Hollywood's funny frat pack

By Chris Garcia
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, June 22, 2007

Troupes, packs, teams, pairs — comedy likes company.

Stand-up comedians are solo by definition, garrulous preachers spouting acid-honed worldviews in billowing, sometimes bellowing, soliloquies. Loners with attitude, they muffle other voices with prejudice, hecklers be warned.

Funny on film is something else. Interaction means inspiration. Friends mean foils. Camaraderie, when good, means comic chemistry. The age-old comedy duo or trio, with roots in the Marx Bros., Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, Hope and Crosby and Martin and Lewis, lives on and strong. (And I don't mean Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan, or Larry the Cable Guy and anybody.)

But as early as the 1940s, with screwball director Preston Sturges, small fraternities of funny people were floating from film to film in loose packs. Sturges, the genius behind "The Palm Beach Story" and "The Lady Eve," corralled a stable of character actors, most memorably William Demarest, Eddie Bracken and Victor Potel, who hilariously played off one another with cultivated ease in a cluster of classic comedies.

In the late '70s, and through the '90s, Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, Harold Ramis and Chevy Chase forged a natural brotherhood of like-minded, generationally bound hilarity in a series of comedies, including "Stripes," "Caddyshack" and "Ghostbusters." With so many funny guys stuffed into one movie, viewers got their money's worth (unless they were at "Ghostbusters II").

Today, there are at least three comedy "frat packs," a nickname wiggling through the Internet labeling a hip, shaggy, smart-alecky generation of comic performers who have produced fortunes at the box office with goofs and spoofs like "Zoolander," "Old School," "Anchorman," "Wedding Crashers" and this summer's smash "Knocked Up."

The three frat packs sport core members, yet individual actors pop up in movies of other frat packs, frequently in the guise of an inspired cameo: Will Ferrell in "Wedding Crashers," Luke Wilson in "Anchorman" and Ben Stiller and John C. Reilly in "Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny."

While Reilly, Will Arnett, Andy Richter, Rob Corddry, David Koechner and other character actors weave through various frat pack movies as reliable comic support, Paul Rudd has proved to be the most restless free radical of the guys (the packers are firmly of the Y-chromosome persuasion, a fact for a whole other thesis).With his every-guy good looks and deadpan panache, Rudd has worked with all the packs for big parts in "Anchorman," "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," "Wet Hot American Summer," "Knocked Up" and "The Ten," a gem of wily satire opening in August.

Taxonomy is the exercise here, not fine-tooth analysis. The frat packs might not be with us much longer as members grow up, win leading-man roles or stop getting along. So this is an attempt to bag and tag them at their peak. Note that as I distill and codify, precision might be sacrificed for concision. In other words, here and there I generalize. But these frat pack definitions mostly hold true, as each groups' members stick together for comic — and box office — gold.

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Three groups of mirthful men loom large in some of film's most successful comedies.

The Boys-Will-Be-Boys Goof-Offs

Core members: Will Ferrell, Owen and Luke Wilson, Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller, sometimes Paul Rudd and Jack Black.

Key movies: "Zoolander," "Dodgeball," "Anchorman," "Old School," "Starsky & Hutch," "Wedding Crashers," "Talladega Nights."

Comic aesthetic: These likable man-boys enjoy wallowing in their immaturity, while playing tug of war with real-world adult responsibility. The films wear a bright sitcom glow, but the comedy tends to be gleefully too raunchy, rude and off kilter for television. Weaned on "Saturday Night Live"-style sketch humor, they are facile parodists, going for easy pop culture targets, from NASCAR and high fashion to egotistic anchormen and the frippery of figure skating. Hormonic urges influence much of their behavior. The guys' general good looks — Stiller, Vaughn and the Wilsons are acknowledged hotties — often land them roles as leading men in romantic comedies.

Coming up: "Semi-Pro," with Ferrell; "The Marc Pease Experience," with Stiller and sometimes-packer Jason Schwartzman; "Drillbit Taylor," with Owen Wilson and (crossover alert) co-written by Seth Rogen and produced by Judd Apatow; "Tropic Thunder," with Owen Wilson and Jack Black and co-written and directed by Stiller.

The Realists With Heart

Core members: Judd Apatow (writer-director-producer), Seth Rogen, Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, Jonah Hill, Jason Segel, Jay Baruchel, Martin Starr.

Key movies: "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," "Knocked Up," and television's "Freaks & Geeks" and "Undeclared." (Crossover alert: As writer and producer, Apatow worked on "The Ben Stiller Show," "Anchorman" and "Talladega Nights.")

Comic aesthetic: Largely eschewing parody and satire, this thoughtful, heartfelt bunch sticks to universal real-life issues facing youths on the verge of adulthood and adults reluctant to join adulthood. Improvisational riffs on pop culture, raw dialogue that sounds the way people really talk and slashingly funny observations about love, life and the opposite sex erect a totally recognizable world in which even somber realizations can be held up to the light to reveal how funny this so called life is.

Coming up: "Superbad," written by and starring Rogen, produced by Apatow and co-starring Hill; "Fanboys," with Baruchel and Rogen; "Forgetting Sarah Marshall," with Rudd, Segel and Hill.

The Arty Parodists

Core members: David Wain, Michael Showalter, Michael Ian Black, Ken Marino and Paul Rudd.

Key movies: "Wet Hot American Summer," "Reno 911! Miami" and "The Ten," and television's "The State" and "Stella."

Comic aesthetic: Hyper-smart post-modern parodies on more obscure cultural angles and artifacts. They're not afraid to go bizarrely highbrow in parodying art films, literature and subversive human behavior. Using far-reaching allusions, their deadpan comedy can hit mind-bogglingly Dada heights. The group's "Wet Hot American Summer" might on the surface be a satirical valentine to '80s summer camp sex comedies, but it's honeycombed with cutting cultural commentary.

Coming up: "The Ten," with Rudd, Wain, Marino and Showalter; "Puberty: The Movie," with Wain; "Kids in America," with Black.