When They Get the Syrup In Them…

I’ve noted this before but it bears repeating: comedy isn’t easy. A good idea can be hilarious, but the longer you work on that idea, the more you try to drag it out, the more likely it is that the joke will falter along the way. You can see this with all kinds of comedies, but just hitting the row of Saturday Night Live film adaptations will give you more than enough evidence. For every Wayne’s World or The Blues Brothers, there’s more films like It’s Pat, Coneheads, and Stuart Saves His Family. Hell, even the sequels to the good films, The Blues Brothers 2000 and Wayne’s World 2, are just as bad as the worst fodder the show has crapped out.

The same goes for any sketch on the show that has become a staple, making appearances every few weeks, having its jokes absolutely beaten into the ground. A good sketch idea is great; turning that sketch idea into something more, longer, bigger, whatever, will more likely drain the fun out of whatever was working in the first place. And that’s a struggle every comedy has to work through. Can your idea last for an entire film or is it just a couple of good jokes that should have been done on YouTube instead?

Super Troopers was only the second film from Broken Lizard, the comedy troupe comprised of Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, and Erik Stolhanske. Released in 2001, it was the first film from the troupe that saw a wide release, after 1996’s very indie film, Puddle Cruiser, and it helped put the name of the group on the map. While the film was only a mild hit in theaters, making a decent $23 Mil against a $3 Mil budget, the film found widespread delight when released on home video, picking up a cult following and giving Broken Lizard the clout to make more films. Most of those films were not anywhere near as successful as Super Troopers, with both Club Dread and Beerfest bombing at the Box Office. Their performance was bad enough that their next film as a group, The Slammin' Salmon, went direct to video.

It’s enough to make you ask: why did Super Troopers work when their follow-ups couldn’t. The guys are all talented, and many have gone off to have successful careers outside of Broken Lizard. The films as a group, though, haven’t done as well, and it’s pretty obvious that something was missing in those later works that wasn’t missing from their big hit. Super Troopers did what none of the rest of the films could: it brought the funny in a way that just simply worked.

I think a lot of the success of this film can be attributed to the fact that this film has a real story and real stakes. When you watch The Slammin’ Salmon (which, honestly, just don’t as it’s not that good), yes you get a story and there’s a clearly lined out goal for the film, but it just doesn’t feel like there’s much connective tissue. There’s a lot of weird little moments, some of them funny (but most of them not), and the film just kind of ambles along until it just sort of ends. You don’t ever feel invested in the film in a way that really matters.

Super Troopers is different. While it, too, is a film with a loose connective thread and a lot of sketches going on, it handles the material better. First, there are stakes. The film is focused on a team of misfit highway patrol cops who mostly enjoy playing pranks and goofing off. They’re the cool cops you want to hang with, which means you like them almost from the outset (especially when they’re being very silly and having a good time with some potheads). But then the film introduces a snag: the Vermont budget is tight and one of the two police divisions in Spurbury, either the local cops of our team’s Highway Patrol, is likely to go. The guys have to shape up, fly right, and work a case that’s before them to show they can be real cops and save their jobs.

That, right there, is real stakes. The film regularly reminds us, as they guys pull their antics, that the blade is hanging over their heads. They somehow manage to bumble their way through a case and come out on top, which is great, but the film is sure to let us know each step of the way just what’s riding on the line. The guys discuss what they’ll do if they get fired. They lament what happens if they get shut down. They care. You need characters to take their situation seriously even as they’re fucking around. The fucking around is their way of blowing off steam and we appreciate it more because we know what’s on the line.

Also, their antics are really funny. From that early scene with the potheads, through various scenes of the guys fucking with each other, and the people they pull over, the movie doesn’t lack for laughs. Hell, it’s hard to find someone that has seen this film that isn’t game to play the meow game or the ol’ repeater. These skits and sketches make up the loose body of the film, but they also help to keep it light and enjoyable. You’re laughing along with the guys the whole time, and the film never really lets up on the humor at all.

I think it also helps that this film came out earlier in the troupe’s life, when they still had a lot of good jokes in their repertoire. That’s another thing about comedy: it needs to be fresh. When you have a lot of good ideas the comedy flows and you can pour it out. Once you’ve been doing it long enough, though, it becomes hard to find the humor, to come up with new jokes and new situations that actually hit right. It’s hard to bring the funny. You can see that with those sequels to the Saturday Night Live films I discussed, but also with the likes of Monty Python and the Kids in the Hall. Their early sketch seasons were great, the later ones not so much. And in the case of Monty Python, their first film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, had the best collection of jokes and hooks they could do, and the ideas quickly ran out of steam after that.

Super Troopers, loose and silly as it is (and this was a common criticism from paid critics at the time, that the film was too loose and too silly) knows exactly the kind of film it wants to be, and it has a troupe at the center that’s fresh and lively and game to pull it out. The team at Broken Lizard were firing on all cylinders, aided by a game cast of additional actors like Brian Cox and Marisa Coughlan, who helped to give the film heart and fun. The team could bring in good actors to aid them on later projects, but without that liveliness and that freshness it just wasn’t the same.

I view Super Troopers as a singular film, the perfect height for a comedy troupe that, instead of being their big debut, it really showed off the end for their run. It was too hard for them to find new stories to tell and new sketches to work, and as time went on, their brand of comedy began to feel tired and stale. That isn’t a knock on the guys, though. They had a great idea and they worked it for all it was worth, creating comedy glory. But comedy is hard and what works one time isn’t guaranteed to work again. Hell, it’s likely to fail. What they made after just illustrates that.

And yes, Super Troopers 2 does exist, and it was actually financially successful. But the reviews weren’t great, and general consensus is that it’s not anywhere in the league of the first movie. I’m sure at some point I’ll see it and judge for myself.