Whack attack

SILLINESS WITH A SOURCE

Early critical returns haven’t been especially kind to Zoolander 2, but it would still take some doing to top the reactions to the first film 15 years ago. Debuting two and a half weeks after 9/ 11 — essentially just as Americans let out their breath, and decided that maybe laughing was a thing they could do again — it was famously savaged by Roger Ebert as an exact example of why the terrorists hated “us” ( or, uh, Americans, anyway).

One of the funnier things about Ebert’s ire was that it was based on a misreading — or at least a serious undervaluing — of the satire in Ben Stiller’s ostensibly dumb comedy about a fulsomely dumb male model. Ebert took issue with the plot to kill the Malaysian prime minister to preserve sweatshop practices. He saw it as another example of ignorant Americans treating the rest of the world like placeholders in their pageant, blithely using them for whatever they deemed necessary, including stupid jokes. It was the kind of review that could only get serious truck in the days following The National Tragedy — or perhaps now, but only on Salon — when everyone was encouraged to be As Serious As Possible about everything.

It’s still especially egregious — Ebert apparently later apologized to Ben Stiller — given that poking at outrageous ignorance, of the fashion world if not necessarily America, is the underl ying frequency of Zoolander. If some of the satire is washed out or easily ignored, it’s probably because the original Zoolander is not really an angry comedy so much as a resigned one. It is undeniably aware of how horrible the world it’s mocking can be, it just doesn’t actually think it can change anything: you might as well just portray them as vapid dolts, because what else are they going to understand?

This is undeniably misanthropic — Stiller, when not being silly, is at his best when playing open contempt for other people, like Greenberg or Tony Wonder — but it’s been borne out by the way the fashion world seems to have embraced Zoolander. They like the fact that laughing at an openly idiotic portrayal makes them look like they’re in on the joke: See, we understand that we look like people who are dumb enough to have a gasoline fight!

But they don’t quite get that Zoolander’s stupidity is just the kooky hook. This is a movie, after all, that implies that most people in fashion are so far up their own sculpted glutes that they don’t even care their vain lifestyles are built on human misery. David Duchovny’s hand model is there just to explain how fashion has been on the side of slavery, child labour and murder for hundreds of years. Those are the kinds of jokes that are harder to play on the pages of Vogue.

In fairness, Stiller himself doesn’t seem to want to do much more than just point at them. It’s less about moral outrage than it is attention to craft, which is what lingers from Zoolander, especially considering the decade and a half of comedy that followed it.

Stiller, through his sketch show and association with Judd Apatow and full- bore silly assault in Zoolander, did a lot to lay the groundwork for the boom that followed. If nothing else, Mugatu was essentially the role that broke Will Ferrell to a non- SNL audience. But both Apatow and Ferrell are much more about spontaneity and comic moments than structure: the former’s subject is basically always the schlubby loneliness of the modern male, while the latter’s is essentially just full-on laughs, albeit usually centred around his bellowing, belligerent alpha male comic type. They love improvisation and low-grade absurdity, the kind of laugh lines that no one, maybe not even the performer, is quite expecting.

Stiller loves to finesse a joke, which is on ample display in Zoolander. The gasoline fight is an obvious one, as is Derek’s tendency to mangle words, or his ridiculous outrage at the miniature model of his school for kids who can’t read good. These are carefully crafted comic scenes with an equation: premise baked into set- up tripping to punchline and occasional callback equals laughs. Nowhere in Zoolander do you get the sense scenes are just building for the chance to riff. They’re careful and contained, to the point where, years later, some of their impact is diminished. The rhythms of the jokes become almost too familiar.

It’s that quality as much as anything that makes Zoolander feel like a throwback. Although it also gives it licence to occasionally have something more on its mind. There’s plenty of silliness in a Stiller comedy, but its silliness that’s always coming from somewhere, silliness that’s developing. Anyone who’s about to slag it off, or even adopt it, would do well to remember that.