Write down what Will Ferrell says and you won’t see the comedy.
“Where is my dog?” Not funny.
“Where is my dog?” bellowed in agonized Shakespearean exaggeration, then bewildered Spanish, then the eyes-wide-dumb everyman that Ferrell specializes in?
It’s a comedy clinic, the simplest of words turned hilarious – and the sequence is the heart of Ferrell’s first attempt as a romantic leading man, opposite Nicole Kidman in “Bewitched,” opening Friday.
Suddenly, with those lines, Ferrell becomes the goof capable of deflecting Kidman’s star power. The showboat who will take a joke as far as possible – and beyond. The guy who is funny simply because his mouth is open and something’s coming out.
“I’m not a joke writer,” said Ferrell, 37, in an interview while promoting the new movie. “I tried stand-up. Stand-up is hard and lonely and vicious. So I always try to find that character’s attitude, and once I find the attitude, I just keep going with it.”
Pity the actors who have to stand next to him while Ferrell explores those limits. Roy Jenkins felt the burn in the early 1990s, when he worked with Ferrell in the Groundlings, the Los Angeles improv company, before Ferrell was asked to join the cast of “Saturday Night Live.”
“We were in a skit together that we’d written, about a couple of dumb cops who pull over a car for no reason and then proceed to search the car,” Jenkins said. “Every time we find something, just the most ordinary stuff you’d carry in any car like a map or a CD, we’d hold it up and make a big, suspicious deal out of it.
“We basically had the same lines. But when I would say my line, I’d get a polite titter from the audience. A second later, Will would say just about the same thing. But when he said it, there would be roars of laughter.”
Ferrell chuckled when reminded of the cop skit. Polite as he is, Ferrell does not deny that he got the big guffaws. Then he explained what he thought was the key to the sketch, the lever he knew could pry some comedy from a few basic words.
“I’ve noticed that whenever a cop pulls anybody over, they start speaking in this really loud voice, as if they were addressing a whole auditorium full of people,” Ferrell said. ” ‘HOW ARE YOU DOING THIS EVENING, MR. FERRELL?’ And I’m thinking, ‘Hey buddy, I’m right here.’ ”
We demand to know why comics are funny – even though we rarely stop to ask, “What makes Sean Penn serious?” or “How is Meryl Streep so sincere all the time?”
Ferrell’s raging success prompts those questions all over again: Propelled by “Elf” and “Old School” in 2003, the startling success of “Anchorman” last summer, and now with a half-dozen movies on the way, Ferrell is the most bankable comic going. Yet he has no identifying shtick, no repeatable signature lines, no trademark goofy face. He’s slightly handsome but no George Clooney, slightly doughy in the middle but not comically fat, a connoisseur of pompous voices but not a mimic.
He’s your college roommate, if your college roommate had actually been funny.
Denver Comedy Works owner Wende Curtis met Ferrell when she managed a green room for the Montreal Comedy Festival. She compares him to Ellen DeGeneres. “Her humor is not any one thing, either, not political or deep, or bleeped,” she said. “Will doesn’t tell jokes. He is the joke.”
Alan Ray can back that up from an academic perspective as a professor who studies humorists at the University of the Pacific. Knowing he is hair-splitting in a tone that Ferrell would ruthlessly mock in an “SNL” skit, Ray forges on: A French philosopher once identified three levels of comedy – the comic in word, the comic in situation and the comic character, where mere looks and attitude cause laughter. The character is the richest form, because everyone understands it.
“In my opinion, Bill Cosby is the only living comedian who has achieved comic character status,” Ray said. “He can just look at you and make you laugh. An audience can read him and know what he’s thinking. Will Ferrell approaches this level.”
Audiences respond quickly to Ferrell because he’s prepared to try anything. His wife, Vivica, said she never met anyone who cared less what people think about him. Thus the “SNL” skit where he strides into a serious office meeting wearing a star-spangled thong, then proceeds to stretch in the least flattering directions.
Or his breakout movie moment in “Old School,” when Ferrell as a middle-aged married man, went streaking from the frat house, graduating magna cum lard.
Explicating that fearlessness doesn’t take a Ph.D., Ferrell admitted. Back in second grade, he would pretend to ram his head into a door frame, producing the noise with a hidden hand. “Everyone thinks this is funny,” Ferrell remembered telling himself. “Make a footnote of that.”
Ferrell also tuned an ear for the extraneous subordinate clause that turns a normal person into a fool, best seen in his impersonations of obsequious celebrity interviewer James Lipton: “When one thinks of the greatest films of all time, in this century or in any other … ”
But it is misguided, luxurious rage that has become a recurring Ferrell theme.
Jenkins remembers it from Ferrell’s very first Groundlings class. Ferrell had colleagues shrieking as an angry parent at a teacher conference. “SNL” hired him while scouting a Groundlings show a year later, as Ferrell played a dull man at a barbecue who periodically looks over his shoulder to aim fountains of fury at kids climbing on his shed. His off-road rage reappeared this spring in “Kicking & Screaming,” as he played a soccer dad transformed into Bob Knight.
“I don’t know how I discovered it, but there’s something about yelling that’s funny to me,” he said. “Because I have this guy-next-door look, it’s the turn you don’t expect. It’s so wrong, so inappropriate. In real life, it takes a lot for me to get angry.”
Dialing it down for a romance, with an Oscar-winning co-star no less, was a new challenge.
“You build up this muscle of being so over-the-top, on ‘SNL’ especially. That’s where I tended to trust Nora Ephron,” who wrote and directed the new twist on “Bewitched.” Ferrell plays a fading movie actor who signs up to be Darrin in a revival of the “Bewitched” TV series. Kidman plays a nobody hired so Ferrell’s character won’t have to share the spotlight.
“I said to Nora, ‘This is all a good deal for me, but is it a good deal for Nicole?’ Will they say, ‘Why did they hire this guy?’ ”
Few things made him feel less jocular, he said, than reading ahead in the script and thinking, “We’ll have to kiss later.” Since Kidman is constantly placed on a pedestal by handlers and colleagues, even when she doesn’t want to be, Ferrell said, his solution was to be “as silly around her as possible.” If someone handed her a plate of “star food,” he would immediately steal it and eat it.
That still left coping with his wife. “At the premier, I kept saying, ‘Sorry about that one. Sorry about the one coming up,”‘ he said. “Fortunately, I have a beautiful and well-adjusted wife, and she smacked me and said shut up, it’s your job. I’m still not sure how I would feel about a real love scene, though.”
Ferrell is currently in Chicago, shooting the comedy “Stranger Than Fiction” with Dustin Hoffman and Maggie Gyllenhaal. The upcoming comedy that has Ferrell fans laughing before shooting begins, though, is “Talladega Nights,” which he co-wrote with his collaborator on “Anchorman,” Adam McKay.
Here’s how they sold the pitch: Will Ferrell as a NASCAR driver. Simple as that. More proof of Ferrell achieving character-comic status; more evidence that it’s not what’s being said, but who is saying it.
As he did donning the elf suit two years ago, Ferrell will produce audience hiccups just striding along in a sponsored fireproof jumpsuit.
“He’s the best driver, but he goes with what his daddy told him: If you ain’t first, yer last. He’d rather wreck than finish fifth,” Ferrell said. Filming starts after Labor Day. But Ferrell is too wary of public reaction to his writing style to predict any kind of hit.
“It will be like ‘Anchorman.’ People will either love it and think it’s true, or they won’t get it at all and they’ll find it sophomoric.”
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at 303-820-1686 or mbooth@denverpost.com.
