Errors of Comedy

The Hangover is this year’s Superbad, which was last year’s Knocked Up, which was The 40-Year-Old Virgin of that year, which was the Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle of the year before that, and so on back to There’s Something About Mary (1998)–an unabashedly filthy, foul-mouthed, animalistic summer comedy that both portrays the consequences of a lack of restraint and is an example of it.

There’s no sense complaining that these movies are in bad taste or that they go too far; they wouldn’t exist otherwise. So, even as one acknowledges that they are not a good sign about the health of our culture, that they only worsen the coarsening they represent, and that fare like this is driving people who want a bit of nice and easy entertainment away from movie theaters permanently, the only real question one can ask about The Hangover is: Is it funny?

The Hangover is about a bachelor party gone wrong. The groom, his two best friends, and his ne’er-do-well soon-to-be brother-in-law all travel from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. When the latter three wake up in the morning, the groom is missing, one of them has lost a tooth, a live tiger is unchained in the bathroom, and the aforementioned baby is in a car seat in a closet. None of them has the foggiest idea how any of it happened. The rest of the movie follows the three survivors as they desperately try to find the groom and reconstruct the events of the previous night.

The hirsute Zach Galifianakis, who looks like one of those drawings that attempts to convey the appearance of the earth’s first man, is the child-man idiot who, told that someone has a ring his grandmother saved through the Holocaust, asks, “They gave out rings in the Holocaust?” Bradley Cooper is the hipster buddy who is desperate to play Rat Pack Guy even though he is a high-school teacher with a wife and child at home. And Ed Helms of The Daily Show makes a spectacular debut as a screen comedy presence in his role as a buttoned-down dentist–the movie’s straight man, who turns out not to be quite as controlled as he appears.

So is The Hangover funny?

Well, it turns out the tiger is the property of Mike Tyson, the boys have somehow traded the hipster’s MG convertible for a cop car, and that when they find the convertible, there’s a gay, naked Korean gangster in the trunk. The gay, naked Korean gangster is played by an unheralded genius named Ken Jeong, who should be garlanded with roses and worshipped as a god for the wonders he does with a part that must have read, on the page, like nothing.

Sounds funny, right? The set-up is ingenious, and the farcical plot–the work of its director, Todd Phillips, and screenwriters Jon Lucas and Scott Moore–is well conceived. It’s tighter, leaner, and better constructed than most summer comedies.

But, no: Except for moments here and there, The Hangover really isn’t all that funny, or as funny as it ought to be. Watching the boys solve the mystery of the disappearing groom doesn’t quite hold one’s attention. In its final half-hour, The Hangover begins to resemble the story of a bender as told by someone who is now sober to someone else who has never taken a drink in his life–shocking at first, thrilling for a while, and then just dully repetitive.

I incline toward the view that comedy is transgressive by definition, should break rules, and justifies any moral failing through the generation of genuine humor and laughs. The Hangover doesn’t manage to produce enough of either and, therefore, deserves to be considered both a failure and a disreputable one.

That is, until its final 90 seconds. In its final 90 seconds, The Hangover pulls a fast one by ginning up a final title sequence that is every bit as fall-on-the-floor hilarious as one could have wished for. It’s also unimaginably, startlingly dirty, with a few split-second images that might properly belong in porn. In its closing moment, The Hangover really goes for broke, and pulls it off.

It’s up to you whether a killer scene like that is worth sitting through a very long final half-hour. I won’t judge you either way.

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