event The Comedy

“Williamsburg represent,” Tim Heidecker halfheartedly declares to a bar full of African-American patrons in The Comedy. “Represent what?” one of them replies. And there, in a nutshell, lies the thesis of Rick Alverson’s prickly examination/example of disaffected Brooklyn hipsterdom, and the towering fortress of irony and cock jokes that wall up access to the soul—if one even exists anymore. Like an arted-up twist on provocative anti-comedies like Lars von Trier’s The Idiots or Tom Green’s Freddie Got Fingered, The Comedy is deliberately off-putting, offering a hero who wallows in booze and entitlement, and gets thin pleasure from needling people by defending Hitler (“if you take murder out of the equation…”) or slipping into the voice of a Southern plantation owner. There’s genuine pain at the core of Heidecker’s character—or at least a numbness where the pain used to reside—but the film is keen on obscuring it.

“Williamsburg represent,” Tim Heidecker halfheartedly declares to a bar full of African-American patrons in The Comedy. “Represent what?” one of them replies. And there, in a nutshell, lies the thesis of Rick Alverson’s prickly examination/example of disaffected Brooklyn hipsterdom, and the towering fortress of irony and cock jokes that wall up access to the soul—if one even exists anymore. Like an arted-up twist on provocative anti-comedies like Lars von Trier’s The Idiots or Tom Green’s Freddie Got Fingered, The Comedy is deliberately off-putting, offering a hero who wallows in booze and entitlement, and gets thin pleasure from needling people by defending Hitler (“if you take murder out of the equation…”) or slipping into the voice of a Southern plantation owner. There’s genuine pain at the core of Heidecker’s character—or at least a numbness where the pain used to reside—but the film is keen on obscuring it.

“Williamsburg represent,” Tim Heidecker halfheartedly declares to a bar full of African-American patrons in The Comedy. “Represent what?” one of them replies. And there, in a nutshell, lies the thesis of Rick Alverson’s prickly examination/example of disaffected Brooklyn hipsterdom, and the towering fortress of irony and cock jokes that wall up access to the soul—if one even exists anymore. Like an arted-up twist on provocative anti-comedies like Lars von Trier’s The Idiots or Tom Green’s Freddie Got Fingered, The Comedy is deliberately off-putting, offering a hero who wallows in booze and entitlement, and gets thin pleasure from needling people by defending Hitler (“if you take murder out of the equation…”) or slipping into the voice of a Southern plantation owner. There’s genuine pain at the core of Heidecker’s character—or at least a numbness where the pain used to reside—but the film is keen on obscuring it.