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Tom Green Saves Sick Comedy

Retarded Interludes

by Sean Nelson

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Marc Pearson

It was the scene where Tom Green's paralyzed-from-the-waist-down girlfriend started to orgasm from being whacked in the shins with a bamboo cane that made me realize that Freddy Got Fingered, Green's directorial debut, was so offensive on every level that it was either dangerous or important. Actually, it may have been the scene before that, in which Green, playing a 28-year-old would-be cartoonist who still lives at home, delivers a baby despite the pregnant mother's anguished protests. This non-consensual midwifery culminates with Green swinging the apparently stillborn baby around a blood-spattered hospital room by its umbilical cord--which he severs with his teeth (naturally)--until it gurgles to life and is safely deposited, cooing in its mother's arms. Green is then bum-rushed out of the hospital, insisting that he "saved the day."

To make a joke out of what more or less amounts to rape is, of course, sick. But to extend that joke into a five-minute set piece that pulls the viewer through a gamut of moral outrage, shock, belly laughter, and a happy ending is something else again. You want to believe that there could be nothing funny about it, while in fact, by its very audaciousness, it achieves a kind of comic perfection that only a deeply moral person could create.

Green, whose hyperintentionally obnoxious MTV show has poised him atop the slippery slope of the novelty star, proves with Freddy Got Fingered that he is, in fact, a master artist. His art is finding, in every conceivable situation, the absolute opposite of the right thing to do or say, and then saying and doing it, repeatedly, incessantly. With a consistency you wouldn't think to predict, the trajectory of his persona--the sweet but malignant cosmic naif--veers from sorta funny, to kind of stupid, to uncomfortable, to completely annoying and not funny at all, to absolutely meta-, and the funniest imaginable thing ever. Though his obvious forbears are Harry Langdon, Jerry Lewis, and Jim Carrey, there's a degree of high-lowbrow absurdism in Green, which owes more to Ionesco or Beckett than to his film precursors, who always pull back from insanity at the last (and crucial) moment and make their buffoons safe and lovable. What's great about Green is that these shades of intellectual defensibility are always obliterated by the blinding klieg light of dick jokes (horse dicks, elephant dicks, et al.), animal molestation, literal wound-licking, and punch lines like "people die of cancer."

Green goes beyond all the way, deftly raising the stakes on hyperbolic silliness to create a film world in which a human story with classic themes (aging skateboard slacker at war with hard-assed father) can be told by way of a progression of retarded interludes. Like a pig in filth, Freddy Got Fingered revels in jokes you're not allowed to make. But the film's goal isn't the obvious outrageousness that has spawned a thousand soul-dead gross-out comedies in the last few years. Like Lenny Bruce at his best, Green's a sick comic for whom shock is a political slingshot. The target is sanctimony. He isn't mocking molested children or handicapped people; he's hocking loogies at the culture of pious, dehumanizing condescension. The joke is always on the people whose reflexive offendedness makes the world sterile and boring.

The Sex Pistols' "Problems" blasts through the first scene like a mission statement: "The problem is YOU!" Green's undergirding punk morality comes from a recognition that not being allowed to say things is the ultimate crassness. Freddy Got Fingered isn't all-the-way great. Green's impulse to go too far sometimes leads scenes astray; many simply degenerate into uninspired, screaming obnoxiousness. Still, it works far more often than it doesn't, and amid the blissfully disturbing moments of Lynchian dementia admits a complex relationship between a frustrated father (played by the great Rip Torn) and his well-meaning but intractably stupid son. Though the generation-gap plot is as old as Aeschylus, Green invests it with an absurdist heart that belies the film's outré nature, and reveals again that there's more here than the context would suggest.

The movie's real triumph, however, is its deliverance of the sick comedy genre from the merely tasteless to the pinnacle of poor taste, a shade of meaning unrecognized by scions of the Farrelly Brothers cottage industry. Its spiritual kin is the South Park movie, which proved once and for all that in the race between hilarious and hysterical, hysterical wins by a margin the size of a horse's dick.