MOVIE REVIEW : You’re No Mel Brooks, Mr. Ferren: ‘Funny’ Fails

Did you hear the one about the wanna-be director who made his first film simply by setting up his camera and inviting hundreds of wanna-be gagsters to tell the funniest joke they’d ever heard? And how the resulting talking-heads filmic funfest turned out to be, in the words of that great comic pundit Pee-wee Herman, so funny we forgot to laugh?

No? It’s no joke.

In directing “Funny--The Movie” (at the Monica 4-plex), Bran Ferren took the lazy and/or underfunded man’s approach to debut film making and shot roughly 2,000 actors, students, bartenders, show-biz types and other jes’ plain folks spilling quips. About 100 made the intermittently amusing, often dull, listlessly long final cut; there doesn’t appear to be a Robert Benchley or a Henny Youngman in the bunch.

Well, just one Henny Youngman (the real one). He’s one of several actual comedians who ply their professional wares for the camera. Most of the crop, though, are amateurs who force some of the same puns usually perpetrated at coffee breaks, the local tavern or lulls in family reunions. We get long stories about Jesus and Moses playing golf that lead to impossibly anticlimactic punch lines; lovingly related racial slurs (“What do you get when you cross a Jewish-American princess with a hooker?”; “Did you hear about the new black-Jewish temple?”), down-and-dirty sex talk (told mostly by women), your basic cruelty-to-animal jokes. Rim shots ‘n’ all.

Ferren, who sets the tone for the film with a lowbrow spoken intro, has taken the onus of tastelessness off himself and put it onto his subjects by claiming that “Funny” is not about what’s funny but what people think is funny. If so, the thesis of his picture--an unwitting one, no doubt--is that intellectual humor is pushing up daisies in America.

That warning stated, most viewers will probably find at least a few guffaws among the groaners. Your subjective reviewer chuckled out loud two or three times and smiled inwardly another dozen or so, winced frequently at some of the older and oft-heard offenders, but never laughed so hard he fell off his dinosaur.

“Funny--The Movie” (Times-rated Mature) will probably work better as “Funny--The Home Video Rental,” where partying chortle-seekers can take in its 83 minutes in segments, punctuated by beer runs and recitations from Playboy’s Party Jokes.