1,000 ways of behaving badly

In this Apatowian Age of the Big Baby comedy, Will Ferrell is the undisputed avatar. He plays seriously self-absorbed characters who do not have much self to absorb. He is also, obliviously, a tantrum-throwing tease. In movie after movie and, before that, on “Saturday Night Live,” he bares his midriff, he displays the ringlets of his fuzzy-wuzzy chest. Can no one stop this man from mooning? From streaking?

In his new comedy, “Semi-Pro,” set in the ‘70s when hair was big, he plays Jackie Moon, a one-hit wonder whose single, “Love Me Sexy,” allows him to own, coach and play power forward for the Flint, Mich., Tropics of the American Basketball Assn. Like his recent movies, “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” and “Blades of Glory,” it’s slipshod slapstick punctuated by bursts of inspired nuttiness. Moon’s mantra is “Everybody love everybody,” but by the time the season plays out he’s wrestled a bear, partaken of the latest in dumpster cuisine and chewed out a ref with unprintable spew.

All of which is typical of Ferrell. His specialty is to flip-flop between the passive and aggressive polarities of his characters. That’s why he was so good as George W. Bush -- he never forgot that Mr. Mission Accomplished had once been a male cheerleader. (Ferrell, of course, played a cheerleader on “SNL.”) Often Ferrell’s placid cluelessness is just bubble wrap for the beast within. The default position for all men, he seems to be saying, is to behave badly. (The reason he makes so many sports movies must be because he views athletics as the caldron of blowhard masculinity). The more straight-arrow Ferrell is, the more avidly we crave his fits. His ordinariness, his sweatered, middle-class whiteness, is a setup. You can be sure that, soon enough, he’ll bawl -- or hurl.

And yet there’s an innate sweetness to Ferrell even when he’s on the rampage, and this is what separates him from, say, John Belushi or Bill Murray, two earlier “SNL” alumni who tilled the same scorched earth. Those guys meant business, hostility was their root and branch, but the anger in Ferrell’s characters is like a fever that flares and then, just as mysteriously, lifts. The reason he’s so good as the elf in “Elf” is because he didn’t need to fake the innocence. When he downs a gallon of Coke in one swig and lets out an interminable, industrial-strength burp, he’s no slobbo, just a big kid.

Ferrell captures the fatuousness that is every man’s downfall. His most memorable characters on “Saturday Night Live” were the ones that gave that fatuity free rein. Playing along with Chris Kattan as one half of the party-hopping, body-jerking Butabi brothers -- a role he later revisited with mixed results in his first starring-role movie, “A Night at the Roxbury” -- he was like a Bizarro Planet version of John Travolta’s Tony Manero from “Saturday Night Fever.” With his thatched hair parted up the middle and his bright, white teeth and blank Roswell alien eyes, he seemed pole-axed by hottie overload.

His hot-tubbing, sangria-sipping swinger on “SNL” looked like a debauched apostle. His Robert Goulet behaved as if all the world was his lounge. As James Lipton, the host of “Inside the Actors Studio,” Ferrell looked like the second stage of the Wolfman. (He is often at his most deranged when he sports a fake beard or mustache; it brings out the Paleolithic in him.) He nails Lipton’s oleaginous persona, his sepulchral, Master Thespian intonations. We are made to understand that, no matter the wattage of the guest, Lipton is the true star.

Throwing himself into his work

Ferrell is also a marvelous physical comic, another reason, perhaps, why so many of his movies center on sports. He’s not wonderful in the way that, say, Steve Martin is or Jim Carrey is. Martin at his best has a gyroscopic aplomb; he finesses gravity. Carrey is a human Slinky. Ferrell’s virtuosity is clunkier. While Carrey appears to have no bones, Ferrell is all torso and kneecaps and elbows. His bigness -- he’s 6-foot-3 -- gives him a daffy discombobulation. Striding buck naked through the suburban streets in “Old School” (perhaps his best comedy) or Lutzing across the ice in “Blades of Glory,” he moves like a mildly inebriated llama.

It’s no news that comics yearn to display their inner Pagliacci, and Ferrell is no exception. In “Live From New York,” the 2002 oral history of “SNL,” he was interviewed after he had ended his seven-year stint. “My dream of all dreams,” he said, “would be to do what Tom Hanks or Jim Carrey have been able to do -- make the transition somewhere down the line from doing comedy to dramatic parts in the movies.”

This he has done, sort of. In the little-seen “Winter Passing,” he played a supporting role as a spacey former guitarist of a Christian rock group called Punching Pilate who quit when it “went all ska.” It’s the sort of part he might once have worked up as an “SNL” skit, but he was affecting in it. The spaciness came out of a hurt and not the usual void. He’s also touching as a lovelorn out-of-work actor in Woody Allen’s comedy-drama “Melinda and Melinda,” but he was fitted with Woodyisms that didn’t sound right coming out of his mouth. “Stranger Than Fiction,” in which he plays a tax man who discovers he’s a character in an author’s novel, was a depresso meta-drama that used Ferrell’s big blankness as a placard for angst. (At least in Carrey’s meta-movie, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” the misery was energized.)

You can’t really fault Ferrell for wanting to secure the occasional day pass from Team Apatow. And yet films such as “Old School” and “Kicking & Screaming” and “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” did occasionally scale the hyperventilated heights of his best “SNL” work. Unlike his “serious” films, they don’t feel like diminutions of his appeal. As with so many “SNL” stars before him, Ferrell is caught in a bind: Repeat yourself and rake in a pasha’s riches or stretch yourself and, as they say in politics, risk alienating your base.

But what if Ferrell’s dumb comedies were smarter? What if he stretched himself in ways that, instead of blanking him out, deepened and complicated what we already love about him? Eddie Murphy was able to do it, and Murray and Martin, but not many others. Ferrell, especially among the younger set, has phenomenal audience rapport -- he helped launch the highly successful comedy website FunnyOrDie.com last year -- and that should count for something as he attempts to move beyond his revue-sketch roots. (It may be that, in the future, the comics who thrive will be the ones who come across best as digitized miniatures.)

The saving grace of the Apatow movies and their ilk, the thing that cauterizes the raunch, is that the women in them are always wise to the men -- they’ve got their number. Ferrell has often worked well with strong women, such as Zooey Deschanel in “Elf” or, when he’s not being a zombie, Maggie Gyllenhaal in “Stranger Than Fiction.” They bring out in him a yielding, beseeching quality. As he moves into his 40s, Ferrell’s creative salvation could be the romantic comedy, and I can think of a few directors -- Richard Linklater, or the Alexander Payne who made “Sideways” -- who could take the romance in directions that we, and Farrell, might never have imagined.

Here’s something I can imagine right now: Ferrell playing Bush in his final hours in the Oval Office. And wouldn’t you kill to see him in a sketch as Daniel Day-Lewis in “There Will Be Blood”? No doubt the pants would come off.

I’m all for Ferrell as Everyman, but in the process, let’s not lose sight of Everyjerk. Let’s not throw out the Big Baby with the bath water.

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Rainer is film critic for the Christian Science Monitor and DVD critic for Bloomberg News.

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The guy is game when it comes to sending up sports

In Will Ferrell’s latest sports comedy, “Semi-Pro,” he plays Jackie Moon, the outrageous owner of the Flint, Mich., Tropics. Sports fans may thrill to the ‘70s-style basketball action, but true comedy aficionados will no doubt enjoy the talented supporting cast, which includes regular collaborators Andy Richter and Will Arnett. Of course, the sports comedy has become fertile territory for Ferrell, and certain moments in “Semi-Pro” might seem strangely familiar.

In the interest of clearing up any confusion, what follows is a quick look at some of the hallmarks of the actor’s athletic-oriented humor.

-- Patrick Day

Semi-Pro (2008)

The sport: Men’s basketball

Ferrell plays: Obnoxious but lovable buffoon Jackie Moon

Ferrell sings: Original composition “Love Me Sexy”

Gratuitous nudity: Ferrell spends one-third of the film in very revealing, very tiny shorts. Very tiny.

Classic rock: “Move On Up” by Curtis Mayfield

Wacky European stereotype: The stoic, mustachioed Uzbek player, Vakidis

Cameos from professional athletes: None, given that the film takes place in the 1970s. However, real-life NBA player Peter Cornell plays Vakidis.

Featuring Andy Richter as . . . Office assistant Bobby Dee

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Blades of Glory (2007)

The sport: Competitive figure skating

Ferrell plays: Obnoxious but lovable buffoon Chazz Michael Michaels

Ferrell sings: “My Humps” by Black Eyed Peas

Gratuitous nudity: An open-robe view of Ferrell’s chest and an extended topless scene in which he shows off his many tattoos

Classic rock: “Flash’s Theme” by Queen

Wacky European stereotype: None, but the villains, Stranz and Fairchild Van Waldenberg, have the most Germanic names imaginable.

Cameos from professional athletes: Brian Boitano, Sasha Cohen, Peggy Fleming, Dorothy Hamill, Scott Hamilton and Nancy Kerrigan

Featuring Andy Richter as . . . a Canadian Mountie

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Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)

The sport: NASCAR

Ferrell plays: Cocky but lovable buffoon Ricky Bobby

Ferrell sings: Nothing in this one, but frequent Ferrell cohort John C. Reilly performs Wham’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.”

Gratuitous nudity: Stripped down to his tighty-whiteys, Ferrell runs around a race track, screaming, attempting to douse invisible flames.

Classic rock: “Faithfully” by Journey

Wacky European stereotype: Artsy, intellectual French racer, who also happens to be gay, played by Sacha Baron Cohen

Cameos from professional athletes: Dick Berggren, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Mike Joy, Jamie McMurray, Larry McReynolds and Darrell Waltrip

Featuring Andy Richter as . . . Gregory, the lover of Baron Cohen’s Jean Girard

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Kicking & Screaming (2005)

The sport: Soccer

Ferrell plays: Uptight but lovable buffoon Phil Weston

Ferrell sings: “Get Ready for This” by 2 Unlimited

Gratuitous nudity: In a game of shirts versus skins against Ferrell’s character’s father, played by Robert Duvall, guess who gets skins?

Classic rock: “We Are the Champions” by Queen

Wacky European stereotype: Two Italian kids who are soccer whizzes, of course

Cameos from professional athletes: Mike Ditka (OK, he’s not an athlete, but The Coach is a celebrity in his own right)

Featuring Andy Richter as . . . This is the one Richter sat out.