Ben Stiller: Moviedom’s Poster Boy for Embarrassment?

A character in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Bluebeard” proclaims that the humancondition can be summed up in one word. “And that word,” he says, “is embarrassment.”

Can’t argue with that. It’s also hard to argue that there are few actors in movies who can convey such a definitive state of being.

Now, there are many actors who are embarrassed by movie acting, even (especially?) those who excel at it. (Marlon Brando and Warren Beatty are two stars who come to mind.) And who can blame them? Playing dress-up in intimate surroundings in front of a camera so millions of people in dark rooms can stare at you? Even writing that last sentence makes me want to hide under the end table.

Embarrassment, however prominently fixed by Vonnegut in the human comedy, isn’t always a smooth fit on a big screen, where big emotions rule. Embarrassment is a reaction that’s rarely projected outward; more often, on screen and in life, it’s turned inside like a scorpion’s stinger.

When characters embarrass themselves, it’s usually an interval bridging--or a moment concluding--some catastrophe. The humiliation passes, or is overwhelmed by something larger, deeper or, more often, funnier.

Comedy would seem the perfect movie venue for a performer to do for embarrassment what Charlie Chaplin did for pathos, Woody Allen for anxiety or Jim Carrey for isometrics. Yet more than a century of movie history has rolled by without one movie actor to emerge as embarrassment’s clown prince. Until now.

The ongoing success of “Meet the Parents” has established Ben Stiller as embarrassment’s big-screen virtuoso. Whether he likes it or not, Stiller has made humiliation into his own personal trademark, as indelible and as conspicuous as, say, that dab of goo on his ear in “There’s Something About Mary.” That 1998 hit owed much of its success to the ease with which Stiller made his ill-starred character appealing, despite the fact that his character fought with a cute little dog or . . . well, that business leading up to that thing with the ear.

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If you’ve seen “Meet the Parents,” you know that Stiller’s earnest-klutz persona is driven to an even more riotous series of mishaps. Bad enough that he’s saddled here with the name Greg Focker and has to explain to rich, arrogant doctors why he’s perfectly happy being a nurse. But in trying too, too hard to please his girlfriend’s (Teri Polo) parents (Robert De Niro, Blythe Danner), Stiller’s Greg commits a species of social suicide that would be agonizing if it weren’t so funny.

Even the simple act of using the guest bathroom becomes for Greg as incandescent an opportunity for self-destruction as one of Wile E. Coyote’s Acme playthings. That the family cat doesn’t get mutilated or killed is one of the unexpected tender mercies of “Meet the Parents.”

Stiller gets better at playing this eager, perpetually thwarted romantic with every movie. You really can’t help but cover your eyes when he’s about to keel over into another verbal faux pas, and yet somehow he remains watchable. His dark, well-sculpted features can go amiably and wistfully slack during the destructive results of his good intentions. And yet, as the hilarious and all-too-perfectly realized sequence in the LaGuardia Airport waiting area proves, Stiller’s face can sharpen and grimace into the best slow burn of any young movie actor on the planet.

Stiller’s credits are cluttered with losers, some far less lovable than Greg Focker. His crooked undercover cop in this year’s “Black and White” suggests what could happen if one of his nebbishes were to veer into the psychotic. “Permanent Midnight” (1998), in which he starred as a writer who’s more willfully self-destructive than the hapless klutzes he plays in “Mary” and “Parents,” was regarded as a “serious” breakthrough as an actor. But I think he was just as good, maybe better, in the underrated “Flirting With Disaster” (1996), in which his character was seeking, with even more uproariously calamitous results, his natural parents.

It would be tempting to call Stiller an original, if it weren’t for the fact that Albert Brooks (whom Stiller referred to as a personal hero) had staked out this terrain of mortification. Brooks courageously created leading roles for himself that made him look as hapless and mortified as Stiller. (Think of “Lost in America,” “Mother” and, even, “The Muse.”)

Why, one wonders, is Stiller managing to make a franchise out of perpetual embarrassment while Brooks still hasn’t scored the box-office triumph his talent deserves? Maybe they should make a movie together to work out an answer.