“I’m a white man and I’m straight, and I deserve it”…hah-hah.
In and of itself, behaving like an antagonistic asshole on purpose (i.e., inappropriate meta performance art) has never been “funny”, not to me and certainly not consistently, and therefore Between Two Ferns with Zack Galifianakis has, for myself and presumably others, always been a flatline experience.
Okay, every now and then this kind of material raises a smirk but that’s all. I half-chuckled when Brad Pitt spit at Zack five years ago.
The idea of myopic dickead-ism may be conceptually “funny” in a certain ironic light, but Galifianakis himself has never been funny, not really and not even in the first Hangover. I recognize this is a minority opinion as far as that 2009 film is concerned, but everyone was with me by the time the third Hangover film appeared.
Galafianakis managed to deliver a truly engaging performance exactly once, as Michael Keaton‘s agent in Birdman.
Almost everyone has appeared on the show as a way of asserting that they’re heh-heh-wink-wink cool and perceptive enough to get unfunny performance art and make fun of celebrityhood (and themselves) in the bargain, but theatrically or dramatically speaking it doesn’t make the slightest lick of sense that Matthew McConaughey, Benedict Cumberbatch, Peter Dinklage, Chrissy Teigen, David Letterman, Jason Schwartzman, Tiffany Haddish, Paul Rudd, Rashida Jones, John Legend, Adam Scott, Brie Larson, Jon Hamm, Awkwafina, Hailee Steinfeld, John Cho, Keanu Reeves, Chance the Rapper and Tessa Thompson would agree to sit with this meta-asshole.
And therefore Between Two Ferns: The Movie (Netflix, 9.20) is going to be, like, “seriously, c’mon…whatever.”