I’m a third of the way through Mascots (available on Netflix), and it’s like it was designed to appeal to me specifically.
It’s nonstop dense, deadpan, absurdist dialogue that rarely belabors a joke, and it focuses on a group of weirdos without point-and-laugh cruelty, and it’s got a genuine affection for them (even in an interlude with furries appearing at the mascot competition).
It’s from the creator of This Is Spinal Tap, which I would have liked more if I was more versed in the last days of glam rock. This doesn’t have as many quotable classic jokes, but it’s good solid comedy throughout.
Also, Zach Woods has such great energy/cadence/appearance for this kind of awkward deadpan comedy and he really needs to be in more things (he was amazing in In The Loop, and he even got to be in the new Ghostbusters as the tour guide at the start)
I hated it, because I didn’t feel genuine affection at all. I felt that movie held all its characters save for the hedgehog guy in complete contempt; we are constantly seeing them do things the movie wants us to regard as dumb without letting us see them pay off or be vindicated. And unlike folk music or dog shows, mascotting is not built-up or glamorous, so the movie is looking down at people who are not highly regarded and saying “I need to take these guys down a few pegs.” Like, the sequence where one of the judges just goes on and on, unprompted, about having a small penis – and that’s it, that’s the joke, he has a small penis. For fuck’s sake, movie.
I dunno. I think that Guest’s work generally runs on an engine of “just sitting there and watching someone for enough time will humanize him and make you care, even if the narrative doesn’t provide a redemptive stinger.” And I think it often works. Not always, but often.
In Mascots, the plumber guy is probably the best example of this. He’s a loser, we never see him being not-a-loser, and indeed we’re invited to laugh at the smallness of his world and the dumb things he cares about…but we see him trying hard, we see him reaching out to make a human connection, we see him being humiliated in a moment that should have been a triumph, and it’s sad. It’s funny to some extent, but it’s definitely also sad, because by that point we’ve mapped some sad-sack part of ourselves onto this sad-sack dude and there is empathetic hurting.
You get the same thing to a lesser extent with Parker Posey’s character, who is obviously insane and clueless, but who is nonetheless shrouded in a weird humanistic dignity by the earnest purity of her passion. (Don’t you wish you were that insulated from existential dread?, you can hear Guest whispering. And, yeah, I kinda do.) You even get it with the husband in the terrible marriage, because the script hammers you with “imagine if you were in a marriage like that,” and yeah, it’s terrible.
The Fist is indeed basically just a walking joke, though.