The Degrading of Comedy in Uwe Boll's POSTAL
Boll KG/Pitchblack PicturesThe objectivity of comedy makes for a monumentally large range. Few features will seep into the social consciousness, and even fewer will last the test of time. But many will work on a short-term basis. The Seth Rogen-led features of the late 2000s, the ineffable charm and romanticism of New York found in the films of Woody Allen. To move into the television landscape is to enter the arena with subtle, smart shows such as Peep Show and King of the Hill co-existing with popularity contests and the common denominators of The Big Bang Theory and Big Mouth. The preference for comedy now includes a new sub-category: the rejection of it. Uwe Boll’s work on Postal does just that, and there are more than a handful of films that did the same.
New interpretations of what comedy can do for an audience and how it can be perceived is an ever-changing moment. Curb Your Enthusiasm revolutionised the blur between fiction and reality, not with fourth-wall breaks but with a revitalisation of the real-life entity so often relied on in The Garry Shandling Show before it and 30 Rock after it. Others have coasted on the controversy slide, which is the clear avenue Postal takes, but it is surprising as to just how many influences, known to Boll or not, his 2007 adaptation of the Running With Scissors video game has. Take the Curb Your Enthusiasm instance, with Postal featuring Verne Troyer, Boll himself and Running With Scissors CEO, Vince Desi, there is a sincerely lucid adaptation of the self as a vehicle for comedy.
To turn the self into a caricature, but on a lower, degenerate extent. Boll manages that in the same way Larry David does, but without actively thinking of doing so. Self-deprecation then leads to the simple-minded and bizarre, unconfirmed criticism of just about anything. Postal, at worst, is a series of successful bunglings of interesting comedic reinvention that was laid out before it. That ability to take on the same, strange appeal of Dirty Work or Guest House Paradiso leads it not to the usual grounds of morally sincere messaging or placid dialogue riffs, but to a new form of degeneracy appealing to cult audiences that hold love for Freddy Got Fingered.
That new audience is the crowd Postal would appeal to, had Boll not been fingered as a sin to cinema. The key difference to remember is that Tom Green’s work on Freddy Got Fingered and Bob Saget's and Norm Macdonald’s on Dirty Work is that their rejection of popular comedy is an active one. Is it possible to enforce the rejection of mainstream comedy without knowing what that comedy is? It would appear so, but Boll does it by coming full circle. His embrace of what he perceives as funny is the accidental rejection of his South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone mentality. He does what South Park pretends to do. Offensive ideas. Sweeping implications that lead nowhere.
It is that nowhere that works best. In the overcrowded market of comedy or even film in general, with so much having a link to or need for a message that embraces its audience, it is refreshing – and even preferable – to have a film either miss its mark or not care for a very obvious conclusion. Postal, by all accounts from Boll, is a political satire that criticises anything and everything. It is the actual stance of anything and everything being criticised that elevates it above the usual humdrum of satire. Media forms have their place, but beyond a brief online buzz as Don’t Look Up made with its chastising of its audience and subsequent emptiness, they do little. Postal, because it is so broad in its aim, actually becomes aimless and subsequently turns itself into a criticism of the satire genre.
Boll is a provocateur, either sincerely so or as a smart PR tactic that saw him box film critics, film three features in one go and enter into the online tirades that made him so popular in online circles. Postal is provocative, but aimlessly so, to the point where its offensive material cannot be taken seriously. It is the far-reaching aims of an idiot, but a smart idiot. It feels similar to Norm Macdonald’s routine of saying something, anything, and seeing where the reaction takes an audience. Crucially, though, Macdonald added explanation to the devolution, whereas Boll just devolves and devolves, but sometimes it is fun and refreshing to devolve such a tightly-wound genre.
A refusal to build back the comedy broken down, purposefully or accidentally, creates a strange new cycle. Green’s directing work on Freddy Got Fingered feels intensely similar. From masturbating a horse to being knocked over by a truck while Green wears the carcass of a dear. It is the bizarre situation, from reading those words, that makes the mind and imagination tick over. Many moments in Postal have that lucid effect captured by that cult arena of film. Boll being shot in the penis while dressed in traditional lederhosen after admitting to financing his films with Nazi gold because “someone needs to use it,” and fighting the creator of the video game he is adapting is objectively funny because of the image it creates, actively or subconsciously, in the mind. It is an appeal that steered many Green and Saget.
There is no doubt that many of the decisions made in Postal are Boll admitting to himself and his audience that he finds provocative actions hilarious. He has seen the slithering dullness of Team America: World Police and thought he can one-up it with ease. Postal’s weakest moments, the gags that don’t stick or the lines that don’t work, come either as an active and surprisingly solid adaptation of the video game, Postal 2, or as a catalyst for the rejection of one branch of comedy and the accidental embrace of another. Boll is not a great comedic mind, but it is that caricature-like adage that Germans cannot be funny. His strict desire to stick to the script, and that lack of banter or improv from the cast, just add a layer to the post-meta structure of comedy.
Pioneers of the genre, those responsible for Airplane! in its earliest form and up to the turning point of Jackass, are always adapting to what an audience likely wants. It is no surprise that the gross-out comedic work of Jackass not only features somewhat in the gutterball moments of Postal but still has its claws on the brains of the audience. Jackass Forever and Jackass 4.5 prove not just that people love familiar faces, but acts of manic sincerity that have no meaning or reaction beyond the vague resemblance of comedy. To put the genre into perspective, the latest releases The Bubble, Don't Look Up, and Sneakerella give some clarity on how commercial, how produced-to-the-letter-with-no-time-for-deviations the comedy genre has become.
It is easy to feel some sort of rejection for a genre pumping out an array of revitalisations of nostalgia (Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers, Marmaduke) and broadly generic comedies reliant on star power (Senior Year, I Want You Back, The Adam Project). They are neither humorous nor interesting to those that have tipped over the edge. The rejection of popular comedy and the active or subconscious act of refusing to compete or connect with it is now funnier than the comedy itself. Does that lead to oversaturation? Perhaps. It may have more to do with meme culture, the quick-flick style Postal takes is almost skit-like, in turn, managing to pre-date the YouTube reels and seven-second Vine era of made-at-home comedy.
From its political punditry also, Postal earmarks its success through the rejection of the norm. Don’t Look Up was as grating as it was boring because of how ineffective the message at its core is and how fascinatingly poor its misunderstandings are. Very generic boomer Facebook posts that decry dishonest media and waggle their fingers at politicians without actually doing anything active. To reject that, like Warren Beatty’s criminally overlooked Bulworth, is not so much the aim of Postal but the conclusion it comes to. Don’t Look Up is the ending of Neil Breen’s Fateful Findings where the politicians and bankers are apologising for their generic, unexplained actions. There is no thrill in genericism like that, no impeachable point to make beyond what is already accepted. Comedy should innovate, and Postal, with its Casablanca reference, shared between Osama Bin Laden and George W. Bush can be conceived as a rejection of political satire because of just how dumb it is upon reappraisal.
At best, though, this is conjecture and projecting. Boll had no idea that this would be the outcome. That is the beauty of it. Reappraisal of art is what keeps it thriving and interesting, and love it or loathe it, Postal is a far more interesting reaction to the genre than anything that followed its release in a vaguely unconvincing satire boom that relies on genericism and whatever Twitter finds popular. The clear and key difference between Boll and Green is that the latter had an express wish for this to be the outcome, whereas Boll did not. Does that change the value of the humour? No, not particularly. Tommy Wiseau tried desperately to salvage The Room, and the humour that comes from that is both in the scenario and the development. Comedy now goes wider, beyond what is seen on the screen. That is where the golden field lies, in the rejection of comedy.
Accidental or intentional, the rejection of comedy is a new, fresh field of interest. Stand-up comic Stewart Lee does this in a far more sophisticated manner than Boll, but the results are still the same. A build-up of the popular mode of comedy, be it Jimmy Carr or Rogen or Don’t Look Up, and the subsequent breakdown not just of why its mainstream success lingers as generic, broadly appealing comedy, but why that is wrong. To be disgusted by Freddy Got Fingered is a better, more emotive reaction than being bored by Coming 2 America. To be offended by Postal is a greater reaction than the unmoving disinterest of Thunder Force or Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar. Within Postal is the idea that the satire sub-genre and the comedy genre is a doomed process, and the strict vision Boll has relies on the rejection and subsequent degradation of political commentary and the comedy market. It is successful because it failed, as Freddy Got Fingered and Dirty Work did.