Get your jokes out of my comedy.
Wild Things
Nothing is funnier than cataclysmic failure. If someone stepping on a landmine during a volleyball match and only leaving behind a pair of smoking leg stumps and someone on the other team starting to laugh until they step on a landmine and then a third person starting to play a slide whistle to mock the whole grim affair but it turns out that slide whistle is also a landmine doesn’t make you laugh then there’s something about the human condition that you’re failing to grasp on a foundational level. You need to meet more people; you need to open your heart to chance.
Wild Things works as a comedy. Whether or not it’s supposed to work as a comedy is a second, chin scratch-ier consideration, but for now let’s focus on the sassy stuff:
Sleaze is the main character in this movie, and I will hear no arguments against it. We are impelled to root for wet, greasy garbage, and well we should – unctuousness has the most consistent motivations in Wild Things, is both the most likable and most relatable thing on screen at any time, and offers up non-zero amounts of thematic depth. You know how sometimes a location is a character, like Chicago in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, or the uncanny valley in Marvel movies? That’s the role that sticky awfulness plays in Wild Things.
Which leads to my favorite type of comedy! There aren’t any “jokes” in this film, at least not any traditional ones – no setups and payoffs, no straight-man character; only vibes, sweet, sweet vibes, and gleefully dumb anti-logic. In watching this movie we are transported to a world complete unto itself and subject to its own rigorously-maintained rules, among which the following reigns supreme: everyone is brain-dead stupid and endlessly horny. They have no third quality.
This movie’s tone is so pure that its humor doesn’t even need a straight-man to punctuate its jokes, because the world is the joke, and just by watching you are cast into the role of straight-man. The Spanish Inquisition didn’t have this much audience participation.
But now we come to the big question: is this all on purpose?
I have no fucking idea! It also doesn’t matter. But, for science, let us consider:
- The participation of Bill Murray means that, even if we’re not dealing with a planned comedy, at least one person is going to be winking. He even plays a sleazy lawyer who wears an unnecessary neck brace. This one seems unambiguous.
- I refuse to believe anyone thought that this movie’s audio cues would work as anything other than punchlines. There’s a sudden trilling of piano keys whenever a character learns new information, which is not how drama works.
- Theresa Russell is in this movie. Theresa Russell knows what a real movie is, having been in many of them herself. There are multiple scenes in this movie in which Theresa Russell is trying not to laugh. Theresa Russell understands what kind of movie Theresa Russell is in.
The End
Jokes are fine, I guess. But you know what’s even funnier than jokes? A character getting harpooned multiple times, still apparently confused after the first harpoon enters his body as to what, exactly, is happening (he is being harpooned); another character being handed a drink, being told that the drink isn’t poisoned, and then immediately drinking the poisoned drink, trusting that the person who has just reassured him of the non-poisoned status of the drink – who only moments earlier just killed someone, directly in front of him! – would never do him harm.
You can have your knock-knock jokes, society. I’ll stick with dumb people continuously falling over themselves on an existential Slip ‘N Slide lubricated exclusively by filth and pointing directly to hell. This movie is a comedy, and you’ll never convince me otherwise. I don’t care if they meant to make one – I laughed, and that’s all that matters.