One of themore dismal gags in the
wretched
new romantic comedy
Just Go With It
involves a character posing as an Austrian sheep importer named Dolph Lundgren.Yes, just like
theSwedish action star
from the 80s and 90s, except this Dolph wears aneckerchief and Harry Potter glasses, smokes a pipe, and refers to his manlyparts as “the schnitzel”:
Of all thepossible meta-casting jokes
—
having
famouspeople
playthemselves
, casting them in
roles that recall theirpast roles
, or
exploitingthe “celebrity paradox”
—
this one is the easiest to pull off. It doesn’trequire any fancy casting stunts or complicated narrative work: All you do istake a regular old character, give him or her an unlikely celebrity name,and
—
presto!
—
comedy
.
It’s alightly postmodern bit that seems well suited to our self-referential comicera. It can be a throwaway punchline (like the
black
,
heavyset
Rebecca De Mornay
on
Seinfeld
) or a more developed runninggag (like the
downtrodden,cubicle-dwelling Michael Bolton
in
OfficeSpace
) but it always relies on some perceived gap between the character andthe celebrity, often taken from the reliable comic trio of gender, ethnicity,or hotness. The celebrity name itself must be perfectly calibrated: It shouldbe someone faintly ridiculous in his own right, familiar enough to ring a bellbut not so famous as to be an obvious choice. It should be
just
obscure enough to make the viewer feel rewarded forrecognizing that she’s supposed to laugh.
But just asreal people with celebrity namesakes find their situations
exhausting
,
frustrating
,and only
intermittentlyfunny
, this gag is wearing thin.
The alwaysreliable TVTropes.com reminds us that the joke goes back to at least the early1990s, when
Cool Runnings
featured abald, hotheaded Jamaican bobsledder named
Yul Brenner
,recalling the bald Russian actor best known for playing a hotheaded Siameseking.
Seinfeld
had
John Voight
a fewyears before it had Rebecca De Mornay. Then there was Jackie Chan’s Chinesecowboy
ChonWang (a.k.a. “John Wayne”)
in
ShanghaiNoon
, Bill Murray’s aging lothario
DonJohnston (“with a T”)
in
BrokenFlowers
, and
—
of course
—
Michael Cera’s twerpy
George-Michael Bluth
on
ArrestedDevelopment.
The writers of
30 Rock
areso enamored of the joke that they’ve given us not only a pale, British
WesleySnipes
but also a Tea Party-ish political candidate named
StephenAustin
.
The writersof
30 Rock
have the chops to pull thejoke off, in large part because (a) they are very funny and (b) the show is soself-aware it’s practically sentient. “Wesley Snipes” works especially wellbecause “Wesley”
is an inherentlycomical name that fits the character exactly: supremely English, a little pretentious,and not especially virile. But the writers also push the joke
one step further than most
:
Wesley : This is insane? You know what’s insane? That the actor is namedWesley Snipes! If you were shown a picture of him and a picture of me, and wereasked “who should be named Wesley Snipes,” you’d pick the pale Englishman everytime! Every time, Liz!
The gag isusually about the cognitive disconnect between the character’s image and thecelebrity’s, but
30 Rock
goes on topoint out that Wesley Snipes
himself
is an absurd juxtaposition. The concept of “Wesley Snipes” folds in on itselfand implodes. We can never take
Blade
seriously again.
Can we alljust agree that this is about as good as this joke is going to get, and declarea moratorium on it from here on out? Otherwise, lesser comedy writers are goingto keep thinking they can pull it off, too — condemning us to a desperatelyunfunny future of scarf-wearing Dolph Lundgrens and lithe young AndiGarcias . Let’s just let this bit shuffle off in peace to the culturalgraveyard where it belongs: realitytelevision .
