Dinner for Idjits

Last night I saw Paul Rudd, Jay Roach and Steve Carrell on The Charlie Rose Show, where they were very pleased to sit around talking about how smart they and their particular peer group are, to which Charlie mentioned this:

CHARLIE ROSE:  At this table you expect all of these questions like how is comedy changing and the history of comedy, but it does seem to me,  John C. Reilly said to me in the film world it seems all of the great minds  move to comedy.  Some of the smartest people I know, some of the most  politically engaged people I know, some of the most subversive people I  know, and compare that to some of the dramas that have come my way, they are a bit of a snooze, compared to these guys, who are really the people you want to work with. 

A few years ago HERE I mentioned the "geniuses" of the world flocking to Hollywood and our being all too happy to throw money at them for trucking out the same old shit time and time again, the bulk being (to me) the whole Ferrell/Apatow/Frat Pack et al franchise that appears to have no end in sight.

Meanwhile, to sit around and talk about how smart these guys are is laughable - while I've hammered these movies for a while now and you can argue that they're not as bad as I claim they are, I don't think anyone would call any of these movies "smart." Yeah, I'm sure each of the guys in these movies are funny and smart, but they seem to be way too happy to default to merely being filmed trying to crack each other up with simple vulgarities and an endless slew of pop culture references. And while I do believe there's a connection between intelligence and humor, in my lifetime I've known probably two guys I thought were funnier than myself, and both are light years smarter than I am, and I'm pretty sure that there hasn't been anything in any of these movies that we could not have come up with ourselves.

I give them credit for being smart enough to make a zillion dollars pulling off such crap, but if they're gonna go around talking about Steve Martin and Monty Python as reverently as they do, perhaps it's time to sit in a room together and try to come up with something a little better than "Dinner for Michael Scott."

full transcript of CR HERE.