Hacks is supposed to be some sort of subversive look at the dark and hopeless underbelly of stand up comedy. All it actually is, however, is fairly funny, deliberately offensive and an example of how comedians have a weakness for mediocre improv.
A mockumentary that focuses on the talent agency of Lucius Diamond (Glenn Rockowitz) and Baxter Hutz (David G. Cohen) and the desperately bad stand-up comics they book into a series of humiliatingly low rent gigs. There's an aggressively bad female comic and her anal husband/manager who really wishes he were the star; a foul-mouthed black comedian who happens to be an albino; a middle aged impressionist with a Catskills-era repertoire; a wheelchair bound observation comic who's every lame, confrontational observation starts with "What is it with ?"; and an "alternative" comic who does pseudo-Kaufmanesque performance art without understanding what he's doing.
A lot of the humor in Hacks is not supposed to come from the comedians, because they suck. It's supposed to be funny to watch them be horrifically unfunny, no matter how hard they try, and you can get laughs out of that concept. Johnny Carson was a master at taking the silence after a joke that bombed and getting the audience to laugh at how bad it was. But Carson would only have to do that once or twice in a 5 to 10 minute monologue. Hacks is great evidence you really can't stretch that out over an entire movie. After a certain point, being unfunny just can't be funny, no matter how much you exaggerate it.
There are some great jokes and great bits in the film, all in the guise of being too offensive or dark for people to laugh at. However, as a farm kid born and bred in rural Iowa, I really didn't find anything in the film that shocking. Dirty? Yep. Politically incorrect? You betcha. But offensive in the sense of "I can't believe someone would joke about that"? Nah. The people making this film sure thought they were being naughty, though. Maybe they were raised Amish.
I suppose I could talk about how Hacks never really focuses on just what it's trying to say as a film or about how the story doesn't really build or go anywhere. But, except for trying to spend the last 3 minutes building up to an ending that doesn't really follow the first 80 minutes of the movie, Hacks isn't really about plot or character development or really making a statement. It's about a lot of comedians improv-ing their way through a series of basic scenes.
I'd bet 5 bucks this is one of those films where there's not many jokes or much dialog written down. They come up with the characters, put them in a situation, turn and the camera and just go. Here's the thing about improv, though. It's very hard to do. And it's not just hard to do good improv. It's just as difficult to do mediocre improv and it's even just as much a challenge to do bad improv. Comedians are generally the only folks who really understand that, and it makes them poor judges of whether or not improv is actually funny. Comedians know that just getting through the scene, making it up as you go along and staying in character, is quite an accomplishment. But they seem to get so impressed by the simple performance of improv, that they can't appreciate that you can make it up as you go along and stay in character and not be funny at all. There's too many scenes in Hacks where you can tell they're improv-ing, you can tell they're trying to be funny, you can tell they're close to actually being funny but they never quite make it all the way.
There are some genuine laughs in Hacks and it's short enough that the almost-but-not-really-funny stuff doesn't go on too long. So, if you're looking for something quick and dirty that will occasionally make you laugh out loud, try it out. But if you've got a short attention span or high standards for humor, give it a pass.
A mockumentary that focuses on the talent agency of Lucius Diamond (Glenn Rockowitz) and Baxter Hutz (David G. Cohen) and the desperately bad stand-up comics they book into a series of humiliatingly low rent gigs. There's an aggressively bad female comic and her anal husband/manager who really wishes he were the star; a foul-mouthed black comedian who happens to be an albino; a middle aged impressionist with a Catskills-era repertoire; a wheelchair bound observation comic who's every lame, confrontational observation starts with "What is it with ?"; and an "alternative" comic who does pseudo-Kaufmanesque performance art without understanding what he's doing.
A lot of the humor in Hacks is not supposed to come from the comedians, because they suck. It's supposed to be funny to watch them be horrifically unfunny, no matter how hard they try, and you can get laughs out of that concept. Johnny Carson was a master at taking the silence after a joke that bombed and getting the audience to laugh at how bad it was. But Carson would only have to do that once or twice in a 5 to 10 minute monologue. Hacks is great evidence you really can't stretch that out over an entire movie. After a certain point, being unfunny just can't be funny, no matter how much you exaggerate it.
There are some great jokes and great bits in the film, all in the guise of being too offensive or dark for people to laugh at. However, as a farm kid born and bred in rural Iowa, I really didn't find anything in the film that shocking. Dirty? Yep. Politically incorrect? You betcha. But offensive in the sense of "I can't believe someone would joke about that"? Nah. The people making this film sure thought they were being naughty, though. Maybe they were raised Amish.
I suppose I could talk about how Hacks never really focuses on just what it's trying to say as a film or about how the story doesn't really build or go anywhere. But, except for trying to spend the last 3 minutes building up to an ending that doesn't really follow the first 80 minutes of the movie, Hacks isn't really about plot or character development or really making a statement. It's about a lot of comedians improv-ing their way through a series of basic scenes.
I'd bet 5 bucks this is one of those films where there's not many jokes or much dialog written down. They come up with the characters, put them in a situation, turn and the camera and just go. Here's the thing about improv, though. It's very hard to do. And it's not just hard to do good improv. It's just as difficult to do mediocre improv and it's even just as much a challenge to do bad improv. Comedians are generally the only folks who really understand that, and it makes them poor judges of whether or not improv is actually funny. Comedians know that just getting through the scene, making it up as you go along and staying in character, is quite an accomplishment. But they seem to get so impressed by the simple performance of improv, that they can't appreciate that you can make it up as you go along and stay in character and not be funny at all. There's too many scenes in Hacks where you can tell they're improv-ing, you can tell they're trying to be funny, you can tell they're close to actually being funny but they never quite make it all the way.
There are some genuine laughs in Hacks and it's short enough that the almost-but-not-really-funny stuff doesn't go on too long. So, if you're looking for something quick and dirty that will occasionally make you laugh out loud, try it out. But if you've got a short attention span or high standards for humor, give it a pass.
