Your fundamental insignificance as a human is both extremely obvious and immensely difficult to accept. These two things are probably related. Someone who really seems to get this is Jim Cummings. Jim Cummings gets the fuck out of this. It’s almost concerning, how much Jim Cummings gets this. I hope everything is OK, with Jim, he get this so much.

The Wolf of Snow Hollow, The Beta Test

There’s tragedy in stupidity, but not that much – a depressing idiot is still an idiot. Diaper-shitting desperation is not without its uses, however; the plight of the mediocre can help accentuate just how deep human suffering runs. You can better appreciate a true cosmic disaster if you’ve been skating by on the doofy, self-inflicted kind your whole life.

And, man, does a Jim Cummings character plunge into the worst of human behavior with disconcerting ease. They’re just so damn bad at everything!

Here, I’ll show you:

• All those cuts to hard angles of Jordan Hines or John Marshall trying really hard to understand something and extremely not understanding that thing. Both men are much better at pretending to think than actually thinking.
• They’re such assholes! This opens a surprising amount of narrative doors – weird storytelling pivots are much more palatable if the audience finds themselves grimly fascinated with just how badly a protagonist is willing to ruin their own life.
• What starts off as a serious but manageable conflict spirals into a complete disaster almost entirely on the strength of our hero’s incompetence as a human.
• Jordan Hines’ terrible attempts to impersonate a police officer are never not funny. Sometimes he starts a conversation by admitting he’s a talent agent, and then tries to impersonate a police officer later in the conversation, forgetting that he has already admitted he is not one. Some of these conversations practically culminate in him saying, “as police officer, that thing which I totally am.”
• In both movies the protagonist just kind of quits. I don’t mean this in a screenplay-mandated “protagonist at their lowest point” kind of way. I mean they just fucking give up. You don’t see that a lot in movies, and it’s amazing. Imagine if, somewhere around Bree, Frodo took a long look at the One Ring, went “fuuuuuuck this,” and then just gave the ring to a hobo.
• Bouts of extreme confidence dissolve into fretful apologies which are replaced by snark which are replaced by more fretful apologies. This sad loop does not stop so much as fade out, like a poorly-produced song. I’m not sure if a Jim Cummings character ever stops talking, or if their stream of pathetic consciousness just occasionally tapers off to sub-audible levels.
• Our hero is consistently losing track of the bigger picture because he’s too busy being passive-aggressive to his co-workers. I feel so seen.

The End

Your characters can pivot into all kinds of fascinating shittiness if you’re willing to free them from the burden of a consistent conscience, or a relatable conflict. The dumber the disaster, the more opportunity to add your own flavor of homemade misery to the mix. This is more than just darkly amusing – as someone who has internalized pretty much every major narrative beat a movie can possibly throw at me, I follow along with renewed interest when I see a film avoiding the classic structural signposts and dancing instead to its own weird tune. It’s nice to have to think a little sometimes. So here’s to a Cummings protagonist: may he never learn or grow in any meaningful way.