodriguez in particular acts like she just turned up on set unprepared, and is like a bad “SNL” guest host reading off cue cards. Woeful, she should be embarrassed with her performance here. Meanwhile, I’m genuinely unsure what the joke is with the “Sperm Lake” sketch. The title, maybe? Because sperm jokes are old, so it can’t just be that, surely. The theme of ‘what’s the actual joke here’ reaches its zenith with the hot tub sketch. I have zero clue where the inappropriateness is here. Either couple could qualify to be honest. Or neither. No clue. If you’re gonna make an offensive ‘comedy’ (And I’m a fan of “Blazing Saddles” and “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life”, so I’m no stick-in-the-mud, easily offended person), at least give us well thought-out jokes…and preferably ones that are actually, y’know, funny.

 

Here it is, folks, a film from 2013 that’s even worse than “Movie 43” and “21 & Over”. I never thought it would be possible. Adrien Brody should be ashamed of himself here and issue a public apology to not just the gay community, but anyone with a genuine sense of humour, as your sense of humour will feel violated after this. A shameful and shamefully unfunny film. I hope Brody and Rodriguez were paid in Schticky’s for agreeing to appear in this garbage. The little ones.

 

Rating: D-