Once I saw the Jennifer Lopez hosted Saturday Night Live in the early 2000s, I knew that the world of comedy was one I wanted to learn more about. People like Will Ferrell, Lorne Michaels, Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, and a host of others would soon become comedy legends of mine. A Futile and Stupid Gesture traces all these comedy roots back to the amazing but tortured mind of Douglas Kenney (Will Forte), one of the founding fathers of National Lampoon magazine and essentially the modern era of comedic storytelling.
Narrated by the older version of Kenney (Martin Mull), A Futile and Stupid Gesture takes us back through the life of comedy’s elder statesman. Kenney, a small town Ohio boy, meets Henry Beard (Domhnall Gleeson) at Harvard, openly mocking the overt elitism of their classmates with Harvard’s Lampoon magazine. Upon graduation, the pair get financial backing from Matty Simmons (Matt Walsh) to continue their lampooning at a national magazine level. Their smart ass dressing down of the establishment is an instant hit, but greater notoriety means greater responsibility, and Kenney’s obsession to be recognized meant flirting with mental breakdowns, drug abuse, and excessive infidelity. And also a couple of the greatest comedies of all time: Animal House and Caddyshack. And discovering pretty much the entire SNL original cast including Chevy Chase (Joel McHale).
Douglas Kenney was the originator of “arms length” comedy, where instead of being emotionally honest, you choose to laugh at something instead. Kenney himself would probably openly mock A Futile and Stupid Gesture, so the movie adopts a similar tone, openly mocking what a biopic does. The voiceover by Mull openly breaks the 4th wall, commenting on his own dumb story. Moments that would normally build to an emotional breakthrough are undercut immediately by a character not paying attention, or drugs to be done, or some other condescending punchline so Kenney can go on undeterred and unlearnt. If you don’t know the fate of Kenney, the third act leads to some pretty stellar subversions of the biopic formula which amount to some jarring plot twists you will not see coming. A Futile and Stupid Gesture wants to almost get the story out of the way so you can party and hang out and have fun as much as these comedic geniuses did.
David Wain’s biopic on Kenney opts for a lifetime study of the man, which is probably too large a story to tell. With the tone the biopic takes, the movie should really just focus on the comedic creation parts of the man, and how crazy it was that Kenney made a crazy successful magazine, the best college movie of all time, and a top 5 sports comedy of all time, and how it was no big deal to them but scary to the establishment. Instead, the movie does a good deal of focus on Kenney’s life influencing his process, which it undercuts with all those jokes rendering that part of the story ill fitting. There’s a moment at the end that’s supposed to be really sad, and it just sort of…is nothing. The movie then relies on us watching which famous comedian is gonna come in to play an earlier famous comedian (McHale playing the guy he co-starred with in a sitcom is a stroke of genius), and just kinda coast on cameos and how fun it looks to work on A Futile and Stupid Gesture. It does look really fun, but Kenney’s biopic does get a little boring more quickly since the movie points out repeatedly we shouldn’t care about any people in this movie.
Douglas Kenney and everyone can keep saying they don’t matter as loud as they want. As someone who worships the world Kenney helped create, this little insight into his process paints him to me as a woefully sad but understood stereotype of a man on the outside who just wants to be at the party. And as a caddy, I appreciate all insights into golf membership Kenney clearly wanted to skewer as well as understanding just the copious amount of drug use caddies take on while doing their jobs. *Wink*