Only the Reagan Era could have birthed the USA Today. Shallow, vacuous, yet full of rah-rah enthusiasm and a constant adherence to style over substance, the newspaper quickly become a favorite among people who don’t search further than headlines for their news needs. Those who enjoy meaningless bullet point information relished in the look of a newspaper no thinking human could take seriously. Comedians made fun of it. Doonesbury made fun of it. And in the fall of 1986, I discovered The Harvard Lampoon had lampooned it. To this date, the well-worn bogus USA Today I bought in a Li’l Peach in Newton, MA so many years ago remains one of the true treasures among my collection of humor. Harvard Lampoon nailed it: every meaningless fact, every shallow article, and every piece of vague poorly-written propaganda. It is too bad I wasn’t old enough to appreciate Harvard Lampoon origins, the ones that spanned the satire of ages past, and those which gave rise to National Lampoon, the focus of this firmly tongue-in-cheek biopic.
The story of Douglas Kenney (Will Forte) goes back to the 1960s when the then-Harvard student
amassed honors the rest of us might not take for granted. Young Douglas had the innate ability to view every.single.thing through a comic lens; I think younger me would have gotten along famously with him. FWIW, Will Forte is almost certainly a perfect match for this walking satirist, except for the fact that he’s too old to be Kenney at any age of this biography. (The movie makes fun of that point.) Eschewing a mountain of responsibility which included being chief editor of the Harvard Lampoon, Kenney and pal Henry Beard (Domhnall Gleeson) spent a chunk of their school year writing and publishing a J.R.R.Tolkien parody entitled Bored of the Rings. While I still quote Bored from time-to-time, I think it loses steam somewhere around page 50. Until now, however, I did not qualify my objectivity with the reminder that it was written by college students in their copious free time.
So I suppose this is a tale of what to do when there is no professional market for your exceptional college talent, which is not an uncommon problem — ask any female athlete. Kenney and Beard moved to New York, sniffed up the entirety of Madison Avenue, and finally found a taker for National Lampoon. It was the publisher of Weight Watchers Magazine who finally bit … turns out there was a market for comedy in magazine form after all. Who knew?
Within a few years, National Lampoon became the standard for adult children too embarrassed to continue reading MAD Magazine. My words here aren’t doing justice to the material. A Futile and Stupid Gesture is a straightforward biopic in many ways, including timeline, but the beauty of the film is in the absurd-but-true details – the in-fighting over the inclusion of the animatronic gopher in Caddyshack and full grown adults debating over how best to represent the cover of “Negligent Parenting” Magazine. The battles to decide what is comedy are almost as funny as the comedy itself.
A Futile and Stupid Gesture has a dangerous amount of wig abuse. I know hair was free-flowing and wild in the 1970s, but in the effort to reconstruct the era, it is quite clear that almost 50% of cast members are wearing terrible wigs. For instance, Joel McHale in sloppy
shower cap hair will remind you not so much of Chevy Chase in the 1970s as Joel McHale in sloppy shower cap hair. The greatest violations of grooming sanity in the film are Gleeson, McHale, Thomas Lennon as Michael O’Donoghue and Matt Lucas as Tony Hendra. I couldn’t help wondering if this helped make the film funny. Did everyone just get on set and immediately start laughing at one another? That’s what I’d have done.
If I have any knock on this movie titled after a quote from Animal House, it’s the shameless name-dropping. I suppose if you have a bio to crow about, you’re going to crow and crow and crow. Does that justify making Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, John Belushi and slew of other names only people my age will remember mere background furniture in the story of the writer who boosted all of them upwards? I’m not sure. Is it enough to know these talents all worked together in a disgustingly white male dominated venue (yes, the movie makes fun of that, too)? I don’t know. What I do know is this film was indeed A Futile and Stupid Gesture, and I, for one, am glad it exists.
A pillar of comic conviction
Created worlds of humorous diction
Yet, his story became lore
We need him no more
As life itself is now self-parody fiction
Rated R, 101 Minutes
Director: David Wain
Writer: Michael Colton & John Aboud
Genre: The drama of comedy
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Historians of comedy
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: The people who have to live with them
