Free Comedies on YouTube to Get Through [gestures] All of This

One might imagine the caliber of free movies on YouTube (free meaning released by an actual production / distribution company, not just a copy of any ol’ movie) to be dismal to painful, with assumptions towards free comedies being in the lower realms of ‘painful.’ We’ve been conditioned to assume that anything given to us for free is probably of lesser quality because otherwise people would be willing to pay for it. While this is sometimes true, it turns out that a large portion of what is available currently on YouTube for free is actually… good. 

In this strange and unprecedented time, I have been on what turned out to be a never-ending quest to watch all the comedies offered for free on Youtube, and what I found was that you can’t put a price on laughter.
(You probably can. We’re in the burning ring of late stage capitalism. I’d wager laughter’s worth a buck eighty.)

Now, there are a few superb free comedies that I imagine are easily available simply because they’re on the weirder side of things; like the bizarre and captivating Wrong (2013) by Quentin Dupieux of Rubber fame. Rubber is a movie about killer tires, and as eyebrow raising as that sounds, I promise you the film itself is even more so. But I digress...

Wrong is about a man named Dolph Springer, played by Jack Plotnick of Girls Will Be Girls. He wakes up one morning in his lovely home in his lovely suburban LA neighborhood and cannot find his dog. People around him are no help; they either act like he’s making a big deal out of it or as if he never had a dog in the first place. His neighbor Mike (Regan Burns) responds to everything he says in a hostile tone, then proceeds to tell Dolph he’s leaving forever. When we go with Dolph to work, a place where he was fired months ago, we find it’s constantly raining indoors. He’s contacted by a Master Chang (William Fichtner), a sort of self help guru holy man with an ever-shifting accent. Chang gives Dolph a book to read about communicating telepathically with your pets, which Dolph is able to briefly do after much effort. He has a dream about his dog getting off a city bus to come home to him, and eventually this comes to pass. The two are reunited while the film ends with Mike blasting across a vast salt flat, believing himself to be on the edge of the world.

What’daya mean you’re confused?

Wrong is by no means a normal straightforward movie, and undoubtedly, as I’m reading in the YouTube comments, the reception to it isn’t straightforward either. It’s a mediation of middle class malaise as well as a story of one specific guy wondering if he can fix his own problems. Chang is an interesting foil to Plotnick’s Dolph because he alternates from being full of shit to being eerily spot-on. His technique to reach out to Dolph’s dog works but only because Dolph spent so much time practicing. In the many readings one could do of this film, the question of ‘how much can actually be helped?’ is presented in a multitude of ways. Dolph starts the story wanting his problems fixed and finding new and confusing problems everywhere. There’s little help from his neighbors and mocking co-workers; Chang offers tools but also more riddles on how to use them. When Dolph actually takes steps to find his dog, he gains momentum with each scene until his final conversation with Mike, who informs him he’s just going to keep driving. It’s the absurdist comedy answer to the question of how we can fix ourselves. The answer, as you may have guessed, is dog telepathy.

So that’s a bit too out there for some people stuck inside during a global pandemic and you just want a clear-cut, old fashioned comedy? Fine, follow me to the star-studded The Slammin’ Salmon (2009) created by Broken Lizards who made Super Troopers and Beerfest. Perusing a few reviews of this movie, I can see that I enjoyed it more than your average bear–uh, I mean… film watching guy. I’m definitely not a bear in a female human suit. That’d be crazy. Though it would explain my love of salmon, both real and slammin’.

There’s not some big complicated plot to this movie: one hectic night in a restaurant run by a dim-witted and angry ex-boxer Slammin’ Cleon Salmon (Michael Clarke Duncan in a splendid comedic turn) where an attempt to outsell and outdo each other has the staff pushing themselves too hard to predictably disastrous consequences. It has a lot of what you’d expect, namely gross-out humor and laughs mined from people getting really hurt, along with an endless stream of recognizable faces in bit parts. The usual players of Broken Lizards are all there doing great but the stand-out performance (aside from Clark Duncan) is Jay Chandrasekhar as Nuts, a polite and medicated server who accidentally forgets to take his prescriptions that day and descends into weirdness. Personally, I found this to be a solid rainy afternoon movie, and in a double feature with Soul Plane (2004), which is also free on Youtube, it tickled my little stoner ribs.

For the ladies, we’ve got Amy Heckerling’s Vamps (2012), a movie which stars Alicia Silverstone and Krysten Ritter as two stylish Manhattanite vampires just trying to enjoy themselves in the big city. Like Slammin’ Salmon, this is a movie that features a lot of familiar comedians and actors for fairly small parts. I was surprised I hadn’t heard of this movie before, simply because there were so many people in it whose careers I pay attention to. Like Todd Barry. Todd Barry’s in this one, you guys.

Vamps is fine but I will say that if you go into being excited about Amy Heckerling and Alicia Silverstone working together again then you might hype it up too much in your own head. This isn’t Clueless 2.0; it’s something different and charming in its own way but also flat in places where it seems like the teeth (no pun intended) were taken out, whether to make the movie more accessible or because the conflict was getting too heavy. Goody (Silverstone) and Stacy (Ritter) are both attempting to stay hip and abstain from blood. When Stacy falls for Joey (Dan Stevens), the son of the famous vampire hunter Van Helsing (Wallace Shawn), she realizes she’s tired of being a vampire; she’s tired of nothing changing and she’s tired of fighting her natural urge to drink blood. Goody and Stacy join Van Helsing to come up with a plot to kill their maker Ciccerus (Sigourney Weaver) in order to revert them back to humans. But Goody, being much older than Stacy, starts to disintegrate once the sun rises, even after Ciccerus is slain. The last scene fast forwards to the future where Stacy and Joey have a little girl together. While playing with her in the yard, Van Helsing sees she’s growing vampire fangs and laughs.

I do wonder if there could be a version of this movie where the topics of youth and beauty being so important to women could have been probed more thoroughly. Of course then you’d run the risk of bogging down an otherwise serviceable comedy with a lot of female anxiety, and who’d wanna see that?! Me, I would. But since no one’s in the business of making me happy, Vamps is frothy in places, campy in others, and genuinely heartfelt by the end. The world the vampires inhabit is fully realized with support groups and dance clubs, not to mention its own version of groupies and scenesters. Like how Clueless is a coming of age movie through the lens of an overly privileged lifestyle, Vamps is a hair-twirling, blood-drinking musing on taking the last steps into adulthood. Goody and Stacy have both reached the end of their fun but know that giving up what they have changes literally everything. Could it use a bit more biting commentary and subversive wit? Sure but, like, couldn’t we all?

This isn’t even scratching the surface of what’s out there, and some of the choices are quite surprising like The Birdcage (1996), Four Lions (2010), She-Devil (1989), Richard Linklater’s Bernie (2011), and Back Row fav Earth Girls Are Easy (1988). Not to be outdone, there are lots of awful, terrible, unfunny comedies like the grim, mean-spirited (which I usually like) Pretty Ugly People (2009). However, my overall impression of what’s available is that it’s the forgotten films of famous filmmakers that had the talent and the cast to pull it off but didn’t quite make it. 

Except for Wrong. I have no explanation for that one but genuinely, wholeheartedly endorse everyone watching it for free.