The Capitol insurrection is based on the 1996 Chris Farley comedy Black Sheep
“This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us.”
-recommended warnings for long-term nuclear waste storage sites, taken from a 1993 report from Sandia National Laboratories
“Voting kicks ass, right?!?!”
-Chris Farley in Black Sheep
I just had to watch Black Sheep, an execrable 84-minute Chris Farley and David Spade buddy comedy, for a podcast that my friend and I do where we goof off and watch comedy movies that haven’t aged well. Under normal circumstances, I would not recommend Black Sheep to anyone; if you’re craving a Chris Farley and David Spade buddy comedy, Tommy Boy is the obviously superior choice. However, these are not normal circumstances because — and my friend and I did not know this going into viewing the film — Black Sheep might be the single most important American political comedy ever made, since it accurately predicted the January 6 Capitol insurrection twenty-five years before it happened.
It’s difficult to overstate how cursed the production of Black Sheep would be even without its horrifyingly prophetic third act. After the previous Farley/Spade vehicle Tommy Boy turned out to be a modest box office success, Paramount Studios started kicking themselves for not marketing the film enough and pushing it to a Wayne’s World-level smash hit. Desperate to turn Farley and Spade’s chemistry into a bigger hit, they asked producer Lorne Michaels to slap together one more near-identical film for the two stars. From there, everything happened under the gun. The first draft of Fred Wolf’s screenplay was 45 pages long (maybe half the length that you would want for a comedy film), and delivered at the last possible second before Wolf could get sued for breach of contract. Director Penelope Spheeris fired Wolf four separate times during the shoot (Michaels and Farley kept bringing him back), eventually banning him from the set. David Spade revealed in later interviews that the bright sunlight on set permanently damaged his vision. According to a 2007 oral history in the New York Post, Farley was so disappointed in the final film that on the night of the premeire, he relapsed back into the addiction that would eventually kill him.
As you might expect from a film that comes with all of those fun facts, Black Sheep is not easy to watch. There’s an extremely loose storyline about Farley being the oafish brother of a gubernatorial candidate in Washington, and Spade being the campaign aide assigned to keep him out of trouble and the public spotlight. The entire first hour of this film is a punishing endurance test. Every laugh line feels like it’s from that 45-page first draft, including Gary Busey saying, with no real setup, “I can go to your momma’s and start a small fire in her panties”. Mudhoney cameos as themselves before being forgotten forever. David Spade visibly breaks while delivering a poop joke. Key plot points are advanced through two-second off-camera snippets of dialogue, suggesting that the film got edited before anyone realized that there were major gaps in the story. There’s a five-minute scene where Farley and Spade play checkers and indavertently cause an avalanche that destroys their mountain cabin, ignoring any real understanding of the rules of physics or checkers. Chris Farley, as always, has his gift for pulling off destructive physical comedy while still endearing himself to an audience, but it’s nowhere near enough to save this film.
The temptation to turn off the movie in the first hour will be very strong for most viewers. But if you did that, you’d miss the plot twist: as the election results come in and a manufactured scandal sinks Farley’s brother-candidate, Farley notices some irregularities in the returns being broadcast on the news, and realizes that the entire election has been tainted by widespread, intentional voter fraud. The solution, according to the logic of the film, is simple: Farley and Spade are going to go to the state capitol building, armed, during the certification of the vote totals, take hostages to get everyone’s attention, expose the voter fraud, and force the government to overturn the election.
I’m going to write that out again: the climactic scene of this film, which came out in 1996, involves a small group of civilians going to a state capitol building, with guns, to threaten people, halt the vote certification, allege voter fraud, and overturn the election results. This is played, start to finish, for comedy. Gary Busey dresses in camo fatigues and points a rocket launcher at a crowd of reporters. Chris Farley steals a cop’s gun and, in order to get onto the dais, takes David Spade as a fake hostage, although nobody is really interested in saving Spade’s life.
Here’s the kicker: they’re in the right! They’re the good guys, because it turns out the voter fraud was real and actually a massive conspiracy created by the incumbent governor and her aides. When Farley bellows “VOTER FRAUD!” from the podium, it’s meant to be a triumphant moment, leading into a less triumphant moment where the podium tips over and because of how Farley falls, it looks like he’s dry-humping the governor.
The question naturally follows: has Donald Trump seen this film? Did he, in January of this year, say to his aides “hey, we should do a Black Sheep on this whole election thing"? It is impossible for me to imagine a world in which the answer is “no". Donald Trump, as we all know, is the only person in human history who has watched every single episode of Saturday Night Live; even Lorne Michaels skipped the 1980 Jean Doumanian season. Trump considers SNL to be an essential totem of American culture, along with Time magazine and MAD magazine and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and eating steak well-done and housing Big Macs and cheering for the New York Yankees, because his neural pathways permanently calcified in 1983. The most current pop culture reference he’s ever made is to the 1995 Disney film Pocahontas, and even then he only knew the title and that it was about a native American, although I can also imagine him bringing up the film to talk about that great actor Mel Gibson and how he was treated unfairly, very unfairly, we all love Mel Gibson movie star, don’t we folks, movie star.
Because of this permanently arrested view of culture, Trump watches SNL every single week, even though it has been unwatchable for years and even though better comedic talent and social commentary can be found on countless other shows. He sits in front of his television for 90 minutes every week completely stone-faced, and he feels that he has to in order to stay current on what’s going on in America. As recent reporting unveiled, he asked the Department of Justice to investigate the show at one point for being too mean to him, displaying his usual expert understanding of what television comedy is and how the DOJ works.
This is all to say that Trump absolutely knows who Chris Farley is, and absolutely has seen every Lorne Michaels-produced film. And in January of this year, some neuron misfired in his brain, and he got the idea to “do a black sheep”, and now this hastily-produced film, a film so bad it made Chris Farley start using again, has had six months of lasting consequences for American democracy, and it’s not over yet.
I have no idea what to do with this information. The Republican party appears to be embracing a violent insurrection intended to overturn an election and leave people dead, and the blueprint for it is the worst comedy movie of 1996. I don’t know if anyone else has made this connection yet besides me and my friend; it doesn’t appear that anybody has, but that could be because nobody actually remembers anything about this film. When the footage came out from the Capitol on January 6th, no reporter said “wow, this is just like Black Sheep", because if they did, the only response they would get was “what the hell are you talking about? What is Black Sheep?” On top of that, I can’t extrapolate any lessons for today from Black Sheep, any solutions to our current political problems. I can just watch this movie in horror and say “holy shit" repeatedly for the final 20 minutes.
Holy shit.
