Humor Me is about Nick, a once successful playwright, played by Jemaine Clement, who has hit rock bottom and decides to stay with his dad, played by Elliot Gould, at a retirement community. I love intergenerational relationships, can relate to rotting potential, yearn for retirement and am a fan of many of the actors in the cast, including Bebe Neuwirth and Designing Women’s Annie Potts. This movie looks good on paper, but the execution is off.
Humor Me wanted to do several things, but isn’t as clear as it thinks that it is being. When the movie starts, we see a depiction of the dad’s story being told to a group of friends then cut to his son at a table read that is going well until it doesn’t. Nick is having problems in all arenas of his life, but we don’t know the origin of his problem. I recently listened to Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast, Revisionist History, Episode 7, Hallelujah, about different types of geniuses: Picasso or Cezanne, immediately producing greatness or constantly revising. I wondered if Nick was a Cezanne, but based on everyone’s annoyance at his sudden failure to engage or complete anything, something else is going on, but we don’t find out the source of that problem until later in the movie. Is Nick inadequate because of external factors or inherent flaws in character?
Humor Me depicts the latter for laughs as he is constantly compared to other men, on and off screen, and comes up short, but the actual problem is grief, which is alluded to though not central until closer to the denouement. He can’t communicate his grief with those who share it. While it makes sense that his father’s different way of coping prevents him from speaking the same language of grief as his son, it does not make sense that his wife, his agent or his brother would fail to diagnose the source of his problem. The film depicts him as a loser/slacker, but he is actually suffering from depression. At the very least, these other characters should have callously referenced this death and suggested that he get over it already.
Humor Me has a dissonance problem, which isn’t helped by the fact that when I see Clement, I think of him as a confident, successful character based on his previous appearances in What We Do in the Shadows, Brad’s Status and Legion (side note: Designing Women’s Jean Smart plays his wife in Legion) whereas the filmmakers seem wedded to this idea of a nebbish, basement dwelling loser, which is not the character that they wrote. The filmmakers want to make two movies: a movie about a younger man finally learning how to live well from people who did, and a movie about learning how to tell your own story faithfully while honoring others’ creative spirit.
Humor Me’s characters are less three-dimensional people than caricatures that belong in a sitcom or were torn from other media such as Biloxi Blues or The Golden Girls. Also why did the writer of this film choose to use The Mikado? I know very little about it, but nothing derails a viewer’s focus on your film quicker than suddenly seeing a group of elderly white women pretending to be Japanese in white face and kimonos. I ran to Google to ask if The Mikado is racist. How did we get here? What is happening? I’m not asking about whether or not The Mikado was racist when it was created, I’m asking if staging it the way that it was originally intended with no alteration except to suit your denouement in today’s world is racist.
I actually think that the filmmakers purposely chose to place The Mikado in Humor Me to flesh out what he believed was a complimentary idea proposed by Ellis, a black man. He basically encourages Nick to not look at menial tasks in an American way as if the task is a signifier of his worth, but look at it in the Asian way by executing a menial job perfectly and being proud of your work. By doing an amateur staging of a comic opera for a retirement community, Nick is embracing the latter, and using specifically The Mikado, I believe that the filmmaker actually thinks that he has successfully fleshed out this theme. Yikes, I’m not Japanese or Asian, and I don’t have that level of confidence to just believe that my Asian audience will get it and not be offended. Compliment or not, talk to an expert before committing it to film.
I’ve discussed this phenomenon in which white filmmakers give prejudiced views to black characters either to pretend like the rest of (white) America has no problematic views or to absolve a prejudiced view as if it can’t be bad because a black person said it. Black people can’t be racist because that is a function of institutional power, but they can be prejudiced. Ellis was in the Vietnam War and says prejudiced things in that vein, which Nick calls him out for, but Ellis basically quiets his criticism by somewhat correctly pointing out that Nick really can’t tell him about prejudice. Clement is from New Zealand and part Maori, but he is playing an affluent white American. Nick can’t tell Ellis when Ellis is the victim of prejudice that he is not, but he can tell Ellis when Ellis is being prejudiced against another minority even if that prejudice is rooted in real trauma. Once a specific experience is generalized to apply for all time and to a people, it becomes everyone’s problem. Humor Me isn’t particularly egregious, and I don’t think that it has bad intentions, but is it inadvertently racist? I’ll defer to how Asian viewers receive this movie.
I wanted to love Humor Me, but it just falls flat and feels wooden. Even if you love the actors featured in this film, it may be a safer bet to wait to watch them in anything else. Skip it.