“Freddy Got Fingered” and Modern Dadaism in “Bad” Cinema (NSFW)
In one of my favorite reviews of his, Roger Ebert said of Freddy Got Fingered: “The day may come when “Freddy Got Fingered” is seen as a milestone of neo-surrealism. The day may never come when it is seen as funny.” After watching a few wonderful reviews of this film by Red Letter Media and Lindsay Ellis (from whom I took heavy inspiration for this essay), I decided to watch this movie for myself and come to my own conclusions. In short, it’s not just bad. It’s not so bad it’s good. In the words of Lindsay Ellis, it’s “so bad, it’s art.” It’s a movie where Tom Green played an Andy Kaufman-esque joke on the producers stupid enough to give him 15 million dollars to make a movie, committing career suicide in the process while making a surreal Dadaist masterpiece. There are parts of that film I still don’t understand, and I’m not sure I want to understand all of it.
Freddy got Fingered takes a traditional comedy film structure and contorts it beyond recognition. Let’s explore this first with the characters: The protagonist Gordy is completely psychotic, unlikable, irredeemably awful and totally unsympathetic all at once. If this were a more traditional movie, Gordy would be kind of dumb, but good-natured and lovable, like Harry and Lloyd from Dumb and Dumber. Next, we have Betty, filling in the place of the dorky rom-com love interest. Tom Green chose to take the common trope of the helpless “fixer-upper” love interest to the extreme by making her wheelchair bound, and instead of wanting a meaningful relationship with Gordy, she just wants to fellate him and surrounds herself with phallic imagery. Jim, Gordy’s disapproving father played by Rip Torn, is in the film to fill in the role of the disapproving father and share the occasional sentimental moment with Gordy. In any other movie, such as Grown-Ups, these types of phony sentimental moments would be played straight and taken earnestly; in this movie, however, they mostly consist of Gordy and Jim repeating “make your daddy proud” to each other. Another important character to examine is the little boy Andy, who fills in the roll of the slapstick side character. Whereas any other slapstick character, like Wiley from the Grown-Ups films, would get hurt in hilarious ways with few consequences. When Andy is in a scene, he always gets a horrific injury which is incredibly uncomfortable to watch; in fact, the ending of the film in which this little boy is shredded to bits by an airplane propeller had to be re-edited to avoid an NC-17 rating.
On to the plot, which is for the most part abandoned a third of the way into the film. Gordy heads to Los Angeles to pursue his dream of being an animator, but not before stopping to beat off a horse (this scene has no significance to the plot). Eventually, he gives up and returns home to annoy his disapproving father (played by Rip Torn). He gets revenge by falsely accusing his father of molesting his little brother Freddy, getting him taken from their custody(hence the actual title of this studio film, which goes to show how out of touch the producers were). He eventually gets his show greenlit and uses the money to ship his parents’ house to Pakistan, where he showers his dad in elephant semen and gets him to admit he’s proud of him. He then finally makes a triumphant return to America as a beloved celebrity.
This movie is incredibly surreal, and for the most part it’s only funny in a detached way. When you realize that scenes where Tom Green wears a deer carcass on his head and swings a baby around by its umbilical cord actually got put into a studio film, you have no choice but to laugh in shock; and that’s not even including the hellish “musical numbers” such as “Daddy Would You Like Some Sausage?” This is also a very common reaction to many influential Dadaist artworks.
Dadaism was an avant-grade movement in art, literature, theatre, and cinema revolving around subverting tradition to the point of almost being anti-art. It was marked by nonsense, chaos, protesting social order, and was often quite surreal. Freddy Got Fingered fulfills most of these criteria, whether by accident or otherwise. In his review of this film, Jay Bauman put it best when he said “it almost feels like the movie itself is the joke.” The plot structure is so loose it is often almost nonexistent. Most of the characters are written to subvert archetypal comedy movie characters. The humor falls flat so much that it seems intentional and uncomfortable to watch.
Personally, I believe that Tom Green probably made this movie to play a joke on the out of touch studio execs who approached him about making a gross-out boner comedy like American Pie, so he just tried to explore what the hell he could possibly get away with in a studio movie and made a feature-length shitpost before shitposting existed. One thing is for sure: Tom Green’s comedy was incredibly fresh and ahead of its time, and he paved the way for many modern absurdists like Eric Andre .
Overall, I think Tom Green was a trendsetter in many ways. Now, while it seems like his brand of surreal anti-humor is everywhere on the internet, this movie reminded me of a few other comedies I’ve grown to love.
The Anchorman DVD Commentary Track
Anchorman: the Legend of Ron Burgundy was a smash hit, one of the best comedies of the 2000's. It was a hillarious and pointed satire of 1970’s pop culture, TV news journalism, and workplace sexism. Of course, it had to have a commentary track for the DVD release. So, Adam McKay and Will Ferrel sat down in a recording studio and made a hidden gem.
For those who have not heard it, the DVD commentary track has very little to do with the film. McKay and Ferrel get drunk and discuss everything from censorship in a “post Janet Jackson era” to dog genitals to Adam McKay’s wife’s breasts to a scat battle between Will Ferrell and Lou Rawls (who had no clue why he was included). There are call-in guest appearances from Andy Richter (who was not in the film), a destitute David Koechner, and a distraught Christina Applegate. It’s abundantly clear that nobody wanted to make this commentary, so they decided to instead make a 90 minute shitpost. Commentary tracks in general tend to have a very niche fanbase, and this is no exception. According to the sparse information I found online about this track, it was poorly received and promptly forgotten. However, I believe McKay and Ferrell created something brilliant.
This commentary track is incredibly surreal (and sometimes painful) to listen to, and it’s definitely an acquired taste. When I first listened to Anchorman’s commentary track on a whim, I had no clue what the hell I had just stumbled upon, but for some reason I loved it. Now I appreciate it for being accidentally Dadaist. While I know Will Ferrell didn’t set out to make a Dadaist commentary track, I still love its anarchic nature and the fact that it flies in the face of “traditions” for what a good commentary track should look like and how the participants should behave. Overall, this commentary is terrible by conventional standards, but that makes it amazingly funny in its own rebellious way.
The year before Anchorman’s comedy track was recorded, a film which I consider a fantastic Dadaist comedy was released and unfortunately panned by critics who misunderstood the film’s intentions.
The Cat in the Hat
Universal Studios and Dreamworks’ The Cat in the Hat, directed by Bo Welch and starring Mike Meyers, Alec Baldwin, and Kelly Preston, is a very loose adaptation of the Dr. Seuss classic. In it, Conrad and Sally are stuck at home with nothing to do, until a cat comes ad takes them on destructive adventures, and he helps them clean all their messes up and leaves before their mom comes home. This plot line takes up about 10 minutes of the 85-minute runtime. The rest of the time is filled with amazingly surreal set pieces and gags, such as the infamous Kupkake-inator. One aspect which always struck me as unsettling is the fact that everything in this movie is pastel-colored and totally spotless; the clothes, the cars, the buildings, the plants, even the messes are spotless.
This film qualifies as Dadaist to me because while at a surface level it seems like another bad Seuss adaptation, this film actually knows what it’s doing, and it seeks to rebel against screenwriting conventions and actively mocks them. It’s writers decided that, instead of taking the safe route and filling the script with literary bloat like so many other children’s adaptations of the time, they would take their artistic license as far as they could stretch it. The result was a surreal sketch comedy fever dream, a feature-length shitpost. The various sketches all seem self-aware, as if they know how stupid all these children’s movies are; they take the literary bloat that would normally fill this type of film’s script and turn it into beautiful chaos.
The one unifying factor in all of these works that makes them Dadaist is that they are all some form of shitpost. What I mean by this is that they all seem at first glance to fit into a cluttered category (i.e. gross-out comedies, commentary tracks, or children’s movies), but upon a closer look, they‘re actually all making mockeries of their respective genres. All three of these seek to rebel from some pre-establishes social tradition, and in the process often create something that can be considered anti-art or anti-humor.
The beauty in all three of these works lies in their anarchic rebellious nature. They are all incredibly surreal in their subversiveness, acquired tastes with their over-the-top humor, and all uniquely hillarious and thought-provoking. But most importantly, these works were all predictive of the absurdist comedy that would become omnipotent on the internet in the coming years.
