Freddy Got Fingered (2001)

It can be a little strange when a comedian makes the jump from stand-up or sketch comedy into a longer form of comedic storytelling. Whether that form is a half hour situational comedy, hour long comedy/drama, or movies, there can be some growing pains that go along with it. They might be used to their stand-up or sketch roots and may not be able to make their new role work. Sometimes they grow and manage to find their place in that longer form of storytelling. Other times, it becomes obvious that there’s something about that comedian that works much better in smaller doses.

Tom Green is a perfect example of a comedian that never quite gelled in a longer form of storytelling. His absurdist style could be funny in smaller doses, whether that was making weird noises or making delicious cheese sandwiches. That could work as an aside in stand-up comedy. It could work as a sketch where that kind of joke was the focus of a three-minute bit. You know, a sort of less is more kind of thing. The comedy wouldn’t overstay its welcome on a smaller scale.

However, his comedic stylings didn’t quite work in a larger project. Freddy Got Fingered was a good example of that. Gord Brody (Tom Green) was an aspiring cartoonist who wanted nothing more than for someone in Hollywood to greenlight his idea. Standing in the way, however, was his father, Jim (Rip Torn). Jim didn’t believe in his son. He thought Gord was a deadbeat slacker who would never succeed. This created a very abusive relationship between father and son and the breakdown of their entire familial unit.

I didn’t dislike Freddy Got Fingered. There was actually a lot that I appreciated about it. The story had a lot of potential. The struggles between a son who wants to live one way and a father’s desire to see the son live a different way is relatable. I’m sure many people have had parental relationships where the parents were very overbearing and trying to steer the child in a direction the child was not meant to go. It’s a story that many movies utilize because so many people go through that experience. That story was good. As was Tom Green’s direction of it and the actors. I wouldn’t say anyone turned in a bad performance. They were all strong in their roles.

The problems came when Tom Green let himself loose to do the types of things that you would expect Tom Green to do. His absurd antics made it into many moments of the movie, sometimes fitting well and other times taking away from what could have been something good, something interesting. When the moments fit well, they fit very well for the comedy. Gord’s girlfriend, Betty (Marisa Coughlan), was paralyzed and wheelchair-bound. One of her sexual kinks was to have Gord cane her senseless legs. The absurdity of that worked for their relationship. It worked when Gord, for whatever reason, pretended to be some bigwig stockbroker to impress Betty. He took a cordless phone from home and used a tape recorder to play a ringtone, so it looked like he had a cell phone. That kind of stuff worked.

Tom Green’s style of humour fell a little flatter when it was a random sort of aside. I’m thinking about things like the opening of the movie. Gord moved out to Hollywood to become a famous cartoonist. While out there, he got a job at a cheese sandwich factory. There was a scene when he was at a conveyor belt of delicious cheese sandwiches and decided that, instead of doing his job, he would jump up on the conveyor belt, hold a salami between his legs, and accost the other workers as though it was his penis. Or there was the scene, right before that, where he drove to Hollywood and randomly stopped to jerk off a horse. Actually jerk off a horse. Tom Green jerked off a horse in Freddy Got Fingered.

What didn’t quite work was that Tom Green was simply being absurd to be absurd. It didn’t have anything to do with the story. There was no reason he needed to poke his coworkers with salami and have everyone no-sell it. There was absolutely no reason he needed to jump a fence and jerk off a horse while yelling “I’m a farmer, daddy! I’m a farmer!” This kind of stuff happened often. It was a bunch of non-sequiturs that added nothing to the story and didn’t enlighten the character(s) in any way.

Then there were the moments that were supposed to be important, emotional moments for the Brody family that got sidetracked by Tom Green doing his wacky Tom Green antics. Picture, if you will, those same horse jerking, salami slinging antics. Now imagine those antics happen during a moment where Gord must confront his dad about the abuse he suffered over his twenty-eight years of life. That would take away from the power of the scene, right? It would make a turning point for the characters feel much less serious.

Two beats in Freddy Got Fingered immediately come to mind when I think about this feeling. The first followed the dinner date scene I mentioned earlier. The stuff with the phone and Gord pretending to have a big stockbroker job was fine. The scene fell apart when Jim realized Gord was at the restaurant and not the computer job that Gord told him he had. Jim completely trashed Gord in front of Betty, then trashed Betty for her disability. It fit with the story of Gord suffering his father’s abuse throughout his life. However, when Gord’s reaction was to jump up on the bar and start shooting water at everyone from the fountain sprayer… That’s where things went a little too far into the typical Tom Green comedy.

This type of behaviour could be easily written off as reactionary bad behaviour meant to elicit people to actually care for Gord. I’m not talking about the audience. I’m talking about the people in Gord’s life. Deep down, Gord wanted nothing more than his father’s approval. His father always wrote him off, though, so Gord acted out. He wanted the attention his brother, the titular Freddy (Eddie Kaye Thomas), got. He never got it, though. So, in his head, bad behaviour that got him negative attention was better than nothing at all. Plus, he probably had some sort of undiagnosed disability of some sort. I can’t say for sure. I’m not a doctor. But he seemed to have a problem focusing on basic tasks.

I want to go back to Freddy for a moment. The other big emotional moment was where Freddy Got Fingered got its title. Gord, Jim, and Julie Brody (Julie Hagerty) were at a counseling session to try and work out the issues between Gord and Jim. Jim didn’t take it seriously, so Gord dropped a bombshell. A made-up bombshell. He claimed that Jim fingered Freddy. It would have been enough to have everyone’s reactions to the bombshell, and to have Freddy, a mid-20s man, be taken to a home for molested children. But about ten seconds after Gord accused his father, he started screaming. He picked up a bust, threw it out a window, and jumped out behind it. It was a scene about Gord accusing his father of sexually abusing his brother, that ended on wacky “Tom Green jumping out a window” hijinks. It ruined the serious nature of the scene.

This is all to say that Tom Green’s style of comedy didn’t quite work in movie form. There’s a chance that it could have, had it been pulled back a little bit. Instead of inserting wacky Tom Green stuff into every single scene, let the more serious stuff play out without it. Have the wacky hijinks in the crazy scenes. But in scenes like the birth of a child, instead of having Tom Green pretend to be a doctor and swing the newborn baby around by the umbilical cord, maybe have him react to a childbirth. Maybe don’t have him lash out at his father by spraying an entire fancy restaurant with water. Tone that back and focus more on the relationship. The caning sexual kink sidestory can stay, though.

Tom Green seems more like a sketch comedian or a stand-up comedian than a comedy movie star. His style doesn’t fit with the longform storytelling of movies. It’s actually a detriment to captivating storytelling. Every time something happened that was emotionally compelling, his comedy would break it up. And, in most cases, his comedy got stale after the initial shock wore off. It wasn’t long enough to come back around to being funny. Aside from the backwards man bit. That’s not important though.

When a comedian makes the jump from the stage to the screen, whether that stage is stand-up or sketch, there can be an adjustment period of getting their style to work in a new form. In some cases, it can work to a high degree. In other cases, the transition never sits right. The performer will always feel like they don’t quite fit into the roles they play because their style doesn’t mesh. It can make for interesting failures, much like this week’s movie.

Might I interest you in some notes:

• Freddy Got Fingered starred Tom Green, who also directed it. Tom Green was previously seen in Iron Sky: The Coming Race (week 440).
• Shaquille O’Neal played himself in Freddy Got Fingered. He was also in Jack and Jill (week 101), Steel (week 127), and The Wash (week 303).
• Freddy Got Fingered featured the third Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance of Ron Selmour, who was in In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (week 220) and Black Christmas (week 368).
• Lorena Gale also made a third appearance in Freddy Got Fingered, after previously appearing in Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins (week 390) and Halloween: Resurrection (week 413).
• Another three-timer was Eric Keenleyside. He was briefly in Freddy Got Fingered. He previously played Santa in both Santa’s Little Helper (week 315) and The Search for Santa Paws (week 420).
• Stephen Tobolowsky popped up in Freddy Got Fingered. Other movies he popped up in were View from the Top (week 83) and Atlas Shrugged: Part III (week 490).
• Finishing off the three-timers is Noel Fisher, who was in Freddy Got Fingered, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (week 310), and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows (week 310).
• Two actors from Say It Isn’t So (week 481) were in Freddy Got Fingered. They were R. Nelson Brown and Connor Widdows.
• Harland Williams was one of many recognizable faces in Freddy Got Fingered. He returned to Sunday “Bad” Movies after first appearing in Surf School (week 42).
• Stephen E. Miller was in Repeaters (week 62) and Freddy Got Fingered.
• Stan Helsing (week 64) and Freddy Got Fingered each featured Darren Moore.
• Did you know that Drew Barrymore was in Freddy Got Fingered? She was! She was also in Beverly Hills Chihuahua (week 70).
• The Buddies movies got a lot of representation in Freddy Got Fingered. Not only was there Eric Keenleyside, but there was Irene Karas Loeper from Air Buddies (week 270), and Cliff Solomon from Snow Buddies (week 270).
• Scott Heindl returned from Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (week 284) for Freddy Got Fingered.
• Rip Torn was in Zoom (week 457) and Freddy Got Fingered.
• I thought I’d finish off with the titular Freddy. He was played by Eddie Kaye Thomas, who was also in a movie called Taboo (week 422).
• Have you seen Freddy Got Fingered? What did you think? Do you think Tom Green’s comedy translates to movies or not? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
• You can also leave comments to suggest what movies I should check out for future Sunday “Bad” Movies posts. I’m always open to suggestions.
• Check out Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram if you want more of a Sunday “Bad” Movies fix.
• Now let’s talk about next week. We’re getting really close to the ten year anniversary of Sunday “Bad” Movies. There’s one more week before that and I left a pretty big one for that post. I’m going to be checking out a movie where Nic Cage screams about bees. I’ll be seeing The Wicker Man! Come back next week for that post. It should be fun. See you then.