Humor in Cuneiform

This is why the most brilliant moviemaking stroke of the past decade was Mel Gibson’s use of Aramaic as the lingua franca of The Passion of the Christ, thereby avoiding any potential guffaws in the midst of the crucifixion and earning $700 million worldwide. Deliberate anachronism is funny, too. In Love and Death, Woody Allen’s 19th-century Russian aristocrat is told by someone with a thick Russian accent that a woman he knows “is taking lovers.” Woody doesn’t understand: “She’s taking uppers?”

In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a revolutionary peasant, told that Arthur became king because the Lady of the Lake presented him with Excalibur, scoffs: “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. .  .  . You can’t expect to wield executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you!”

And then there is the gold standard in deliberate anachronism: the 90 minutes or so of sheer bliss during which Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, over the course of 14 years, recorded the series of comedy routines in which an interviewer asks questions of a 2,000-year-old man. The joke is that the 2,000-year-old man is an Eastern European Yiddish-speaking Jew whose perspective on history has not been helped along at all by his longevity. He has over 42,000 children, and not one comes to visit him.

“How did you feel when Joan of Arc was burned at the stake?” he is asked after he says he dated her. His answer: “Terrible.” The greatest historical invention? Saran Wrap. The first national anthem? “Let ’em all go to Hell except Cave 76!” The missing Shakespeare play? Queen Alexandra and Murray, which closed in Egypt.

The 2,000-Year-Old Man has just been mashed up with the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope road pictures and remade as the new comedy Year One, in which the pudgy scenery-chewer Jack Black buddies up with Michael Cera, the gangly boy-man costar of Juno who possesses a miraculous sense of comic timing and an entirely original way with a line of dialogue. The movie begins with the two of them living in prehistory with a small tribe in which they are also-rans because they are bad hunters and not especially good gatherers (“and those are the only two jobs we have here”).

They leave their village and meet up with Cain just as he is killing Abel; end up meeting Abraham just as he is binding Isaac; run away from Abraham because he announces his plan to circumcise them (“it’s a sleek new look, everyone’s going to be doing it”); and find themselves in Sodom, where they are pursued by a randy High Priest as they attempt to rescue two girls from their home village who are about to be sacrificed to the gods.

Year One comes from the comedy factory of Judd Apatow, Hollywood’s phenom of the moment whose name has appeared as a crucial creative player on The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up and Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Superbad and Pineapple Express and Step Brothers and Talladega Nights–all in the past four years.

There comes a moment when someone like Apatow hits it big, when everybody in the motion picture world wants to do business with him, he can get practically anything made, and so even his secondary projects get funded and produced. That was the case with Walk Hard, a full-length Apatow parody of a perfectly good movie (the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line) that hardly deserved the attention or the mockery. Walk Hard was funny for about 10 minutes and excruciating for the other 90.

Something similar is true of Year One; though it’s much better than Walk Hard, it still runs out of gas in exactly the same way. Year One is primarily the work of the writer-director Harold Ramis, a comedy phenom himself 30 years ago who faded for a decade and then came out of nowhere in 1993 to make Groundhog Day, an extraordinary comedy that deepens and satisfies in a manner unlike almost any other film ever made. Since then, Ramis hasn’t done much worth mentioning, but he is one of Apatow’s idols, and so here is Year One.

The comic anachronism here is that Cera and Black act like the kids from Apatow movies as they travel through Genesis. It’s cute, but Ramis doesn’t work it anywhere near as brilliantly or interestingly as Brooks and Reiner did. And he even appears, for a moment, to have something serious in mind, as when he shows in rather graphic detail Cain smashing Abel over the head repeatedly with a rock.

Ramis seems to be trying to convey the nature of man’s cruelty to man in the middle of his wan comedy, which is also punctuated by Cera urinating on himself and Black eating feces. There is something funny about the idea that Ramis and Apatow think Year One is an appropriate forum for thought-provoking commentary on faith, reason, and violence. But like Anne Baxter as Nefretiri in The Ten Commandments calling out to Moses–“You stubborn, splendid, adorable fool!”–the comedy is, in this case, entirely inadvertent.

John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.