Talladega Nights:
The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
Directed by Adam McKay
The new Will Ferrell comedy, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, is nominally a satirical farce about a race car driver. But really it’s a study in a certain style of improvisational comedy perfected in Chicago by a crazed dope addict named Del Close. The Close improv method is everything comedy ought to be–daring and risky and a real high-wire act for those who perform it–except that the work it produces is often awkward, weird, and astoundingly unfunny. And that is, unfortunately, the case with Talladega Nights.
A description of the plot of Talladega Nights makes it sound like a conventional sports-movie spoof: Dodgeball on four wheels. Ferrell plays Ricky Bobby, a white-trash South Carolinian who becomes the most popular driver in NASCAR by holding fast to his motto: “If you’re not first, you’re last.” He makes $21 million a year, marries a “tractor beam of hotness” who introduces herself to him by raising her T-shirt at the track, and has two children, Walker and Texas Ranger.
His unrivaled domination of the sport ends one day when a French driver named Jean Girard (the sidesplitting Sacha Baron Cohen) emerges to challenge him. Girard drives while drinking café filtre and reading Camus, and he causes Ricky to suffer a terrible car crash that shakes Ricky’s confidence. Ricky loses his wife to his best friend, is reduced to selling pizzas, and only begins to see the way back when his ne’er-do-well father returns to give him new confidence.
In the end, though, the movie doesn’t really send up sports movies or American white trash or anything in particular. It’s really just a series of exhausting set pieces, each one a cute little joke that is stretched and extended and distorted.
In one, Ricky says grace at the dinner table, invoking Baby Jesus. His wife objects that it makes no sense to pray to Baby Jesus, since He was just a baby then. Ricky says his wife is welcome to pray to the Christmas Jesus if she likes, but he likes the Baby Jesus and his Baby Einstein developmental toys.
Maybe you smiled reading that. But trust me when I say that the scene just goes on and on and on, and on and on and on, with Ricky continuing to expound on the qualities of the Baby Jesus, his friend Cal talking about what he thinks of the Baby Jesus, his wife objecting again, and his kids and his father-in-law getting in on the action.
It takes a particular kind of person to believe that it’s funny to be subjected to endless variations on the same joke. It takes a person who has been trained in the Del Close School of Comedy, as Ferrell and his cowriter and director, Adam McKay, were.
Close thought you could find “truth in comedy” by beating a joke to death and then whaling on it after its corpse lay there rotting on the floor. He devised a lengthy improv form called “the Harold,” which basically involves coming up with three comic situations over the course of 30 minutes and repeating them three times over. Each joke is told, retold, examined, and deconstructed in a laborious and confusing process that is occasionally exhilarating to watch but is usually just tiresome.
Other forms of improvisational play appear in the movie to similar lame effect. After his car crash, Ricky imagines he’s on fire, takes off all his clothes, and runs around with only his underwear on, invoking Jesus and Tom Cruise and Oprah Winfrey to save him. It’s not a bad bit until Cal starts screaming, “Save my friend from the invisible fire,” jumps on Ricky’s back and attempts to put Ricky out.
Improvisers are taught to “say yes” to anything their fellow improviser might say or do–which means they are instantly to accept whatever weird or crazy premise is put in front of them, and try to build on it. It’s the only way improv can work, because if someone says, “It’s tough being a rutabaga,” and the other person on stage says, “What are you talking about, you’re not a rutabaga,” there’s really nowhere to go but down.
But all too often the original premise is either just weird or not very clever (like a sentient rutabaga, for example). When improviser #2 starts chiming in by claiming to be a different talking vegetable, the whole business instantly seems more like an inside joke than a performance meant to evoke laughs from anyone but the two people onstage. The audience ends up like the one straight guy in a room full of marijuana smokers.
In their first film together, Anchorman, Ferrell and McKay took a TV movie-of-the-week storyline–how a sexist work environment at a San Diego television station was forced to change when a high-powered woman arrived on the scene in the early 1970s–and played some inspired riffs off it. There hasn’t been a funnier scene this decade than the rival local-TV news crews facing off in a rumble.
They have just as rich a vein to tap with NASCAR as they did with happy-talk news during the Me Decade, but they don’t make much of it. Maybe McKay, who wrote and directed a show in New York in 2004 with the subtle name of George Bush Is a M–f–, simply couldn’t get a feel for a subculture that is made up almost entirely of Bush voters. Or maybe they just saw the dailies and believed the improv they were filming was pure gold.
John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
