celebrity gossip, academic style

The following is a guest post from R. Colin Tait, RTF Ph.D. student and my personal informant on all things Canadian, including Rachel McAdams, hockey, universal healthcare, and not paying for grad school.

Brennan: You know what? I still hate you, but you have a pretty awesome collection of nudie mags.

Dale: Yeah, I got ‘em from the seventies, eighties and nineties. It’s like masturbating in a time machine.

- Brennan (Will Ferrell) to Dale (John C. Reilly) in Step Brothers

First off, I want to thank Annie for letting me do some cyber-squatting on her otherwise excellent blog, and second, let me state at the outset that these thoughts are part of a larger work-in-progress, tentatively titled “Absurd Masculinity: The Time-Bending Comic Persona of Will Ferrell.” So thanks to all of you in advance for entertaining some of these half-formed (or perhaps malformed) thoughts.

This project is motivated by my larger interest in film nostalgia, particularly for the 1970s and as replayed in contemporary film culture. My central question begins and ends with Anchorman as well as a whole wealth of comedies, all of which highlight the absurdities of excessive masculinity across different time periods. I am interested in comedies set in the recent past – including Superbad (which seems to be set in the eighties), The Wedding Singer, in addition to The Royal Tennenbaums — a comedy(?) set simultaneously in a strange in-between place that is the seventies and the present.

Will Ferrell’s portrayal of Ron Burgundy is the chief illustration of this trend. We can add a series of films where the male protagonists depict man-children of a certain age (around the 40-Year Old Virgin mark) who haven’t “grown up” or are stuck in some sort of state of adolescent sexuality or man-child-ness. These films not only include the recent “Bromances” (I Love You Man, Role Models) but also the residents of “Old School” and certainly almost every one of Adam Sandler’s films, whose characters live in either a literal or figurative past.

Will Ferrell is the latest and most successful within this larger phenomenon, not only because of his appealing comic persona, but in the way that he seemingly destabilizes traditional notions of history, sexuality, and politics through his excessively absurd portrayals of childhood, adolescence, in addition to retaining a core stable of comic traits. I will argue that part of Ferrell’s appeal (and ultimately why he is so funny) is his willingness to pierce traditional notions of male power, to put his naked body in the service of destabilizing concepts such as attractiveness, and ultimately his association with eras that he has obviously lived through, representing the full range of childish or adolescent sexuality from the perspective of absurd critique. This work involves looking at the core of Ferrell’s comic traits including key scenes, as well as linking Ferrell’s success to a nostalgic depiction of both the way things were, but also the way that they never were. In this sense, I propose that Ferrell’s persona is “time-bending;” my allusion to the idea of gender bending but through his revisitation in particular eras. The reward of watching his films is built upon the fact that his comedy depends on our built-in foreknowledge that Ferrell is presenting us with the absurdities and excesses rather than the defenses of the eras he’s referring to.

In terms of contemporary film stardom, Ferrell is a consistent draw at the box-office, with some very big exceptions such as big studio films like Bewitched and most recently Land of the Lost. For the most part, his films from Anchorman onward (and his collaborations with Adam McKay) are consistently profitable and generally over-perform at the box-office. Additionally, as retrospectives of the first decade of the new millennium begin to show their faces, we can see that the 2000s were marked, in part, by the rise and peak within Ferrell’s career as he moves from the sidelines as a memorable bit player (some might say the most memorable player in certain films such as Old School and Zoolander) and emerges as a genuine box-office comedy star. As recently as this last week New York Times critic A. O. Scott listed the best of the last decade he almost mentioned Ferrell as a significant afterthought.

While sometimes associated with the larger movement somewhat problematically called the “Frat Pack” which is even more commonly associated with writer/producer Judd Apatow – whose “laugh factory” includes what could be effectively called a reparatory company of actors and writers such as Vince Vaughan, Ben Stiller, Jason Segel, Leslie Mann, Paul Rudd among many others - Ferrell brings his own brand of comic sensibility to the discussion, which may begin with Apatow, McKay and others, but remains consistently and uniquely linked to the actor’s comic persona.

Will Ferrell’s comic persona is unique insofar as it possesses the following “time-bending” features, “man as child,” “man as adolescent,” “man as reactionary” and “man out of time.” The best of Ferrell’s characters generally overlap these categories. First, Ferrell is associated with a “man as child” childish grown-up, prone to temper tantrums (and yelling) and wearing clothes that are far too tight.

(Quintessential Ferrell vehicle Elf)

This first category accounts for the actor’s first hits, particularly as he moves from a sideline and TV player to a bona fide box-office draw and carries through (somewhat more perversely) to Step Brothers.

The second category, “man as adolescent” is best embodied by “Frank the Tank” in Old School in addition to his depiction of President George W. Bush on Saturday Night Live and You’re Welcome America: An Evening With George W. Bush.

(Frank the Tank while still married)

The third category, “man as reactionary,” presents a man who is simultaneously in and out of his time, best embodied by North Carolina race car driver Ricky Bobby. In the case of Bobby, the childhood trauma of his father’s abandonment forces him to question his excessive materialist (and perhaps American) values at the end of the film.

(Ricky Bobby espouses the family values of a white baby Jesus and capitalism, brought to you by Pizza Hut and Taco Bell)

The most interesting of these categories for me (and ultimately what draws me to Ferrell as a performer) is “man out of time.” The atemporality of Ferrell’s portrayal usually infuses his characters with a self-reflexive commentary on the era his characters are set in. The fact that Ron Burgundy plays the jazz flute, an anachronism in our era to say the least, is part of this humor, as is the claim by designer Mugatu (in Zoolander) that his claim to fame was inventing the piano-key necktie.

(Ron Burgundy plays the jazz flute)

The reflexive presence of hyper-masculine Ron Burgundy, Ferrell’s portrayal as one half of the Woodward and Bernstein team (in Dick), the association of designer Mugatu as a former member of 80s group Frankie Goes to Hollywood, are examples of how this phenomenon plays out.

Ferrell’s best characters are borne of this temporal gray area. They are literally man-children born in the 1970s – sometimes literally like Brennan of Step-Brothers or Buddy from Elf, or are associated in some way with a previous decade – Ron Burgundy, the 70s anchorman, 70s Detroit basketball team owner Jackie Moon, or the cowbell player from the famous “more cowbell” sketch.

(My apologies, but this is the best version of this available on youtube)

Importantly, all of these characters are men seemingly “out of time,” males whose extreme whiteness and overdetermined masculinity are made absurd through the process of the film or (sketch’s) narrative. It is as if because Ferrell is of a particular age (moving onto forty, if not right in his forties) he best embodies this “arrested development” inherent in contemporary masculinity, which he both explodes the expectations of, while simultaneously reconstituting a new formulation of it.

History

I would like to suggest that Will Ferrell’s emergence as a star as dependent on two factors. First, Ferrell’s developed a distinctive comic personality over the course of the 1990s on Saturday Night Live during his tenure from 1995-2006. Second, I imagine that Ferrell’s depiction of a hysterical rendition of excessive masculinity corresponds with the nostalgic paradoxes of the post-9/11 era. Importantly, this “excessive masculinity” is really funny.

This initial period is formative for Ferrell and for his audiences, in part because of his collaboration with then-SNL writer Adam McKay. The duo would go on to form an effective partnership which accounts for Ferrell’s greatest successes, including his three biggest films, Anchorman, Talladega Nights and Step Brothers. We can also see Saturday Night Live as an effective producer of pop-cultural personalities, references and star personas. In this way, it nearly resembles an earlier version of stardom in the Vaudeville era, where performers enter a market with fully-rendered star persona traits. To be certain, some performers fare better than others, but Saturday Night Live has more often than not been successful precisely because it so effectively creates and cultivates stars on its show. Although billed as an ensemble program, gradually it elevates certain performers over others, grooming them eventually for film stardom as others in the cast recede or become supporting actors in this system.

We can see Ferrell’s rise as following performers such as Mike Myers, Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, Eddie Murphy and John Belushi, each of whom effectively constructed comedic star personas that expanded outward after years of apprenticeship in this staging ground. At the same time, we can see that the range of these actors and their roles remains consistent throughout their subsequent careers, so that the kinds of films that Myers, Sandler and others follow a limited set of traits and which usually exploit the personality traits honed on the Show.

For Ferrell, these traits included what are now staples within his film repertoire. They include the aforementioned temper tantrums, (as seen in one of his earliest sketches featured Ferrell as a father at Thanksgiving dinner who repeatedly threw over the kitchen table, declaring a censored “Fuck this, I’m leaving!”) in addition to imitating antiquated pop-cultural figures, including Neil Diamond, Robert Goulet and Alex Trebek (who is nearly atemporal as he exists in reruns and syndication) and the “more cowbell” guy.

Robert Goulet “Raps”

In each case, Ferrell can be expected to throw some sort of temper tantrum, sing, or embody an outdated mode of male-ness, that has long since gone out of style. Ferrell’s physicality – and often enough what has been described as his “doughy nudity” – achieves comedic precisely because of its inappropriateness and its deviation from the norm. As with all Saturday Night Live comedians, Ferrell also became famous by imitating George W. Bush throughout his presidency.

This depiction of Bush as a petulant frat-boy is also interesting as a historical phenomenon. It is worth pursuing how these comedy traits carry over into different aspects of pop-culture, particularly as Ferrell crosses media into the talk show circuit (sometimes taking entire characters with him) and further expanding his comic presence across media industries.

(A fictional character pitching a real product)

(“Robert Goulet” appears on Conan O’Brien)

In this vein, Ferrell can be seen as embodying an older style of comic personality, such as Groucho Marx’s hosting game shows, and his later appearances on shows such as Johnny Carson and Dick Cavett.

History and Masculinity in Crisis?

Moving on to the specifics of Ferrell’s contingent history, I would like to follow some comments such as those made by K.W. Kusz who in his essay “Remasculinizing American White Guys in/Through New Millennium American Sport Films,” suggests that the ascent of comics such as Ferrell, Vince Vaughan and Judd Apatow’s are historically-contingent on the post-9/11 era and are reacting to a particular crisis of American masculinity under threat during the “War on Terror.”

While I find some of these ideas convincing – particularly Peter Alilunas’ excellent study across Vince Vaughan’s career, which certainly intersects with Ferrell’s – I find some of the valances of these arguments slightly problematic. This is especially true of the critical engagement with Talladega Nights, a film that Heather Laine Talley and Monica J. Casper state that they “are deeply concerned” with the possibility that the film presents another opportunity to “laugh at ‘gay men’” “Southerners,” or “the working class without “being critical of the assumptions that this humor depends on” (Laine and Casper 2007). Part of the problem with these analyses is that they take the films (and their various plot points) entirely seriously (which may be something that I am admittedly guilty of here) whereas Ferrell’s comedy leaves room for a certain amount of “play” and perhaps even some critique to take place. Added to this I would argue that what makes Ferrell’s persona so likable is he manages to take standard representations of gender, of maturity, of sexuality, and presents their absurdity for comedic effect.

The actor’s various outbursts during crisis points serve as part of this effect (such as Mugatu’s screaming of “I invented the piano-key neck-tie!” during the climax of the film) or as Ricky Bobby strips down to his underwear to run around the racetrack in Talladega Nights when he imagines himself to be on fire.

(Mugatu faces off against “Blue Steel”)

(Ricky Bobby is on “fire”)

In both cases, it is the inappropriateness the outbursts that provide the humor within these scenes in addition to Ferrell’s obvious and near-nudity.

Ferrell’s physical comedy is also important here, as one of the trademarks of this public persona is presented by the absurdity of his ubiquitous nudity. The most famous example of this is in Old School where Frank the Tank’s “Let’s go streaking!” provides one of the film’s most humorous moments. In addition, his climactic “ribbon dance” may have marked a turning point in the actor’s career. We can also expect Ferrell to break into an overly sentimental song from the 70s, 80s or 90s, as he does in this scene from Old School, but also in almost every other one of his films.

Frank the Tank’s “Ribbon Dance”

(Frank sings “Dust in the Wind” – a rendition that is as comedic as it is earnest)

In both examples, Ferrell seemingly explodes both the expectations of male camaraderie and love in addition to a bravura display of sentimentality and an implosion of gender expectations.

Finally, this expansion of boundaries can be seen in the penultimate scene in Talladega Nights as the actor’s climactic run to the finish line in order to beat gay French racecar rival Jean Girard.

(“You taste of America”)

What is interesting to me about this clip is the way that it combines and problematizes the notions of masculinity (and politics) as it simultaneously presents an ideological message (complete with a waving American flag in the background) in addition to a long man-on-man kiss at the end of the scene. Once again, the inclusion of all things, a Pat Benetar song is important, as it aids in evoking the simultaneity of the past and present, and its ongoing association with Ferrell’s comic personality.

Gender Politics and Sensitive Expressivity

I would like to end on this note, as I believe that Ferrell’s films and his comic stardom raises some interesting questions within a larger discourse of contemporary masculinity. The first of these ideas relates to the setting of many of these films, presenting absurdly anachronistic versions of “normative” masculine behavior and how in almost every case, Ferrell’s humor derives entirely on deflating and expanding these gender norms. Relating back to my earlier discussion of Ferrell’s “time-bending” qualities, Ferrell infuses past and present depictions of masculinity with either a childish or adolescent sensibility, in addition to his willingness to go over the top by way of a sickly-sweet sensitivity. Added to this is the notion that somehow Ferrell embodies “the way things” were in a hyper-stylized manner that ultimately opens the past up for ridicule.

Buddy the Elf is clearly the best (and perhaps most successful) example of this fusion of the man-child within a contemporary cynical sphere (New York City no less), but there are clearly numerous other examples. As the actor continues to be associated with specific periods and characters who live in the past, Ferrell’s inappropriate comic appropriation of these eras ultimately reward us with the big laughs that we get from watching one of his films.

Finally, Ferrell’s portrayal and association with George W. Bush, throughout and after his presidency may provide us with an interesting window through which we can view the political effect of Ferrell’s comedy. As opposed to critics like Kusz, who is prepared to take Ferrell’s films at face value as part of a larger movement of reactionary gender politics, perhaps we can see the comic’s portrayal of Bush as largely countering these claims.

In (one of) his most recent releases, Ferrell portrays the ex-President as a petulant and bratty Frat-boy, undercutting his potency as a hyper-masculine figure and great leader.

(“How come you’re the only one in our family that speaks with a Texas accent?”)

What is especially interesting to me about this scene is how the line between the portrayal of George Bush and Will Ferrell is so fine, and how this particular story allows Ferrell to use the full range of his comic persona, submerged within a larger historical figure. At the heart of things, it would seem to me that this presents an absurd critique of the excessive masculine patriotism that emerged during this specific time.

Maybe we’ll have to wait until Anchorman 2 to see how all of this plays out, but for now, I hope that I have outlined some of the larger points about Ferrell’s comic personality and made a case for his “time-bending” comic persona.

If not, I had lots of fun stringing a bunch of great clips together which is just as important to me. Thanks to all for reading.

Works Cited (or parenthetically referred to )

Alilunas, Peter, Nothing I Ever Do Is Good Enough: Masculinities in the Films of Vince Vaughan. MA Thesis, The University of Texas at Austin, 2008.

—. “Male Masculinity as the Celebration of Failure: The Frat Pack, Women, and the Trauma of Victimization in the ‘Dude Flick.’” Mediascape, UCLA (Spring, 2008).

Kusz, Kyle W., “Remasculinizing American White Guys in/Through New Millennium American Sport Films,” Sport in Society,2008, 11:2,209-226.

Talley, Heather Laine and Casper, Monica J., “A Response to the Motion Picture Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” in Journal of Sport and Social Issues 2007; 31; 434